Tobold's Blog
Thursday, December 31, 2020
 
Mapping the fault line

Unless you live in Belgium (and not even necessarily if you do), you probably don't know who the prime minister of Belgium currently is and what his politics are. Belgian politics are not only very complicated, they are also largely irrelevant for the rest of the world. Meanwhile the Belgians perfectly know who the president of the United States of America currently is, and what his politics are. However, both seen from afar and how they are presented in US media, US politics often appear to be mostly about partisanship, Republicans vs. Democrats. This is quite often where the political fault line is, but not always.

In a two-party political system, each party has a certain interest in at least appearing to be united against the other party. Maybe you have a preference of this wing or that wing of your party over the other, but usually you'd rather have somebody from the "wrong wing" in power rather than somebody from the "wrong party". Thus a lot of Republicans made an effort to appear standing behind Trump for the last 4 years. Sometimes they needed to use weasel words when Trump did something too outrageous, but at least the Republican politicians in power rarely let any opposition they felt to Trump show.

But since the election, the fault line has shifted. It isn't really Democrats vs. Republicans anymore, but rather something like real world vs. fantasy world. And with no Democrats supporting the fantasy that Trump actually won the election, the rift now goes right through the Republican party. And what is interesting is that the actions of the fantasy wing will probably force the real world wing to stop with the weasel words and go on record with that they really believe on January 6.

Weasel words usually work well for the media. You don't need to say that Trump won the election, you say something like "he has the right to pursue all legal options". That isn't actually a lie, and it won't get you targeted by Trump and his base. Freedom of speech means you can say whatever you want, and be protected at least from legal consequences. However, sometimes you'll find yourself in a situation where your words have legal weight, and you say them under oath or in an official capacity that doesn't leave that much wiggle room. That was pretty funny to watch when looking at the disparity between what the Trump team said in the media about voter fraud, and what they said in legal documents to the courts, where they were under penalty of perjury.

Something very similar applies to votes of members of the U.S. Congress. A vote is binary, yes or no, you can't use fancy weasel words instead, and the vote is on public record. So on January 6, every Democrat in the house and senate will vote to accept Biden's victory in the electoral college, but the Republicans will be split. Each and every one of them will have to decide whether to vote for reality, or whether to vote for Trumpism. And while the outcome of the overall vote is certain, each individual vote will be remembered by the different wings of the Republican party, and will be subject to a lot of insults and attacks. It is pretty certain the the Republicans aren't looking forward to this vote, because it will map the fault line that runs through their party.

- posted by Tobold @ 11:55 AM Permanent Link  (2) comments
Wednesday, December 30, 2020
 
An impressive box of Tainted Grail

Two years ago, in December 2018, I made a tactical mistake: I didn't read the small print of a Kickstarter project I backed, and went for an intermediate (Excalibur for £110) pledge for Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon, without paying extra for two wave shipping. As a result, while most people got their copy of the game last year, my Tainted Grail box only arrived today, two years after my pledge. But the box I received today was impressive: It contained the core game (4 characters, 15 chapters of game), the stretch goal box (another 8 character and 30 chapters of game), the very pretty but unnecessary for gameplay box of miniatures for the large guardian monsters, and a free "surprise" box containing advertising for the current Kickstarter game of the same company, ISS Vanguard. In hindsight I would have better left out the miniatures, paid for two-wave shipping to get the base game earlier, and maybe picked up some other extras like the metal dials instead of the miniatures.

On the other hand I am glad that I didn't go for a higher "all-in" pledge level. Kickstarter projects have a built-in trap known as FOMO, fear of missing out. If you decided today that you wanted a copy of Tainted Grail, you would have a hard time finding one, and certainly not at the price I paid. Expansions are usually even harder to find (Awaken Realms doesn't appear to have a webshop). The only place I could find those Tainted Grail metal dials now is on eBay, for 5 times the original price. Knowing that, one is easily persuaded to go for an all-in pledge at two or three times the cost of the core game, and end up with far more game than you can ever play. And of course sometimes a Kickstarter game is just not a good game, and then you end up with a huge box full of garbage you don't want to play.

