How many percent of players do you believe are worse at playing MMORPGs than you are? Obviously a trick question, because most people will overestimate their abilities when answering a question like that. But even if we take the mathematically median player, by definition 50% of other players are worse than him. If you ever ran a damage meter in a raid or dungeon, or saw damage meter statistics reported elsewhere, you will be aware that there is a huge range of differing damage outputs, based on a combination of gear and skill. But how does that matter for game design?

Telwyn is discussing action combat in MMOs, looking for the happy medium between too much and too little action. Everybody would like to have combat which is challenging and interesting, without becoming either frustrating or boring. The problem is that with different people playing the game differently well, there is no such thing as an optimum. If we take the above mentioned median player and design combat in a way that it is challenging for him, it will be frustrating for a good part of the 50% of players who is worse than him, and boringly trivial for a good part of the 50% of players better than him.

Now in principle role-playing games do have an answer to that problem: They can offer opponents of different levels, with different rewards. So the best players can go after higher level mobs, while the worst players stick to "green" difficulty quests. Unfortunately in practice MMORPGs never handled that well. Harder combat takes more time, and the rewards never really scaled well in any MMORPG. Thus even for a good player trying to maximize rewards per hour, "farming" mobs just under his level is better than going for a challenge.

How many percent of players do you believe are worse at playing MMORPGs than you are? Now imagine your dream game with a difficulty level tuned exactly to your liking. And all those players you believe are worse than you won't be able to play, because combat is too hard for them. The game fails to get a sufficient number of subscribers and is closed down after a while. Obviously not an ideal situation. Which is why I think that adding action combat to a MMORPG as a feature is inherently harmful. Either it keeps people from playing, or it is tuned down enough to allow everybody to succeed, in which case even the average player considers it as a kind of boring button-mashing exercise. I have a hard time imagining a system which works for everybody.

For anybody worried about unfair practices in Free2Play games, this report from the UK Office of Fair Trading is a must-read. It lists very clearly the principles of what is fair in Free2Play games (especially with regards to them being played by children), and what are deceptive practices. It even has long lists of hypothetical examples!

There is not much more to be said about the relative advantages and disadvantages of the Free2Play business model versus the subscription business model. But one argument that pops up again and again is that of the relative health of the two business models. And often the data provided are anecdotal. So how well is Free2Play really doing in a western market versus subscription? Fortunately there are good data available on the US digital games market:

In 2013 Free2Play games in the US made $2.9 billion, up 45% from $2.0 billion in 2012. Subscription games in the same period made $1.1 billion, down 21% from $1.4 billion. The biggest market share went to mobile games, with $3.1 billion, growing 29%, while social games (Facebook etc.) are down 22% to $1.8 billion. Note that the table includes DLC sales, but not buy-to-own game sales for PC and consoles. PC DLCs made $2.1 billion in 2013, up 11%, so selling games slice by slice definitively seems to be working.

World of Warcraft alone made $213 million in microtransactions, not counting income from subscriptions, while SWTOR made $139 million. Which actually isn't that bad for SWTOR, whatever number you believe the game cost. Of course we don't know what the cost to run the game are, but profit margins tend to be high once you get past a certain threshold of player numbers.

Normally one would be well advised to not look at the title of a game too closely if one wants to know what the game is about. Titles like "Metal Gear Solid" or "Call of Duty" don't really tell you much about gameplay. Might & Magic X : Legacy (MMXL) is an exception here, because the "Legacy" part is very much the one-word description of the whole game: MMXL is a time-machine back into the 90's. It ditches at least 15 years of technical and gameplay development that happened since, and goes right back to the state of Might & Magic VI, with a few graphical improvements. And that is deliberate.

In consequence I've seen a lot of reviews that just don't get MMXL, complaining about the grid-based movement with 90° turns, or other antiquated game features. But the thing is that if you prefer modern real-time role-playing games, you are simply not the target audience for MMXL. This isn't even a full-price game, it is a game with a smaller budget and smaller price for a well defined niche of players who spent hundreds of hours playing turn-based role-playing games in the 90's and now want that experience back. I certainly do. And you can sign me up for a new version of Pool of Radiance and the other gold box games right away.

As a legacy game, MMXL is quite enjoyable. Yeah, there isn't much of a story, and there ain't many comfort functions either. But in return you get a lot of the stuff back that has been lost since, for example the ability to create a non-standard party and have a very different experience of the game (up to and including unplayable if you totally gimp yourself). If you believe that good games are series of interesting decisions instead of long lists of trivial tasks, Might & Magic X : Legacy is the game for you.

Telephones, social networks, and MMORPGs profit from something called a "network effect": Any new user makes the service more useful for the existing users. If you have the choice between several rather similar games and all your friends play one specific one, it is better for you to play that one. What people tend to look at less often is that the same network effect also works in reverse: Any player quitting a game decreases the value of the game for the remaining players.

I think that there is very little doubt left that MMORPGs as a genre are in decline. Not just this or that game, but the genre as a whole. It is rather unlikely that they will die out completely. But as a result of the gold rush boom years of the genre we do have an oversupply of games, which doesn't mix well with the declining network effect. SOE shutting down four MMORPGs is just the beginning. Even the new releases of this year like TESO, Wildstar, or EQN are more likely to cause other games to die than they are to grow the market.

The survivors will be the biggest, more popular games, or those who somehow managed to keep costs down. People frequently discuss development costs in the hundreds of millions of dollars for MMORPGs, but forget that they are also rather expensive to just keep up and running. And under a certain number of players, the monthly revenue falls to below cost, and then the game is shut down. While that tends not to go down well with the generation of entitlement kids, it is just simple economics. No company has any sorts of obligation to keep a loss-making game up and running, although sometimes they do for PR reasons.

Of course the decline is not inevitable. MMORPGs could rise again if somebody invented a new secret sauce to make gameplay more interesting. But over the last decade evolution of the genre has been slow, and people are increasingly growing bored of playing through the same old, same old, with just a fresh coat of paint. Many other gaming trends have come and gone, that really isn't anything unusual. The only difference is that previous genres declined quietly, because their decline didn't involve somebody having to shut down a server.

In as far as such a day can be exactly determined, today is the 40th birthday of Dungeons & Dragons. People celebrate and remember the enormous social power of this game. I can attest to that, even across a language barrier I made friends through playing D&D when I emigrated to another country after finishing my studies.

But like many 40-year olds, Dungeons & Dragons is going through some sort of a mid-life crisis. It doesn't really know what it wants to be any more: The game was modernized with the 4th edition, only to then backpedal and revert to old flaws in the 5th edition. In the end nobody is really happy.

Ultimately it isn't the game itself that has changed so much, but the environment. Playing games together with real people around a table sometimes seems like a historical artifact by itself. Why make friends in your neighborhood and live with all their foibles and differing interests and time-schedules if you can find people to play with on the internet any time you like? By having a much larger pool to search through, you will always find somebody whose interests are closer aligned to yours and whose time-schedule fits perfectly. And those virtual friends are a lot easier to get rid off too when you don't need them any more! Once we moved the education system online, we won't need real friends at all any more!

While my sarcastic summary of modern gaming might be exaggerated, the trend against playing together locally sure is real. And it doesn't help that Dungeons & Dragons is more a complete hobby than just a game, you can't just play it here and there for half an hour. At it's birth, Dungeons & Dragons was still a very unique way to dive into a fantasy universe full of dragons and wizards. Today there are a lot of alternatives in computer games. While the quality of the stories hasn't gone up much, the graphical presentation sure beats miniatures and pieces of paper.

