I’m not going to write a full review of Thronebreaker: The Witcher Tales. I’m nearly half-way through, and I’m planning to keep on playing. But as the game definitively also has weak points, I’d like to discuss what I like and dislike about it.

The game’s strongest point are the story and the standard Gwent card battles. I’m playing at the highest difficulty, and at that level the battles are challenging enough to be fun, without being unfair. The story is interesting, has a lot of difficult moral choices, and succeeds in creating a believable albeit dark fantasy world.

The strong story has innate drawbacks: The game is fairly linear, and there isn’t much interest in playing it a second or third time. However given the reasonable price tag and length, this is something I can live with.

The weak points of Thronebreaker are the somewhat trivial resource gathering part, and the puzzle battles. Resource gathering forces you to go all over the map and click on things, which just isn’t very interesting. The puzzle battles are non-random card battles with a single solution. You need to play your cards in a specific order to win. If you are the kind of person who rather solves chess puzzles than play a game of chess, that might be fine by you. Me, I find the puzzles somewhat annoying. And they aren’t very well balanced, some are trivial, some require you to foresee complicated card interactions 5 moves ahead. Fotunatly solutions for all puzzles can be found on YouTube.

As a medium to tell a grand story in the Witcher universe with the occasional card battle thrown in, Thronebreaker is an amusing enough game, and I don’t regret having bought it. But I wouldn’t really call it a RPG, and some of the minor gameplay elements are more tedious than fun.

Just to let you know, I just backed a Kickstarter Project called Tavern-Born™: Pintsized Realms - 3D Printable Kingdoms. Basically it is a step up from the dungeon tiles I use, a tile set that allows you to 3D print overland maps of villages, towns, or wilderness. One tile of 5 cm x 5 cm (2" x 2") represents something like a section of a village with two or three houses on, or the village square, so the scale is obviously much smaller than that of the dungeon tiles. Not to be used with miniatures, but for overland travel. I think the wilderness tiles would work out well for a hex crawl (or in this case square crawl) type of gameplay.

My only reservation is that I don't paint the tiles and miniatures I print, except for painting the water tiles blue. So I am not sure how good this will look in mono-color.

I don't know if you are familiar with the theorycrafting websites that exist around games like World of Warcraft, and which can tell you exactly with detailed mathematics what choices to make in character creation to get the absolutely most powerful character possible. Or the sites for Magic the Gathering or Hearthstone describing the "net decks", that are the most powerful in the currently tournament-legal set of cards. To a lesser degree that also exists for Dungeons & Dragons, see for example this Guide of Guides, linking to guides for every D&D class to optimize a character.

Some of the characters I described yesterday as me playing in my various D&D campaigns deliberately deviate from the optimum. For example I have both a barbarian and a paladin built around maximum dexterity instead of strength. It is pretty obvious that the barbarian loses out on his "rage damage bonus for attacks based on strength" if I don't use strength attacks, and big strength-based weapons deal more damage than small dexterity-based ones. Of course I don't just take something sub-optimal with no advantage at all: The armor class of characters with high dexterity is better in the absence of armor, and so is their initiative. For the barbarian the dex-build actually gives the best possible armor class, and then it opens up a barbarian/rogue multi-class build. For the paladin I took dexterity in order to use two-weapon fighting; having previously observed that the best use for paladin spell slots is often using them for a divine smite after rolling a critical hit, I am trying whether by making more attacks and thus having an increased chance to crit I can make a good build.

But the main reason that I build sub-optimal characters in D&D, or "fun decks" in Magic Duels instead of "net decks", is that optimization inevitably results in having fewer options. There are far more sub-optimal builds for a given class of D&D, or a given deck type in Magic, than there are optimal ones. If we all play just optimal characters in D&D, then you will meet the same build over and over. At one point you are just sick and tired of half-orc barbarians with greataxes, and a halfling barbarian with a scimitar sounds more fun, even if he deals less damage per round. And if you play Magic only with optimal decks, you don't use 80% of your cards, and miss out on a lot of variety. So what if my zombie deck isn't tournament viable? As long as I am having fun playing that deck against an AI deck, I don't care.

Certainly in Dungeons & Dragons, "winning" is not the purpose of the game. And in a game like Magic the Gathering, especially in PvE, "having fun" can also be more important than winning. Having a completely useless character or deck is not fun, but there is a wide variety of slightly sub-optimal builds that can be more entertaining than the ultimate optimum. In D&D that is not just true for yourself, but also for your fellow players. The halfling barbarian and the tabaxi (cat-person) paladin make for more interesting travel companions than their more traditional and optimized versions. And even in combat, optimizing average damage per turn is somewhat boring to the other players, while a character that does slightly less damage but can occasionally shine with maneuvers the optimal build doesn't have can be preferable.

Fortunately at least for D&D this is uncontroversial, and well supported by the game developers. For online card games like Magic and Hearthstone, developers seem to want to push people towards the most competitive game modes, because players need to spend more money to build a competitive deck than they need to build a fun deck. Especially the latest online version of Magic the Gathering, Magic Arena, is going down a path where it only appeals to highly competitive players, and doesn't even offer the opportunity to play a fun deck against an AI opponent. I don't think that this is a sustainable business model for the long term. I'm still playing Magic Duels instead, in spite of there not being any new cards added to it.

I played a lot of Dungeons & Dragons during the 80's and 90's. Then I had a forced break, when I moved to another country for work, and didn't have anybody to play with. I restarted about a decade ago with new friends I made, playing about twice a month. And then I discovered a local role-playing club, and have become increasingly involved there. So now I am back to playing a *lot* of D&D.