The first Kickstarter board game I bought, 7th Continent, I backed because I had seen a prototype played at the Brussels Games Fair. These days some of those pre-Kickstarter prototype versions are being sent out to YouTubers with board game channels. So these days I wouldn't buy a Kickstarter game anymore without having seen it played and reviewed on YouTube. Having said that, all the game I got from Kickstarter up to now I enjoyed, and I backed another one, 7th Citadel, this year. So I am looking forward to finally playing Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon.

 

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- posted by Tobold @ 2:32 PM Permanent Link  (0) comments
 
Change in monster design philosophy

In the Dungeons & Dragons 4th edition starter adventure Keep on the Shadowfell the group encounters 8 different types of kobolds, from kobold minions with just 1 hitpoint to kobold wyrmpriests and warchief. In the 5th edition starting adventure Lost Mine of Phandelver there is only one kind of goblin, and when the story calls for a goblin leader, he has just the same stat block as all the other goblins, just with maximum hitpoints. These are just examples for the very different design philosophy in monster design between the last two editions of D&D. And I think we lost something in the transition.

The 4E design philosophy was that any monster type had some basic characteristics, but could then easily be modified to create a wide range of different stat blocks. The 4E Dungeon Master's Guide would define 7 different possible roles for monsters: artillery, brute, controller, lurker, minion, skirmisher,
and soldier. Also each monster could be of varying difficulty, from minion, to standard, elite, leader, to solo (a monster designed to be encountered alone, thus being much more powerful). The DMG had a whole chapter on designing combat encounters with groups of different monsters of the same type. Just because you saw that you were facing kobolds didn't immediately tell you what these monsters would do, and how powerful they were. You could build a whole dungeon with monsters of the same basic type, and still have a variety of different tactical encounters.

The 5E design philosophy on monsters is that a kobold is a kobold, with the only variety allowed in the Monster Manual being rolling for hitpoints. A few monsters have different types, there are two goblins on the Monster Manual and four types of drow. Years later Volo's Guide to Monsters introduced 3 more types of kobolds, but only a few races of common monsters got that treatment. Once you met a certain type of monster, let's say a gargoyle, you could "learn" its stats, and every future gargoyle you would encounter would be exactly the same. The idea was that with the help of bounded accuracy, the gargoyle would remain relevant at whatever level. Hint: It didn't work out that way.

One problem with 5th edition is that there is not enough variety to a single monster type to populate a whole dungeon. I am currently DMing Dungeon of the Mad Mage, and in the middle of the 23 dungeon levels there are 3 levels that are about two houses of drow fighting each other, one house on top, one on the bottom, and the level in the middle being a battleground. As other level of the dungeon also prominently feature large assemblies of drow, a dungeon crawl through these levels gets old pretty fast. Especially since, if played as written, every drow mage and every drow priestess always have the same set of spells (as does every "mage" NPC, etc.). The other problem is that the idea of one monster type always being the same sometimes collides with the story itself. There is a location in Dungeon of the Mad Mage where some tiny monsters have grown to 12 times their usual size; and without having a solid system of "upscaling" a monster, the altered stats presented in the module aren't working all that well.

Of course a DM can always add his own stuff: He can give different mages different spells, he can create half a dozen new varieties of gargoyle, or invent smaller or larger versions of some monster. The problem is just that the rule system doesn't give the DM any support in that. There is absolutely no advice what the CR (and thus xp) of a larger gargoyle, or a mage with a different spellcasting level would be. You have to guess the relation of size to hitpoints, strength, constitution, attack value and damage, as the rules won't tell you. 4E had official online tools to modify monsters, 5E only has a few fan-made ones (which look suspiciously like 4th edition). Virtual tabletop systems like Roll20 don't have tools for upscaling monsters (you can edit them manually), because the rules don't foresee that. So in summary, in 5th edition modifying a monster is far more work than it used to be in 4E, and that is a pity.