But what none of the computer games offer is the chance to really influence the fantasy world, and create an interactive story of your own with your friends. And in spite of all the drawbacks, that is sure something worth preserving. Regardless what edition of Dungeons & Dragons, or what other later pen & paper role-playing system, these games are still a tremendous source of creative energy. You just don't get that from canned content. So here is to you, Dungeons & Dragons, a happy 40th birthday, and may you still celebrate many more of them.

Clockwork from Out of Beta is against 40-man raids in Wildstar. He says: "So raids tended to be fairly generous with things like DPS timers which leads to the oft lamented "30 carrying 10" feeling, the idea that the majority of players were having to pick up the slack for the lesser-skilled/geared members. This adds fuel to frustration fires and leads to finger pointing amongst the group.". I beg to differ. I have always considered "30 carrying 10" to be a desirable feature, not a disadvantage of vanilla WoW raids. And I believe that the reason for this difference of opinion reveals a deep difference in attitudes towards what exactly a guild is.

Back in the days where Ultima Online and Everquest where the dominant MMORPGs, there was no such thing as Facebook. One of the main attractions at the time was running around in a virtual world, meeting new people and making friends. Your guild was your "social network", and consisted of the people you would want to hang out with, your online friends. If you build a guild after that model, it is important that guild activities are inclusive. You want to be able to raid with Mr. Nice Guy, even if his DPS isn't top notch. You might also want to raid when only 35 people show up; or you might have one guy in the raid responsible for giving directions on Teamspeak, even if that activity takes away from his damage output. Performance is less important, because you raid to be able to do something with your guild.

The modern version of guilds resembles more a sports team: Your club is in a certain league, and you need to be absolutely certain that all your players are up to the standards of that league and able to win. That leads to constant change, as there is absolutely no loyalty between player and guild: If a player is worse than his guild mates, he'll get kicked or at least not invited to raids unless really nobody else is available. If a player is better than his guild, he'll leave for a better one. The people in your guild are not your friends, they are means to an end. You are in a guild to be able to raid.

The frustration and finger pointing is pretty much exclusive to people who tend to think of guilds as sports clubs. If you think of a guild as a social club, you have more understanding for somebody underperforming, or having a bad day. The social aspects of playing together are more important than "winning" or getting epics.

The only thing that is wrong with Wildstar's ideas of 20-man and 40-man raids is giving out better loot for the 40-man version. I would have made the two sorts of raids give out the same loot. That would give a better chance to both viable social guilds and sports team guilds to evolve.

Imagine you had an incredibly accurate account of all the activities you ever did in a MMORPG like World of Warcraft. If you would then make a list of all the content you ever saw in the game and count how often you saw each bit of content, you would automatically end up with two very separate types of content: A long list of bits of content you only saw once or a few times, and a somewhat shorter list of bits of content you repeated quite a lot. To me that distribution suggests that there is some content which is "under-utilized", and other content which is "over-utilized".

Now to some extent there is a justification for that. The list of bits of content you only do rarely will have a lots of quests and other single-player content on it. The list of bits of content you repeat frequently will have more multi-player content like raids or heroic dungeons on it. That is the classical "level solo, play the end-game with your friends" model of World of Warcraft. But that only works to some extent. There are a lot of lower level dungeons, multi-player content, which is rarely used. And there are top-level daily quests that is single-player content which is repeated a lot.

This makes me wonder whether the solo-leveling, multi-player end-game is the optimum solution. How many players do actually follow that model? In a future where you can skip the first 89 levels for money and raid with a LFR system which doesn't require you to make friends, is it still justified to have a part of the game repeated a lot more frequently than the rest? To some extent Guild Wars 2 already addresses that issue by scaling your level to the content, making content you technically "out-leveled" still interesting to play through. You aren't limited to level-cap content if you want a minimum of challenge and rewards while playing your level-capped character.

But if adjusting your level to the content is the solution, do we actually still need levels in a MMORPG? Why not simply make all the content in the game equal, with minor variations to provide easier challenges for less rewards and more difficult challenges for higher rewards, but without the "hard" content becoming trivial as you level up? If everybody always was the same level, we would both maximize content utilization, and the availability of other players to play through multi-player content together.

Guest post by Hugh Hancock:

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In 2009, I started making a World of Warcraft fanfilm, Death Knight Love Story, which I estimated would take 6 months to make. I just released the first part of it this morning. Total development time: 5 years. The budget for the project has gone the same way: from a few thousand dollars (perfectly reasonable for a project aimed at learning how to use motion capture) to ... let's just say "more".

Why would you be interested in this? Because one of the topics we end up debating a lot in the games blogging world is the way in which AAA games' budgets spiral out of control.

Just a week or so ago we heard that The Elder Scrolls Online may have spiralled up to $200m. Tobold has spent a lot of time looking at the economics of game business plans in the past, and how - and if - they'll make their money back. But one thing that I've rarely seen discussed is just how the hell budgets get that high in the first place.

The Death Knight Love Story experience has given me a solid insight into exactly how that happens. Death Knight Love Story is, in fact, very similar to an AAA game in many ways. he level of art quality is the same - including both the WoW art but also the original art I've had made for it. We worked with Hollywood actors to produce the voice for it, just like an AAA title. And Death Knight Love Story is such a huge opportunity for me and my movie-making that I couldn't afford to screw it up. Just like, after spending even $100m, the developers of TESO must have known they couldn't afford to screw it up.

Imagine you're the executive producer of TESO. You've got an early alpha version of the game, and you've sat your focus groups down to play through it. And the result comes in: it's not very fun. It's, you know, OK.

What do you do?

In the case of Death Knight Love Story, we actually threw nearly-finished versions of the film away three times over. If the opportunity hadn't been so big, I would have released a far earlier version and lived with the rough edges. But because I had managed to land such high-profile actors - Brian Blessed, Jack Davenport, Joanna Lumley and Anna Chancellor - I was very aware that I had to get the film just right.

For the TESO team, and particularly the heads of development, the pressure is even more intense. Games development works on an iterative process right from the start, so there's probably nothing in the game that hasn't been thrown away or at least heavily revised three times over. And the problem is that every time you do this, the stakes get higher. The game has now spent more money, so it's even more important that it be a hit. So the focus-testing becomes even more stringent and there's an even higher bar of fun to hit. And so on.

If you're trying anything sufficiently ambitious in the game or film world, this sort of scope creep is almost impossible to avoid. Why? Because if you're aiming to create a detailed 3D world of any kind, you are by definition attempting something hugely ambitious and massively complex - and worse, something that's fractal. The deeper in you go, the more complex it becomes.

Let's go back to our poor TESO developers.

The focus group results come in. The design team sits down to look at them. And the design lead says "Hmm, what we need here is a new settlement in Morrowind where the levelling curve can flatten out a bit.". Problem solved! The quests team go away, and they design the settlement in rough. It turns out that this will be a really key part of the game's progression, so they're going to need to introduce new art elements. So the concept artists come in and create drawings for the characters and buildings of the settlements. And the quest teams come in, and then the 3D art guys start adding things up.