As a DM I was running up to three campaigns in parallel. One at home with my friends, using the Princes of the Apocalypse book; but I think everybody forgot everything about that story, and we are just running it as a large dungeon crawl. I would like to stop DMing that, and play as a player instead, but it isn't so easy to find a replacement DM. The second campaign uses the Out of the Abyss book, which is one of the more complicated campaigns in the 5th edition material; we are already over half way through, but will make a pause so that another player can run his campaign. The third campaign I am running is called Ruins of Engorath, and isn't an official campaign at all. It is more of a specific mode of play in our role-playing club, where every session represents an expedition into the ruins, played with a different DM and a different group of players. Each DM has his own part of the ruins to run, and the players move from one game to the next. Again there isn't much of a story, and more of collection of different styles of dungeon crawls, with every DM having his own style.

As a player I am currently playing a dwarf cleric in a self-made campaign playing in the fantasy world of Balaia, from the Chronicles of the Raven novels. In another self-made campaign I play an anti-hero bard in the fantasy world of The Witcher. And I am playing a halfling barbarian in the Ruins of Engorath game, when I'm not the DM. If my Princes of the Apocalypse group finds another DM, I will play another bard there, more of a classic "lore" bard. Soon my Out of Abyss group will play Tomb of Annihilation with one of my current players as DM, and I will play a tabaxi paladin in that campaign. Actually we were told to make two characters, because the campaign is kind of lethal, so I also made a tabaxi rogue, the sister of the paladin. The (tragic) story is that the paladin is looking for his sister, so if he dies during that search the group will then suddenly find the sister, who will join the group. I also signed up for a campaign of the new Waterdeep Dragon Heist book, but don't know when that will start and what I will play.

So the idea is that due to me currently being very busy at work, I will do less DMing, and more playing next year, which requires less preparation. I still will run the occasional Ruins of Engorath dungeon. And if I have more time, I might run a 5th edition conversion of the Zeitgeist Adventure Path, or rather the first two adventures of it. I already played those with my home group in 4th edition, and can reuse the maps and tokens, so it is less work to prepare.

Thronebreaker: The Witcher Tales was just released, and I installed it this morning. Haven't had a chance to play yet, but there are already a lot of points to talk about. Which gives me an opportunity to break the eerie silence on this blog, which is caused by me being somewhat overworked at the moment. So what do you need to know about Thronebreaker?

Thronebreaker is neither a full-fledged The Witcher role-playing game, nor is it (as you might think from the "Tales" part) a Telltale Games adventure. Instead it is a role-playing campaign based on the Gwent card game from the Witcher Universe. While a lot of card games (e.g. Hearthstone or Magic Arena) are very much PvP-centric and don't offer much in the way of a single-player campaign, this is completely PvE-centric. And according to the reviews the RPG campaign is full-fledged (40+ hours) and of great quality.

I haven't seen a game that combines card combat with a RPG campaign for 20 years. So this was an instant buy decision for me. Even at "full price", which is this case was just €26. I would love to see other card games, especially Magic the Gathering, do a single-player RPG campaign game. So I am having high hopes for this. In addition to my interest in the gameplay, I also recently started playing in a D&D campaign that is using the world of The Witcher as setting, so that is an additional interest for me.

Thronebreaker: The Witcher Tales is exclusively available on GOG.com. And this was the first time I bought a game there. The site used to be "Good Old Games", and I didn't have much interest in buying old games. But now they have more and more new games. And unlike Steam you can use download a DRM-free version of the game you bought without needing to run the platform in the background (although you *can* if you want run GOG Galaxy like that). While on the one side having all my games on Steam is certainly convenient, on the other side I can see the possible disadvantages of Steam having a monopoly. So I do have an Origins account, and now a GOG account as well.

I am somewhat less enthusiastic about my choice for 3D printer since I found that the Zortrax M200 plus has an extruder with only a single roller, which explains my difficulties of printing with PLA. The roller just slips on the harder, smoother surface of the PLA filament and doesn't feed it correctly. As I can't do much about the extruder, I gave up on PLA, and am now exclusively printing in ABS.

For some applications, ABS is not a bad material. It is the stuff Lego stones are made off. Which means that if I achieve good layer-to-layer adhesion, I can print items that are rather tough. However for pieces which are rather thin, ABS is not the best material, as it is less stiff than PLA. Plus it gives of more harmful vapors when heating it, although I can much limit that with the HEPA filter I bought. The tiles I print for my dungeons come out good in ABS, and are nearly indestructible. Printing miniatures for my D&D game, heroes and monsters, is often far more problematic. Of course that depends on what sort of detail the miniature has, but things like legs, arms, and weapons are inherently not very thick at 1:60 scale (28 mm scale).

Part of the problem I overcome by printing thicker supports. In PLA I used to make support structures of 1 to 2 mm diameter, now I use 3 mm. But I still had sometimes difficulties with miniatures not coming out right. In some cases I could identify the problem as being support structures or lower parts of the model moving while printing. The print head is moving while deposing the next layer of material, and if the support isn't stiff enough, it can move and ruin the print.

I printed a while with ABS or toughened ABS (called ULTRAT) from the printer manufacturer, Zortrax. The results are okay, but the material is on the expensive side, especially the ULTRAT. So I started to experiment with materials from other brands. The cheapest stuff, e.g. Primavalue, didn't give very good results. I had more luck with Fillamentum Extrafill ABS. And it turns out that while the Zortrax printer limits the parameters you can set with Zortrax material, once you set the printer to "External" material, some parameters become available that are helpful for miniature printing.

So now I am using the "print speed" parameter to print my miniatures at half speed. The disadvantage is obviously that it takes twice as long. But it avoids the problems of the print head moving around finer parts of the print. And some of the details also come out a bit better. I even managed to print some miniatures with thin legs and wings correctly. So I now have solutions for everything I want to print. I still wished I could install a better extruder on my Zortrax M200 Plus, but for now I am okay.