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- posted by Tobold @ 10:57 AM Permanent Link  (3) comments
Tuesday, December 29, 2020
 
Thanksgiving after Christmas

The end of 2020 is approaching, and for most people it was a weird year. There were over 81 million known cases of people infected with COVID-19, and nearly 1.8 million deaths worldwide. The measures taken to try to control the pandemic affected the lives of far more people, and very much changed the way we lived this year. And although the first people now got vaccinated, COVID-19 will still be with us for much of 2021, and a return to normal, whatever "normal" is, is unlikely before then end of next year.

A pandemic is obviously bad news, and 2020 was a bad year for many people. People died, others got seriously sick, companies went bankrupt, and people lost their jobs. Several sectors of the economy suffered structural hits to employment, that is to say that if you are a travel agent or organizer for large events, you probably not only lost your job, but the outlook of finding a job again in that field next year is rather dim as well.

And because of all that bad news, whenever people talk about 2020, whether directly or via the internet, they tend to complain about this year. I don't remember another year in which the end of the year was greeted with that much "thank God this year is over" sentiment. But having said that, not all complaints about 2020 are equal. COVID-19 has no notion of fairness. The disease did *not* affect all of us equally, and even those 81 million infected people had vastly different experiences of the disease; both sheer luck and socio-economic factors resulted in the outcomes of an infection varying widely between barely noticing it and dying from it. And the economic fallout from the disease also was very unfairly distributed.

So I would like at this point to stand up and admit that I was very lucky, and have no reason to complain about 2020. Lucky, because I didn't catch the disease, and the people I know that caught it all only suffered minor symptoms. I have no reason to complain, because while my life was affected by the pandemic, on balance my quality of life went up, rather than down. Of course, part of that has to do with personality: I'm more of an introvert, I don't like crowds, and I don't enjoy parties very much; I'm fine with more social distance, and fewer larger assemblies of people.

But more importantly I am nearly ashamed to say that I am member of a social class that already belongs to the winners of globalisation, and now belongs to the winners in the pandemic: The highly educated knowledge worker. Even before COVID, my work days were split between meetings and working on the computer. After COVID the meetings went online, but otherwise not much changed about my job. I didn't lose my job, and I didn't get paid any less than in 2019. Yes, in 2020 I didn't do as many holiday travels as in 2019, and I had to celebrate Christmas with my extended family via Facetime, but compared to the negative effects others are experiencing, this were really minor inconveniences. And on the upside, I didn't have to do business travel (which I dislike) in 2020, and I spent nearly half of the year in home office, which I find a much more convenient way of working. (Again, that is due to character and personal situation, I know that home office isn't necessarily a plus for everybody.)

I don't know what 2021 will bring to me. The pandemic isn't over and might still harm me or people close to me before it is. But in retrospect, 2020 wasn't such a bad year for me, and for that I am thankful. My thoughts go out to those who were less lucky than me!

- posted by Tobold @ 12:49 PM Permanent Link  (1) comments
Monday, December 28, 2020
 
The weird power curve of 5E Dungeons & Dragons

The two official starting campaigns of Dungeons & Dragons, Lost Mines of Phandelver and Dragon of Icespire Peak, both end at level 5. Level 5 is an important power jump for a group: Several spellcasting classes get access to powerful damage spells like fireball, while the weapon-based classes get a second attack. At level 5, full spellcasters now can cast 9 spells per day, up from 2 per day at level 1, and are thus more likely to be able to cast spells every round of combat.

I am currently a player in a level 10 campaign, and a DM in a campaign which will hit level 10 probably in the next session. So, what happened to character power between level 5 and level 10? Not much, actually. Fighters get their third attack only at level 11. Wizards now have 15 spells per day, but rarely manage to cast them all. But even more weirdly, the power of the level 5 spells that level 10 characters have access to seems not a big improvement over the level 3 spells they have access to since level 5.