Have you ever looked closely at the number of models in any World of Warcraft location? For example, much of Death Knight Love Story is set in the Ebon Hold in World of Warcraft, so I have the model to hand. The Ebon Hold is a reasonably simple two-floor structure, made of 6 main model parts. Six models for the building - not too bad. But that's just the main structure - walls, floor and so on. If you just use that model, it'll look very bare: in a 2001 or so game it might have been fine, but in 2014 we demand a lot more detail. So the Hold needs anvils, sacks of grain, forges, and so on.

The Ebon Hold model has 426 models for anvils, grain sacks, runeforges, etc, etc, etc. Each of which has at least one 3D texture - probably more. Each of those textures had to be drawn by an artist, taking a couple of hours, then each model had to be assembled, for another couple of hours, then it had to be reviewed to check that it fits with the art style. Some models had to be revised, maybe a couple of times. Then the models had to be processed into a form that the game engine can understand - a surprisingly non-trivial problem. Some of them will throw errors, and have to be fixed. Then a level designer came in and placed the models for each area. They probably realise they need a couple of models they don't have, so they submit a request for a new model, and that has to be approved, and concept art created, and so on. Then the gameplay designers come in, and design the gameplay for the area, necessitating a few thousand lines of scripting code.

Then the area is tested, and it turns out that some of the models break the AI pathing, or get in the way of the player's movement, so they have to go right back to the start, and...

Even a single building in a game like WoW is a massive work of art.

And how many of those are there? Well, let's put it this way: in Wrath of the Lich King, for example (an expansion, not a full game), the continent of Northrend alone is a grid of squares, 49 squares wide by 37 across. Each of those squares has been designed by hand. Almost all of those squares have at least some structures and some placed buildings in, as well as character spawning points, quest NPCs, special effects, and so on. So that makes a total of 1131 squares, within each of which there are probably a few hundred 3D models and a few thousand lines of code. That makes a grand total of somewhere in the order of 350,000 individually placed models, many of them unique, and literally millions of lines of quest scripting.

And that was just part of one expansion pack.

When I was making Death Knight Love Story, we'd frequently experience the fractal nature of 3D design. We'd come up with a simple-sounding change, like adding an additional small scene, and suddenly that would turn into weeks or months of work. We needed to create new characters, export a new location, update the textures, then total up all the animation needed by all the characters in the scene, organise a motion capture session, process the motion capture data, insert dozens of motion capture files into the scene... And all of this from one phrase casually spoken in one development meeting.

Of course, everyone on a AAA team will be aware that 3D products are complex. But when the pressure's on, and the game or film is clearly not as successful as it needs to be, it's very easy to say "well, if we just add this one thing...". And sometimes - often - you actually need to say that in order to make a great product. And it's impossible to tell whether the months of work you're authorising will be the months that make the project incredibly successful, or if they'll get to the next focus group round and then get discarded. I have entire scenes which took weeks or months to create which are just sitting on my hard drive now - the cost of making a great project.

In the course of revision-driven, throw-it-away-and-start-again hell, you genuinely have no idea whether what you're making will be a hit or a flop. All you know is that you're not at "good" yet, and the only way to get there is to keep going. The first Half-Life famously took years because Valve threw it away half-way through and started again. World of Warcraft's development started in 1999, with the game being released in 2005 - it's reasonable to assume that there were quite a few iterations and dark times during the process.

Unfortunately, AAA game development, just like movie development, is a very high-stakes game. The studios can spend $200m and they might still end up with a dud - but if they didn't do that, and released the game when their testers were saying it was terrible, they'd have even worse odds of making their money back.

As for my own experience with development hell - also 5 years, coincidentally enough - I'll leave it up to you to decide if it finally got to "good enough"! You can check it out at www.deathknightlovestory.com .

In the previous session we had the first character death of the campaign. So between sessions there was some discussion going on between me and the player who's character had died. He had a decision to make: Did he prefer his character to be resurrected, or would he rather make a new one? In the end made a new one, so I modified the story to fit with that decision.

We started the session with the Favorites of Selune carrying their dead dwarf companion out of the watchtower. After bringing the sword of his dead father to Berrian, the leader of the eladrin nearby (who couldn't help but remark that this was the second family member of his of which the heroes could only bring news of his death), the group set off to Fallcrest to look for somebody to cast the resurrection ritual. Entering the temple of Selune in Fallcrest, where they had previously spent a year in training, they found the high priest in earnest discussion with a beautiful gypsy woman. The high priest called a dwarven priest colleague for the raise dead ritual. But try as he might, the priest wasn't able to make contact with the soul of the departed. Although the body was clearly fresh, the soul seemed gone for ages.

Discussing this curious turn of events, the group explained the manner of their comrade's death. He had died in the watchtower while the tower was still stuck in time on the day of the fall of Gardmore Abbey, and in a different dimension. So technically he died over a century ago, which was why he couldn't be resurrected. Talking of their contact with the Far Realm, the high priest introduced the gypsy woman to the group. She had come to the temple because she was a follower of Selune, and had a connection to the Far Realm (she is of course the new character, a warlock with star pact and a Vistani heritage). At the time where the group returned the watchtower to the real world and time (and incidentally released a beholder), she felt a "disturbance in the force", so to say. And as the beings of the Far Realm are quite dangerous, she felt obliged to warn the authorities, or rather the temple, because the secular authorities wouldn't have listened. When introduced to the group, she and the character holding the cards of the group felt the familiar tug towards each other, indicating they both had cards from the Deck of Many Things. So to follow up on the Far Realm event and to find out more about that card she had held for some time, the warlock (or should I call her sorceress? Witch? Fortune Teller?) joined the group.

The dwarven priest of the temple of Selune offered to organize a dwarven burial for the dead warlord. That caused some tension because the priest wanted to bury the dead with his weapons and armor, and the dwarven fighter in the group wanted to keep the magical equipment. In the end the fighter handed over the lesser items and kept only the best stuff for himself, burying his comrade with non-magical weapons. They bought a barrel of beer and celebrated a wake, and that was the end of the story for that particular character.

Next the group returned not to the abbey, but to Winterhaven, from where they had received the quest to liberate the watchtower. Lord Padraig was happy to hear those good news, and said he would send 50 soldiers with them as an occupation force for the watchtower, which should hinder the orcs from making further raids. But ideally he would like to see the orcs gone from the abbey, so he suggested that the heroes kill the orc chieftain. The court mage Valthrun had recently received information from a merchant who was held for ransom by the orcs and then liberated for a large sum of money. The merchant was part of Valthrun's network of informers, and had used the opportunity to spy on the defenses. He reported that the main gate was only lightly guarded, and held stocks of the hooded cloaks the orcs wore. It seemed possible to capture the main gate, which was a good way apart from the village, without raising an alarm.

[This was basically an attempt by me to rescue two or three encounters of the adventure. But the players didn't bite. I wonder if any group playing this adventure ever did the main gate encounter, it appears so bloody obvious that there are so many better ways to get into the abbey.]

The group traveled back to the abbey and instead of approaching the main gate went back with the soldiers to the watchtower, and crossed the Feygrove from there to get to the back of the keep. They had learned from the eladrin that the orc chieftain was in that keep, but that in front of the back entrance there was a garden full of giant spiders, which the eladrin didn't want to disturb. The group had less qualms about that, especially since they remembered a secret the nymphs had told them, about a magical sword lost in that garden which was a key for a building in the village.