The aforementioned fireball does 8d6 damage if cast as a level 3 spell, 10d6 if cast as a level 5 spell. The level 5 spell cone of cold deals 8d8, which is only 1 point more on average as a level 5 fireball. Impressive sounding spells like cloudkill turn out to be not very efficient, dealing 5d8 per turn, but between monsters able to move out of the zone and the concentration rule having trouble dealing their damage more than once. The cleric, who was able to revivify a dead character 1 minute after combat at character level 5, can now raise dead that dead character up to 10 days later at character level 10, which doesn't make much of a difference. The circle of the moon druid, who was a powerhouse at levels 2, is basically irrelevant at level 10, as the CR 3 beasts he can turn into are much weaker than the monsters the group is likely to meet.

The power curve getting so much flatter from level 5 to level 10 is probably intentional, an attempt to overcome the previous problem of the "quadratic wizard", whose power increased exponentially because he got both more spells and more powerful spells. The power curve remains relatively flat until it spikes again at level 17, with the level 9 spells being significantly more powerful than level 8 spells.

On the DM side, the Monster Manual gets decidedly thin after CR 11. You still got the top of the food chain, adult and ancient dragons, vampires and liches, demon princes and archdevils. But you are running short of the kind of regular monster that you wouldn't be surprised to find after opening a random door in a dungeon. And in my Out of the Abyss campaign, my level 13 players already dealt with several demon princes, so I wouldn't know what to put as an everyday challenge for a level 17 group.

In summary, 5th edition Dungeons & Dragons feels like great power progression until level 5, then feels as if the regular game has been designed to run more or less stable until level 10, and then the balance of power crumbles beyond level 10. But of course players love powerful characters, and it is very hard to persuade them to abandon their level 11+ characters and start over at level 1.

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- posted by Tobold @ 10:20 AM Permanent Link  (3) comments
Saturday, December 26, 2020
 
Gloomhaven character unlocking

Gloomhaven is a great game, it isn't by accident that it has hogged the number 1 spot on BoardGameGeek for 3 years now. Gloomhaven has an excellent combat system, and well designed scenarios. My wife and me have played maybe a quarter of the campaign up to now, both just retired our first character. And all the scenarios we played were exciting, with us not being sure whether we would manage to win. The reason that the scenarios work so well is that they are mostly scripted, and there is not much randomness in the combat in Gloomhaven.

So it is somewhat curious that the character unlocking system feels very random. The first character I unlocked was a healer, which is such a bad choice for a 2-player game that I rather played another starting character than the one I unlocked. My wife had more luck on the first unlock, but had to choose between two (random) options for the next unlock, both of which (doing "crypt" scenarios, killing "bandit/cultist") would have been brilliant as starting cards, because there are a lot of crypts with bandits and cultists among the first scenarios. Meanwhile one of the cards we didn't choose for the first unlock was about killing oozes, and we only came across oozes in one scenario up to now.

In other words, unlocking characters based on a random condition is really hit and miss. While you can choose between two cards, you don't know which conditions are easier to fulfill than others, and you don't know what class you will unlock (unless you look up spoilers on the internet). And there isn't even a relationship that the harder to fulfill conditions result in the better character classes to unlock. Playing the campaign in a group, it is completely possible that one player ends up retiring his character and unlocking his next class way after everybody else, and then is disappointed by finding that unlock is a class that isn't very good, or he has no interest in playing.

I was lucky insofar as both of the personal quests to retire and unlock a new character were about collecting or spending gold. There is gold in every scenario, so those quests are always possible. And in the unlikely case that I would play through the campaign a second time, I would know much better which personal quest conditions are easier and which are harder. Without a bit of knowledge, or spoilers from the internet, the Gloomhaven character unlocking system to me feels to much based on luck.

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- posted by Tobold @ 5:41 PM Permanent Link  (5) comments
Friday, December 25, 2020
 
Niche within a niche

The most owned board game on BoardGameGeek is Pandemic, with 151k players. The highest funded Kickstarter game ever is Frosthaven, with 83k backers. The highest rated board game on BoardGameGeek is Gloomhaven, and it has 65k owners registered there. Even if obviously not every owner of a board game registers it on BoardGameGeek, these numbers give us an idea of the size of the hobby. 100k copies of a board game is a huge deal. Compare that to the 8 million pre-orders, 13 million games sold of Cyberpunk 2077, and you see that there are 2 orders of magnitude between successful board games and successful video games. So when I am writing about board games, it sure isn't to attract more views, I'm more likely to bore people away. Complex board games like Gloomhaven are a niche hobby, and I'm okay with that.

However I am starting to wonder whether I haven't gone down too far down the rabbit hole when I ordered Altar Quest recently. Because that Kickstarter had only 5,355 backers. It's a niche within a niche. I can still find content about the game on the internet, but it sure is thinner than for the more popular games. And while I do want to talk in this post about some of the design decisions of this game, because I think they hold some general interest, I am pretty sure that nobody in my audience will play this game. And while very successful Kickstarter games get reprinted and become available in retail, the more niche games might not, and end up being forgotten by everyone but the few owners.

What I find interesting about Altar Quest is that it is a game about emergent stories, not written stories. Board games with written stories are pretty popular right now. Okay, the story in games like Gloomhaven / Frosthaven is on the thin side, but games like Folklore: The Affliction, 7th Continent, Tainted Grail, or Etherfields are all about the players discovering a story that the developers have written down in story books or on cards in the game. Sure, with a "choose your own adventure" style of game, different players will to some extent experience different stories. But usually not different enough for one player to want to replay the same story again.

Altar Quest also has a written story in the campaign books, but that is actually only one of the three modes you can play the game in. It isn't really what the core game is about. The core game is about stories emerging from randomness, because the encounters in Altar Quest aren't scripted. You set up a game of Altar Quest using "modules" that consist of decks of cards. You select a quest, which is a deck of cards. You select a villain, which is a deck of cards. You select minions, which come as a deck of cards, and you don't need to make the minions be the same race as the villain. The features of the dungeon are a deck of cards (but unless you have expansions, it's always the same deck.) When you play Altar Quest, you can start in any room you want, and when exploring the next room you'll get a random dungeon feature (which you need to interact with for the quest), and random threats and minions. The dungeon isn't scripted, it comes into existence by drawing random cards while you explore. And because the decks are modular, and you can play another villain, other enemies, and another quest with a different win condition next time, every game is very different. And that randomness creates its own story moments, when by some confluence of random events suddently the situation gets very dangerous for your character, or by some combination of features you manage to pull off some cool trick. The stories that emerge from gameplay of your character are always more memorable than the stories the developers wrote down.

In a way, Altar Quest is the anti-thesis of Gloomhaven. Gloomhaven has very little randomness, just enough to make it not completely foreseeable. The scenarios are carefully scripted, and would feel very similar if you played them again. It is basically a puzzle, in which you are looking for the best solution of combinations from your cards, and you can even calculate a turn or two ahead. And while that is fun, having to deal with the ever changing randomness of Altar Quest is also fun, in a different way. And somewhat lighter hearted. It feels like an adventure not because somebody has set up the story and the scenario to create an adventure, but because you can't know what will be after the next door, and how that next room will play out. You get a lot of resources which you can use to deal with randomness, and the game is about using these resources in the most clever way to make it through the unknown.

At the end I would like to mention two rather brilliant design decisions in Altar Quest, which I would hope future games will steal. The first is that the dice with which you determine your successes don't have failures on them. There are half successes, successes, and more-than-one successes on the dice, nothing else. Which is psychologically brilliant, because it still means that you can have a bad roll that isn't enough to overcome a problem, but you don't have that in-your-face failure symbol on your dice laughing at you. The second is that the monsters don't roll for attacks, all dice-rolls are player-centric. If a monster attacks you, it attacks you for a fixed amount of damage, and you roll dice to reduce the damage. That is a lot faster and more elegant than having to roll both for attacks and defense. And in the end, chance still determines the outcome, you just don't need so many dice and so much math to determine the result.