Arriving at the garden it became clear that some of players thought that there had been too much role-playing and not enough fighting going on. Seeing webbed nests in the trees the cleric deliberately threw sticks at it to provoke a fight with a spider. The spider was killed quickly, and the players found a cocoon in the webs, which contained a skeleton and a gleaming sword. Their new fortune teller group member used a ritual to make sure that this was the magical sword they were looking for. The rogue experimented with cutting the webs and discovered that if done skillfully the group could cut their way through the garden without disturbing all the spiders. They found the best path to try that and proceeded towards the back door of the keep. The rogue could completely disable one spider web "alarm system", but two others only partially. And in both cases the other party members passing failed to do so quietly enough, resulting in two more mini-fights against spiders.

Having arrived at the back door of the keep, the rogue examined the door, found no traps, and was able to unlock the door. Listening at the door he heard sounds he thought were big dogs. On opening the door and then banging against the door to attract the dogs, the resulting howling was identified by the ranger as rather belonging to giant wolves. The players tried to lure them out, but then saw that the wolves were mounted by orc riders, who refused to be tricked that easily. So the players decided to go in and attack before the orcs could raise reinforcements. As it was late and that fight would take more time than the small skirmishes against the spiders, we decided to stop there.

The repeated tactic of the players to rather stay outside of doors and hope to attract monsters instead of going into a room to fight them is messing with my encounter maps. Half of the fighting we do happens outside the boundaries of the battle map. I wonder how other DMs handle that. I sure ain't going to let every monster rush into that sort of trap.

It is very difficult to get an idea how popular pen & paper roleplaying games are today. Sometimes you can get some limited sales numbers, but nobody knows how many people are still playing with old books or using downloaded pdf files of rulebooks. It is said that Dungeons & Dragons is in decline and that Pathfinder is the new top dog, but given how much longer D&D has been around it is impossible to say how many people are playing some version of it. Anecdotal evidence suggests that game stores selling role-playing material aren't doing as well as they did 20 years ago. And certainly pen & paper roleplaying game lost a substantial part of their potential player-base to computer games over the last three decades.

But I was wondering whether apart from these factors, the decline of pen & paper roleplaying games also has to do with a change in attitudes towards games. Games as a whole have developed from something which was considered to be "for children", over something which was part of geek culture, to something everybody does. The current prime minister of the UK mentioned playing Angry Birds in an interview, and it is hard to imagine Margaret Thatcher talking about playing a game for relaxation. Technology has made computers ubiquitous, and that in turn has made games ubiquitous. Get into a bus or subway today, and you are basically guaranteed to see somebody playing Candy Crush Saga or something similar.

Now computer games have a lot of advantages, primarily that they allow you to play when other players are either not available at all, or available only in distant locations. But computer games also have disadvantages; and when I read some modern comments or blogs on Dungeons & Dragons today, I sometimes wonder whether younger people who grew up with computer games maybe sometimes fail to understand some aspects of pen & paper roleplaying games which are radically different from computer games.

The main limitation of a computer game is that in the game only that is possible that has been foreseen by whoever developed the game. If the devs haven't foreseen you going in some direction, you will hit an invisible wall when you try. And only what is allowed in the rules is possible, the rules are the game. To "cheat" a computer game, you need to change the rules by modifying the code. Or you cheat with a cheat code, at which point you are back to doing only what the devs allow you to do. If you play a lot of computer games, it is easy to think that this could be true for every form of game, that the rules are the game. And approaching pen & paper roleplaying games with that attitude results in a rather inferior game experience.

The rules of a pen & paper roleplaying game cover at most half of the game, and it is the more technical and less creative half. You *can* play a game of Dungeons & Dragons doing only things that are listed in the rules, and I am very much afraid that is what some people do. But then you get series of combat encounters and skill checks, resolving every situation by the rules, which usually call for rolling some dice. Roll-play instead of role-play. I've seen comments on 4E adventures where somebody said "I played it, and it was just a series of combat encounters". And I think that was just a case of inexperienced players and an inexperienced dungeon master trying to play the game completely inside of what is printed in the rule-books and the adventure modules.

For me the combat encounter gameplay, which is the part best described by the rules and thus also the part that differs most from one rule-system to the next, is held together by the "glue" of actual role-playing. And this role-playing is not covered by rules at all. In a printed adventure module the role-playing is covered by text describing for example the motivation of the arch-villain, but there are usually no detailed descriptions on how to translate those motivations into actual game-play.

Contrary to popular belief, 4th edition D&D does not in fact have less instructions on how to role-play, or is otherwise preventing people from role-playing. The "problem" of 4E is having a well-balanced and rather complete set of rules for combat encounters plus some selective non-combat situations (skill challenges). It is thus relatively easy to fall into that trap of believing that the 4E rules are all there is to a game of 4E Dungeons & Dragons. Earlier editions had less complete rules where improvisation was more obviously necessary.

While I would think that the 4E rules would make for a rather good computer role-playing game, my personal experience with 4E is the same as with previous editions: The part not written in the rules is more important and more memorable than the part that is written in the rules. My current adventure in my current campaign is all about how the players over time come to think of the artifact they are collecting piece by piece, and what they will in consequence do with it. It is a grand interactive story with a very open end. The two booklets full of combat and skill encounters set the scene and are fun by themselves, but they aren't what this adventure is about. If we did just the encounters without the role-playing in between, the adventure would be rather boring, and I'd probably rather play a turn-based tactical computer game. But because in Dungeons & Dragons the rules are NOT the game, and there is so much more to it, the game is so much better than that.

Since the Google Reader was killed, I use Feedly for reading blog feeds. And while reading the feed from Bio Break, Feedly made some suggestions to me what other sites I might like. Made me smile:

I am happy to report that The Banner Saga, a game I supported on Kickstarter, finally came out. It took longer than expected, because the devs decided to make the multiplayer version first, but now the single-player version is out. And I'm reasonably happy with the result.

I don't know if you know King of Dragon Pass, a game the critics loved but which didn't sell very well. I bought it, twice actually, but never played it for long. Because while I love the story and the decision making, the actual gameplay is a bit dry. The Banner Saga has a similar setting, a similar system of decision making, but a very different core gameplay: Turn-based tactical fighting instead of a resource management sim. The result is a lot more playable.

Nevertheless one word of caution: At least as far as I played it, the game is rather linear. That is you can make decisions in situations which arise, and those decisions have consequences. But you can't decide on such basic stuff as where you are going. Your "caravan" is moving where the story needs it to be, and you can only influence it a bit, for example by deciding how much you want to rest.

But I do like the story, and the tactical combat system is good too. So if you haven't gotten the game via Kickstarter, you can now buy The Banner Saga from Steam for $25. Europeans pay €23, which is over $30. So the Kickstarter thing turned out to be a rather good deal, as I only had to pledge $10 to get the game.

I very much recommend reading DMDavid's post on elegance and resolution transparency in Dungeons & Dragons rules. He very well explains the problem that you want pen & paper role-playing rules to BOTH "apply broadly so fewer rules can cover whatever happens in the game" and "produce outcomes that match what players expect in the game world". Which happens to be an impossible task. So while I very much agree with him that 4th edition covers the first point brilliantly, and is a much better system also in terms of game balance because a warrior works fundamentally the same as a wizard in 4E, I also agree with him that the downside is "the edition often fails to model the game world, creating a world where you can be on fire and freezing at the same time, where snakes get knocked prone, and where you can garrote an ooze".