I don't think Altar Quest is a better game than the more popular board games I mentioned. It clearly has flaws, and the time you gain from a faster dice system is lost by having to deal with a large number of cards. Also, unless you play the faster encounters on the small maps, the full map games are a bit long, and I'll have to work out whether playing with fewer features would work as a house rule. But I am looking forward to have a game in my library that uses randomness cleverly, doesn't rely on a written story, but is endlessly replayable through the combination of the many modules.

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- posted by Tobold @ 7:35 PM Permanent Link  (4) comments
Thursday, December 24, 2020
 
Change game design

I couple of months ago, I wrote a blog post about cheating at solitaire, where I expressed my preference for cheating only when I was playing alone. I wouldn't cheat in a game where I was playing against another player, as that would be unfair. I would cheat when playing against only the game, if that cheating made the game more fun. As I am now playing more board games, this concept is becoming more relevant.

I am not, technically speaking, a game designer. However, I do not only talk a lot about game design on this blog, I also have a lot of experience of designing game elements and watching the results of that design through my Dungeons & Dragons Dungeon Master experience. A DM does a lot of game design, as typical game design questions like flow of the game or balance are frequently left to him, not the D&D rulebooks. As I have been doing that for decades, I have a pretty good feeling whether a sequence of game events would be fun for the players or not; for example you'd never encounter two identical fights in an adventure of mine (although, come to think of it, it could be fun to use that once, with the players finding themselves in a time loop).

Most board games don't have a DM. It is up to the players themselves to know, follow, and enforce the rules. But once you know a game well enough, you might find that certain rules are not fun for you and the people you play with, and introduce "house rules". A majority of people playing Monopoly have some house rule for the free parking space, although the official rule is that nothing happens there.

House rules become especially relevant in the sort of board game that I am playing, which are cooperative, the players against "the game". I don't believe in there being some higher purpose in beating a game "as intended", the purpose of a game is to have fun. Sometimes game designers just make mistakes, and design something that isn't fun, like that empty no parking space. More often, in the more complex type of games, the designers simply couldn't foresee all possible combinations of group composition vs. scenario rules. You could have a dungeon crawler game in which a scenario is easy if you have a certain character type, e.g. a rogue able to pick locks, but much harder if you don't. When I DM Dungeon & Dragons, I know that I need to adjust the adventure to group composition, so the same sort of adjustments make sense in a board game. You might say, "you need to play a different character for that scenario!", but frankly, even if the game allows for switching characters in and out, that doesn't sound like a lot of fun. Especially if you don't "peak ahead", play the scenario as intended with the group you want to play, fail and find out that you need a different group, and play it again with the group the game wants to you to take.

The most common adjustment, and one that is often actually already foreseen as optional rule in the rulebook, is adjusting difficulty to your personal needs. You want your game to be challenging, but not frustrating; but where exactly that level of difficulty lies is different for different people. Or even for the same people in different situations. Sometimes you might want to spend minutes thinking about each move, like a chess game. In other social situations, a "beer and pretzels" game for fun, you might prefer the game to advance faster, and not be too punishing if somebody then makes a mistake.

In summary, I am not only cheating at solitaire, I also cheat at cooperative games. I'd rather adjust a scenario or rule slightly to make the game more fun for us, rather than treating the game design as some sort of holy scripture. And I know enough about game design to be able to not break essential rules. Pro tip: Leave that free parking space in Monopoly empty if you want a faster game; if you use the common house rule that landing on free parking gives you money (e.g. taxes and fines previously paid by other players due to Chance and Community Chest cards), you increase the money supply in the game, and it takes longer until the game ends because people run out of money. Use the house rule if you prefer to play Monopoly without actually reaching the end, e.g. playing with kids while waiting for dinner. And count yourself lucky if this Christmas you can actually celebrate with family, which won't be possible for all of us in this rather crazy year 2020.