In fact, while I didn't detail it in my campaign journal there was a situation in our last D&D session where a black pudding (an ooze-like monster) was "knocked prone" by a spell-effect. And when the players asked me whether that was possible, I preferred to stick to the rules even if they made no logical sense in that situation, than to create a case-by-case system of rules exceptions which would be impossible to manage.

I do consider that position a modern one, as opposed to what I would have ruled in the same situation 30 years ago. And one thing that changed in the meantime is computer games and MMORPGs. When we played 1st edition AD&D the idea that a fireball could burn only enemies while leaving allies untouched would have appeared completely foreign to us. Now I play 4E D&D with a group of players who all played World of Warcraft, and in WoW all area-effect spells selectively touch only enemies and there is not such thing as friendly fire. 4th edition has both kinds of area effects, selective or with friendly fire, and due to the experience with MMORPGs, players don't think that is strange in any way.

Having discussed the theory of games for over a decade on this blog, I think you will believe me if I say that I have a deep interest in that subject. I believe that rules systems are important, because they affect very much how we play, a theory which outside of gaming is an important part of behavioral economics. From my point of view, 4th edition was progress for Dungeons & Dragons, while 5th edition is a step back. It is not that I don't understand the appeal of "classic" D&D, or why some players would want a wizard to work with one sort of resource system (Vancian magic) and a warrior to work with a completely different one. It is just that by having played D&D for over 30 years with many different people and groups, I am very much aware of the problems that these classic rules cause. The "linear fighter, quadratic wizard" problem, or the "5-minute work day" problem were all things that 4th edition solved, and 5th edition brings back.

For me, in the end, Dungeons & Dragons is a collaborative multi-player game. So in my opinion it is more important that the rules apply broadly and thus create a system with automatic balance between classes. If that leads to somebody garroting an ooze, so be it.

This post is about math.

(Now that should have made 99% of readers go away).

In a recent comment one of my readers remarked that I had quoted some number, that he wasn't sure about the precision of that number and that "numbers are pedantic". And I was under the impression that not everybody understands the precision of numbers in mathematical terms. Precision is very important in math and sciences, so there are well-established conventions which result in a number not only having a value, but also containing some information about the precision of that value.

The way this precision is expressed is by giving more or less significant figures. By convention, trailing zeroes are placeholders that indicate the scale of the number, and are not significant figures. So if I say that game X has 291,938 players, that is a pedantic number. It only has significant figures, and that basically claims that the number is exact. There are not 291,937 or 291,939 players in that game, there are EXACTLY 291,938.

But if I use trailing zeroes, and say that game X has 300,000 players, only the 3 is a significant figure, the five trailing zeroes aren't. Saying that a game has 300,000 players does not exclude the possibility of the game having some more or less players than that. Any mathematician would read that "300,000" as meaning "between 250,000 and 349,999". Because using all those trailing zeroes means that any number which would be rounded up or down to 300,000 is included. So "300,000" is not a very pedantic number, it is a number with a 16.7% error margin. Likewise if you express the number of players of a game in millions, you include the possibility of an error margin of plus or minus half a million.

These mathematical conventions about significant figures allow us to talk about numbers which are impossible to know exactly. Nobody knows EXACTLY how many inhabitants the United States of America has, and obviously the number changes every day through births, deaths, arrivals and departures. But mathematically it is perfectly okay to claim that the USA has 300 million inhabitants, because the implied error margin of that number is bigger than the probable error margin of a U.S. census. Saying that the 300 million number is wrong would mean saying that it is wrong by over 50 million.

Note that some player numbers expressed on blog posts are "wrong" or at least "disputable" by more than their error margin. To give the most quoted example, the number of World of Warcraft players, even if you express it in millions, varies by more than half a million depending on whether you count or don't count Chinese players in that number. The numbers of EVE Online vary by more than the implied error margin of 50,000 depending on whether you count Chinese players or not, and whether you count "accounts" or "players". And nobody agrees what should be counted for a Free2Play game, as the number of people who ever made an account is rather obviously inflated and not significant at all.

I am one of those weird people who rather pay for content than to steal it. So for me it is a real concern, and not just a lame excuse for stealing, when I have to remark that due to legal and contractual aspects the availability of content is lagging behind the availability of hardware in Europe. I bought myself just after Christmas the latest version of the iPad, the "Air". It is lighter, and thus easier to hold when you watch a video on it. And it now has stereo speakers instead of mono (although I wished they were placed left and right of the screen when holding it in landscape mode, which they aren't). Thus I am on par with the rest of the world in the latest hardware.

But the content is a completely different picture. I like watching TV series, for example CSI. And somebody living in America would have no problem at all to watch CSI on his iPad: There are numerous services like Netflix, Hulu, HBO GO, or Amazon Instant Video which offer all sorts of TV series on demand streamed for a small fee directly to your iPad. And none of them works in Europe. The only service I can get here is the BBC iPlayer, which is limited to BBC programs.

The only way I can legally buy video content like CSI is on DVD. Which is nice enough if I only want to watch it on my TV screen: I pop the DVD into my DVD player and even get various language options and subtitles. Thus I have a large collection of TV series on DVD at home. But if I want to watch them on my iPad, I'm out of luck.

It isn't as if video streaming from a computer to the iPad was difficult. Any video content I have on my computer can be streamed to the iPad using various applications like AirVideo. But none of those applications work for video content that is on a DVD in the drive of my computer. I would first need to "rip" the DVD to my computer's hard drive to be able to stream it. There appears to be a DVD Player app for the Mac, but I can't find one for Windows. I don't want to "rip" my DVDs. It takes a lot of time, and if the DVD is copy-protected, I would need to use illegal software to circumvent that protection. I just want to stream it directly from a DVD drive (in my computer or as external separate device) to my iPad.

I am one of those weird people who rather pay for content than to steal it. One would assume that the companies that are in the business of creating and selling content would love customers like me. I am banging at their door, begging them to sell me content they already sell to other people, so their cost of making it available to me should be minimal. So why won't they sell this content to me? Why would they want to force me to use illegal means like fake IP or DVD cracking software just to be allowed to watch content on a mobile screen?

I was planning to write a long response to a recent comment on this blog: People often mindlessly repeat the mantra that having a Free2Play business model always affects a game negatively, and I wanted to point out that EVERY possible business model can affect a game negatively, and that whether a game is exploitative or not doesn't depend on what business model it uses. Before I could finish writing that, Gamasutra published an article stating pretty much exactly that, and better researched than I could have done in the available time.

If you believe that games which have upfront payment or a monthly subscription do not suffer from exploitative game design practices, you are deluding yourself.

While I generally agree with Keen's sentiment: "Good games can be ruined by business models, but bad games can never be helped by them.", the reply of Ryan Dancey (developer of Pathfinder Online, a game with a subscription business model) to the Forbes article I discussed last week is worth reading. Ryan has a very nice table with numbers which show that in the Western hemisphere subscription games make about $100 million per month. That is give or take, based on some assumptions about numbers, but I don't want to nitpick on the details. Rather I would like to point out two major things from that table:

1) More than half of those $100 million is made by a single game, World of Warcraft. Every time WoW loses a million subscribers in the West, the number in that table goes down by $15 million as well. As many of the people who are cheering FOR the subscription business model are also cheering when WoW loses subscribers, this is worth pointing out.

2) Every game other than WoW and EVE in the list has two different numbers in the columns on "Estimated monthly players" and "Estimated subscribers". Or in other words, they are all games that do offer a subscription OPTION, but are otherwise Free2Play.

So in the end the whole discussion is one of semantics: What exactly is a "subscription business model game"? I very much agree with Ryan Dancey that IF you count every Free2Play game which has a subscription option as a subscription business model game, then the subscription business model is alive and well, and will still be continue to be so for many years to come. But then of course statements like "subscription games are more fair, because everybody pays the same" do not apply any more.

And I very much believe that the Forbes article didn't use that definition. Nobody believes that The Elder Scroll Online would be hurt by its business model if it had a Free2Play model with a subscription option. It is very much in question whether TESO can be successful if subscription is the ONLY option. But of course as Keen reminds us, TESO might simply fail for being a bad game, regardless of business model.

Last week we had the first character death in my 4th edition Dungeons & Dragons campaign. That is a good opportunity to talk about death and penalties in D&D, in comparison with other games. So, what is death in a role-playing game? Basically it is the game telling you that somebody made a mistake. Maybe that frontal assault on the red dragon wasn't the best possible tactic, or the group ran out of healing spells. It isn't necessarily the person who died who made the mistake, it might well be another player, or in D&D even the DM; but as long as we are in a cooperative multiplayer situation (and in D&D that includes the DM), the responsibility is somewhat shared, and the death of one character is to some extent a message to everybody.

And having that sort of message in the game is important. If you believe in Sid Meier's maxim that a good game is a series of interesting decisions, you need to realize that there is no success without the possibility of failure. I am not at all unhappy that a death occurred in my campaign. Due to the group having 6 players, of which 2 are healers, in a system that is designed for 5 players with 1 healer, it wasn't always easy to keep up the sense of danger necessary for a good game of adventure.

But if I say that this was the first death of the campaign after two years, I need to clarify that it wasn't the first time somebody was down and dying. 4E has basically three levels of death: You go from fully active to "dying" when you drop to 0 or less hit points. But then there is still a window of opportunity in which you can be saved as long as you succeed "death saves" and don't incur further damage. And the penalty for going into "dying" state is light as long as you get revived before dropping to "dead": You might miss a turn or two until somebody heals you, but then you are back up on your feet with no penalty.

If you don't get revived and drop to "dead", all is still not lost. D&D always had resurrection spells, and in 4th edition that spell is a level 8 ritual in a game of 30 levels, so not all that high. My level 7 group doesn't have it, but finding an NPC priest who can do it shouldn't be impossible. And the rules allow that resurrection to happen within 30 days, and even longer if a ritual of preservation is cast on the dead group member. Resurrection from an NPC costs gold, but not all that much; the group lost more money when they had two magic items eaten by a rust monster. And once resurrected the death penalty still is moderate: A -1 to dice rolls for the next 6 fights.

Sometimes a character can't be resurrected. Maybe he died somewhere where his companions couldn't recover even a part of his body. Maybe he got disintegrated or suffered some other unrecoverably fatal condition. Now obviously the player is still sitting at the table and you still want to play with him. So the death penalty in that case is that the player needs to roll a new character. At that point we are firmly in the domain of house rules. No D&D edition ever was very firm on rules for rolling a new character into an existing campaign. A few DMs insist on new characters being level 1, but in general large level differences in a group cause more problems than it is worth. In my campaign all characters always have the same level and the same xp, to stress the cooperative multiplayer part, and avoid somebody going off on his own to get ahead in experience points. So a re-roll character in my campaign would also have the same level and xp than the others. The death penalty for a re-roll would be handled by the magic items that I'd hand out to the new character, which would generally be common magic items and thus less interesting than the equipment the previous character had.

Of course changing your character also has lots of other effects, but I hesitate to classify those as "death penalties": You need to put some work into creating a new character, you lose story lines linked to the previous character, but gain new ones instead. Replacing an old character who died by a new one is as much an opportunity for a new start as it is a penalty. That is why in my campaign I don't insist that a character needs to be dead beyond the point of being resurrectable to allow a player to roll a new character. If somebody really had enough of his old character, he could even replace him without needing to die first.

And sometimes I wonder why computer roleplaying games don't have that option. Wouldn't that make for an interesting option to be able to reroll a character without losing progress in character power and/or story? On the other hand, computer games are often short enough that starting anew at level 1 isn't that much of a burden. In a way the next expansion of World of Warcraft is offering improved re-roll capabilities, with the possibility of skipping the first 90 levels. If you grew bored with your old character, or your guild / group needs a different class, why not?

Exactly one year ago today a great MMO experiment was started: The PS3 shooter Dust 514 was linked to the PC MMORPG EVE Online. Whether you are a fan of EVE or not (and I sure ain't), one has to acknowledge the innovation and potential of the idea of a central virtual world in interaction with satellite games. So how did it work out?

Unfortunately it didn't. While EVE Online outside China has 30,000 daily peak concurrent users, Dust 514 only has 3,000. So there are ten times more pilots in space than troops on the ground. And with other console shooters having 300,000 daily peak concurrent users, it is safe to say that Dust 514 was a flop. Review scores were pretty bad, Metacritic shows an average of 59/100.

As far as I can tell the reason for the flop was that Dust 514 simply was a bad shooter game. It was not the idea of a link with an MMORPG that sunk the project, but the quality of execution. Thus I am still positive on the idea having potential. And not just with shooters: 16.5 million people bought an Animal Crossing game, 150 million people bought a The Sims game. Is it so outlandish to think of a MMORPG linked to games like these, where the players of the satellite game replace the NPCs of the MMORPG, playing the role of the peaceful villagers in need of heroes to do tasks for them?

If somebody on the internet doesn't like the business model of a specific game, he is likely to insult that game as being "Pay2Win". And if you ask for a precise definition of when a game is Pay2Win and when it isn't, you never get an answer. The inconvenient truth is that even if somebody rants against Pay2Win, he most likely loves another game in which progress and winning is also in some way depending on the amount of money spent. At best we can talk about a hypothetical scale of Pay2Win-iness on which all games could be placed; but there are very few games that are either 100% Pay2Win or 0% Pay2Win, and most games are somewhere in the middle of that scale.

I can't find a better example for an 100% Pay2Win game than an auction. While auctions aren't usually considered as "games", they do share some characteristics with games, like having strict rules and a win condition. And obviously winning an auction is pretty much 100% depending on how much money you're willing to spend.

On the other end of the scale we already get into an argument about what money we are counting when we talk about Pay2Win. Because if we talk about computer games, most of them require some money to be spent to play. You need to buy a computer or console, and you need to buy the game. So you could say that you can't "win" such a game without "paying". On the other hand the cost is more or less fixed. You might have a tiny advantage in a PC multiplayer game if your computer is much more powerful than the computer of your opponents, but that effect is small enough to be neglected. Paying for let's say a second copy of the game wouldn't give you any added progress or chance to win. So we might as well bundle all games that are "buy once, play forever" at or near the 0% end of the Pay2Win scale.

If we now look at a typical MMORPG, and what game could be more typical than World of Warcraft, we find that it is surprisingly far from the 0% end of the Pay2Win scale. Just ask yourself how much money YOU spent on World of Warcraft or whatever other subscription MMORPG you played for several years. For me that is well over $1,000 spent on World of Warcraft alone. And that expenditure isn't independent of progress in the game: Since I don't pay for WoW any more, my progress has stopped. We talked yesterday about how getting to the level cap in World of Warcraft and even getting epic gear was possible without ever doing any challenging cooperative multiplayer content. But what it does take is time. And if you are just a normal person with a job / studies / family / friends / food / sleep occupying most of your time, it takes months to get a new character to full epic gear at level cap. Months which you have to pay for in subscription fees. That is even more extreme in some other games, e.g. skill progress in EVE is done in real time, offline, and thus solely depends on how much money you spend on the game. Which is why many EVE players pay for multiple accounts. The more you pay in a subscription game, the more you advance, so it isn't 0% Pay2Win.

The games most likely to be accused of being Pay2Win are those which are free to play and then have an "item shop" or something which allows faster progress or other in-game advantages in exchange for money. If you want to place those on our Pay2Win scale, you'll notice something weird: For many of these games it is extremely hard to correlate progress with the amount of money spent. In most of the cases it is a matter of "you COULD pay to win", which doesn't automatically mean that somebody who has progressed more than others is automatically the person who paid most. In many cases it is possible to arrive at the exact same point in the game by either spending more time or more money, or even by being more skilled. If you look at forums for games like World of Tanks, you'll always see people who are adamant that somebody who landed a good hit on them must have been using money for "gold ammo" to do so; but if you study the game mechanics a bit you'll realize that it is very possible to one-shot another player by simply being very good at aiming with a tank and equipment you can easily get for no money at all. The Pay2Win argument often looks like a lame excuse for players to explain why they have lost or didn't progress that much. It is easier to claim somebody else is a "wallet warrior" than admitting that he might just be better at that game than you are.

So I think that on the Pay2Win scale those games shouldn't be represented by a single point, but rather by a range: How much money do HAVE TO spend to progress in the game? And how far could you get if you played badly but spent a lot of money. For some games those bars could cover most of the scale, with both playing your way to a win less money spent than for a "buy once, play forever" game and paying your way to a win being possible.

Blizzard sent out a survey to some players asking how much they would be willing to pay for a level 90 character, beyond the one free they get in the next expansion. That caused the expected wailing and gnashing of teeth, including some original suggestions like forcing those new level 90 characters to play through the proving grounds in order to demonstrate that the player is sufficiently skilled in playing his class. To me such suggestions reveal a deep rift in the player base between the players who believe that MMORPGs are competitions in which you level and/or gear score are an indicator of your skill in playing the game and other players who believe that MMORPGs are virtual worlds in which players lead pretend virtual lives full of adventure.

The source of that rift is that the games themselves aren't really clear about what they want to be. On the one side the hardest content requiring the most skill is clearly concentrated at the level cap, and usually has some sort of gear requirement. On the other side it is today possible for a new player to start a new character in World of Warcraft and get to level 90 with full epic gear without ever doing any multiplayer activity, and without having learned how to play his character in a multiplayer environment. You can get to that point as a warrior without ever touching the Taunt button, or as a mage by only using your 1st level spells. So as somebody who is getting to level 90 by standard leveling doesn't need to prove his ability to be able to play his class, it would be somewhat ridiculous to demand it from those who accelerate the process by paying.

Now it may appear weird that somebody who is not playing World of Warcraft competitively would even want to pay for a level 90 character. But if you look closely, even the most peaceful activities of living a virtual life in the virtual world of Azeroth are locked behind level requirements. You need to be high level to gather resources for crafting, growing vegetables on a farm happens in a high-level zone and occasionally requires fighting high-level mobs, and I would be very much surprised if the new player housing would be accessible to low-level players.

I could very well imagine a very different type of MMORPG in which both competitive adventuring and leading peaceful virtual lives co-exist in better harmony. If you look at a pen & paper roleplaying game, you have the player adventurers interacting with NPC civilians who craft or farm or fish or do other things. Why not create a MMORPG where you can lead a virtual life of crafting and farming and fishing and whatever without any level requirements if you are inclined to do so? A bit like Ultimate Online or Star Wars Galaxies, where certain players were famous for being the best blacksmith on the server instead of for being a server-first raider. It should be possible to create an interesting player economy between adventuring and non-adventuring players. And there wouldn't even have to be a strict separation between the two: A farmer could always take up his sword when the mood strikes him and do some quests, while a high-level adventurer could always spend some time off fishing.

To me it appears that the decline of the MMORPG genre has very much to do with the trend towards massively single-player adventuring along a linear progression path. By adding more different options on how to live a virtual life and by adding more different interactions between players, it would be a lot easier to persuade people to play a multi-player online game with extra cost instead of a single-player game.

The session started where the previous session had left off: The Favorites of Selune are standing in front of the watchtower in Gardmore Abbey, wondering how to get in. There is clearly something strange going on, with the tower apparently extending into another world, and impossible to enter by normal means. But the group is still searching for the cards of the Deck of Many Things, and the cards they have show a "pull" towards the watchtower, indicating that there are cards inside. After some unsuccessful attempts, the cleric has the idea of touching the wall of the watchtower with one of their cards, which causes a portal to inside to open.

Stepping inside the heroes find themselves in scene right out of a Lovecraft horror book, a warped room resembling the expected inside of a watchtower, but with non-Euclidean geometry, and a rubbery floor slowly "flowing" towards a crevice in the middle of the circular room. Two cards form a bridge over the crevice, while a third card creates a door on the other side of that crevice. At the bottom of the crevice is a sort a black lake, from which globules float up from time to time, and out through the door.

So the rogue attaches himself with a rope to the warlord, and crosses the bridge. Unfortunately the two "cards" that make up the bridge are in reality mimics, who attack as soon as the rogue is on the other side. And the moving floor causes the warlord to fall into the crevice, where he lands softly, but on a black pudding that also attacks. Some of the floating globules also join the fight. The confined space with the floor moving towards the crevice and the two halves of the room not connected by a bridge any more makes this a difficult fight. Both the mimics and the black pudding have attacks where they grab a character with tentacles or pseudo-pods, and then deal automatic damage if the hold isn't broken. But the warlord manages to climb out of the crevice, using the rope he is still attached to. And the warrior scores an early critical hit on the mimic on his side of the bridge, bloodying it with a single strike, so that it is killed early.

The black pudding crawls out of the crevice, attacking the side with the larger number of heroes, but using an area attack that manages to grab characters on both sides. With the minions having dies early, that leaves the mimic on the side of the warlord and rogue, and the black pudding on the side with the other 4 group members. Perceiving the black pudding to be the greater threat, the rogue jumps over the crevice, leaving the warlord alone. But the warlord fails his escape roll from the grab of the black pudding pseudo-pod, then receives a critical hit from the mimic, and goes down.

Now I had a problem, because I knew that one player had an object that could have helped the warlord. But as the player wasn't thinking of that, I felt I shouldn't intervene. So even with the warlord succeeding his first death save, he is then crushed by the black pudding pseudo-pod before the others could kill the pudding. First character death of the campaign! Now if somebody dies in my campaign he can either make a new character of the same level, or try to get a resurrect with the help of the other group members. The player of the warlord wants to keep his character, and so the others carry his corpse into the next encounters.

After having killed the remaining monsters, the Favorites of Selune manage to leave the moving floor room through the door, and find themselves one "floor" up in the tower. The wizard is trying to leave the tower by touching the walls first with one card, then with two and all three cards they have. Using more cards clearly has a bigger effect, but apparently the number of cards they have isn't sufficient to open a portal back to the real world. So they have to continue onward through the watchtower. Everything in the second room seems to be flowing upwards, from the globules still floating through the door to the walls itself. But chaotic influences attack the characters, which at first they are able to resist with endurance checks. What follows is technically a "skill challenge", a series of skill checks based on the player's actions. But whenever they fail, they accumulate a "chaos point", which comes with some mutation like an extra limb, sprouting tentacles, or a melting face. The skill challenge has three stages, in which the heroes manage to get to an exit, traveling through various psychedelic scenes. Fortunately for them they each remain under 3 chaos points, so their mutations disappear.

But getting to the exit of this chaos is jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire: Behind the exit is a room which apparently previously was the top of the watchtower, and is now inhabited by a beholder and his mutated minions. One of the minions is recognizable by his sword and harness as the missing father of Berrian, the leader of the eladrin. The beholder is offering to let the heroes live if they help him to get out of the watchtower, in which he is as trapped as they are. The wizard remembers his earlier attempts to escape which ended with the conclusion that they would need more cards to do so. Feeling a pull of their cards towards the beholder, they ask him whether he has cards of the Deck of Many Things, and the beholder is willing to give them the three cards he holds. Touching the walls with all six cards together works, and moves the whole watchtower back from that Far Realm into the real world. Only problem: The beholder now also is in the real world, and free from his pocket dimension prison. So he keeps his word and doesn't bother with attacking the players, but yells "I'm free" and escapes floating through the roof.

As the mutated minions have crumbled to dust, the Favorites of Selune find themselves on the top floor of a now rather ordinary watchtower. They collect the sword and harness to give news of his father to Berrian, and leave the tower by means of a now normal staircase and door, still carrying the body of their dead comrade. At this point we ended the session.

I was talking yesterday about how we tend to towards playing the same game, sequels, or games of the same genre until we get completely bored and want something very different. While of course not everybody works like that, data on the success of sequels supports that theory. Furthermore what is true for individual cases might well also be true in the aggregate: Whole genres of games being very successful for years, and then fading. In that context I found an article in Forbes rather interesting, predicting The Elder Scrolls Online to be the biggest video game disaster of 2014.

I can't really say I disagree. If you *had to* predict a "biggest video game disaster of the upcoming year", MMORPGs in general are a good bet: They tend to have large budgets, and their launches are notoriously tricky. Some of the biggest video game disasters of the last decade were MMORPGs who flopped on release, or shortly after, if they even got that far (Project Copernicus). Furthermore the article has some good arguments, like Skyrim being a great single-player game for which the advantages of going massively multiplayer aren't really obvious.

But I do think the clincher is a combination of the "genre fatigue" discussed above and the economic argument. If we have become less enthusiastic about MMORPGs in general, and TESO isn't radically new, then the number of people willing to pay over $200 for a year of TESO is likely to be limited. There are some perfectly good alternatives that are either Free2Play, or "buy once, no subscription". In addition to that, MMORPGs have a strong history of deflation: Very many games that started out with a $60 price tag and a $15 per month subscription are now considerably cheaper and/or have changed their business model completely. An expectation of deflation can reduce demand, due to people waiting and seeing. That can quickly turn into a self-fulfilling prophecy, because a lack of early success can cause a rethink of the business model, and also can cause other potential players to be less interested in that "flopped" game.

I do believe that it has become nearly impossible to launch "yet another MMORPG" with a monthly subscription successfully. To succeed with a subscription model these days, one would have to offer something which at least appears to be very different from the usual fare. Maybe Wildstar can do it, but I am not sure. TESO could very well end up being perceived as an inferior version of Skyrim with a much higher price tag. Predicting a disaster for The Elder Scrolls Online is a reasonable bet.

P.S.: Quoted for truth from The Nosy Gamer: "I think that WoW will experience a year that all other game companies would envy. I think that we will see the new Warlords of Draenor expansion sell 2.4 million copies in the first week and the number of subscribers hit between 9 and 10 million. Of course, these numbers will have critics exclaiming that WoW is dying and on its last legs.". I'd say that is another safe prediction of "disaster": If we simply define the threshold of success impossibly high, we are sure that any prediction of failure will come true.

Unless he plays the same game every day, a gamer frequently needs to make a prediction of fun. He will have to choose which game of his library to play next, and sometimes he might want to choose a new game for his collection. And the question of "will that game be fun?" is obviously an important criterion of choice. But how can we predict whether we will have fun playing some game today or tomorrow?

I think the main difficulty in this choice is whether to go for the old or for the new. If I played game A yesterday and had fun, it is rather natural choice to play game A again today. But we all know that this strategy has its limits: At some point we feel we have "finished" game A, be it because we reached the end of the game or because we simply grew bored of it. So we want to play something else. That still leaves us with a choice between old and new: We frequently predict that because we had fun with game A, we will also have fun with the sequel of game A. I don't know if you saw some of the lists of the best-selling video-games of 2013, but whatever version of it you believe in, it is most certainly dominated by sequels: GTA 5, Pokemon X/Y, Fifa 14, Battlefield 4, a Call of Duty sequel, Assassin's Creed 4, Bioshock Infinite, etc.

And it isn't just sequels: We also tend to stick to games of the same genre. If we grew bored of playing online multiplayer shooter Call of Duty and there isn't another sequel around, we'd rather try the latest Battlefield than to go for something completely different and play let's say a Pokemon game or The Sims. And because game companies know that, they have a tendency to produce games that are rather similar to whatever is selling well at the moment.

That gamer strategy of choosing the tried and tested genre of course also has its limits. Basically it is a problem of diminishing returns: If you switch from game A to game B, and game B is very similar to game A, your learning curve will be a lot shorter, but you are also likely to grow bored with the game faster. According to Raph Koster, the two are very much related, learning something new in a game is an important element of fun.

So one alternative strategy of predicting fun is to go for "something completely different", as Monty Python would have said. If your previous game was a multiplayer shooter, play a point-and-click adventure next, or a puzzle game, or a turn-based strategy game! The basic prediction of fun in that case is "I grew bored with this genre, I'll have more with something else.". But ultimately of course that is more of a shot in the dark than a prediction.

This is where game reviews and recommendations come in: If you are a huge fan of the Assassin's Creed series of games, you are likely to buy the next sequel regardless of what its Metacritic score is. But if you want to try something very different from what you usually play, going for a game that either has consistently high review scores, or is recommended by somebody you believe has similar tastes as you, improves your chance of having fun with a new game. It is still a matter of probability, as you might find that you simply don't like a particular genre of games and even playing the best of that lot isn't fun to you. But if you want for example to try a survival horror game for the first time, chances are you'll like The Last of Us (Metacritic score of 95) better than BlackSoul (Metacritic score of 25). Personally I tried The Last of Us this year, and found I simply don't like that genre, which isn't all that surprising, as I don't like horror movies either. But by going for the best of the lot, at least I'm reasonably sure that it is the genre I dislike, and not just that particular game.

As I have been playing video games for over 30 years now, I arrived at a mixed prediction of fun strategy: I rarely try completely new genres, as frankly new genres aren't arriving all that often. But I frequently change between genres I know I like. And to mix it up a little, I also sometimes play genres I'm indifferent about, but know I don't hate. How do you choose your next game to play or buy?