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- posted by Tobold @ 10:38 AM Permanent Link  (4) comments
Tuesday, December 22, 2020
 
Opportunity meets obsession

You probably noticed that I have currently an obsession with board games, in particular dungeon crawlers that can be played solo or with 2 players. In a way that is "back to the roots" thing for me; I used to play Dungeon! with my brother when we were teens, and it was Talisman that got me into the fantasy gaming and later role-playing hobby. But at some point many years ago I got bored with board games, and started to prefer the more elaborate pen & paper role-playing games and of course computer games.

In the meantime something happened to board games: Kickstarter. Now there is a lot of negative things you can say about Kickstarter board games, because some projects are very flashy and attract lots of backers with fancy components and miniatures, while not necessarily being good games. But Kickstarter also does two very positive things: It enables passionate people to make the board game they have always wanted to make, outside of the constraints of a gaming corporation; and it allows these creators to find the few thousand customers for their niche games, and thus make these niche games happen.

The downside of Kickstarter is that it isn't always easy to buy a game that you didn't back. Sometimes a game isn't for sale at all outside Kickstarter campaigns. But usually a successful Kickstarter campaign allows the creators to make more copies of the game than they owe to the backers, and then they find their way to the market by various channels: Amazon if you're lucky, otherwise web stores from either the game's creators or third party hobby stores. As I am currently following a bunch of YouTube channels about the sort of board games I like, I often notice a game when the Kickstarter gets delivered, and everybody is talking about it. And luckily that is the moment where you are most likely to find those extra copies of the game. In a way this gets you the best of both worlds, you don't have to fund a game in advance on blind faith, but can watch reviews before you buy; but you still get those more specialized games for the niche you are interested in. Only downside is that niche board games are already somewhat expensive, and if you buy them after release, you pay more than if you backed them.

Nevertheless I just came across an opportunity that was too good to miss: Altar Quest, now available in the webstore of Blacklist Games. It is available in the same version that the Kickstarter backers got, including a box of Stretch Goals, and you can also get two expansions (First Four Hero Pack and Ruins of Arkenspire). And as from the reviews this appeared to be a game that I would like to play, I went and got just about everything for €200. That might be overkill, but for a game with just over 5,000 backers it is far from certain that you can get expansions later.

At first look, Altar Quest looks somewhat like Hero Quest. Hero Quest is relatively famous, but I never played it. It came out when I had already moved on to role-playing games, and I never bought it later, because it seemed a bit too simplistic for my tastes. Altar Quest is basically taking a highly complex system of tactical combat between heroes and enemies and puts it on a Hero Quest board, with the fixed arrangement of rooms, but variable doors and features. The interesting part is that you put together your adventure by not only selecting your heroes, but also what type of quest you want them to go on, what archvillain you fight, and what minions he has. It is called a "modular deck system", because the heroes, quests, villains, and minions come in the form of decks, and you can freely mix them. Another reason why I immediately went for the expansion, as in such a system an expansion increases the content exponentially, because you can mix any of the elements from the expansion with any of the elements in the base game.

Another thing that was attractive to me about Altar Quest is the combat system with specialized dice. In a way it reminds me of Lord of the Rings: Journeys in Middle-Earth, with the successes and other results that aren't a success unless you pay a token to make it a success. Fortunately in Altar Quest this is done with dice, so I avoid the problem of constant deck shuffling that drove me crazy in JIME.

Of course I also listened to the negative things that people had to say about Altar Quest. For example the rulebook appears to be somewhat dry and hard to digest. Which isn't much of a problem if you use YouTube to explain the game mechanics to you. And Altar Quest seems to be a bit light on story, heavy on game mechanics; but as I mentioned in my previous post, I'd rather have a game that way than the other way around.

I don't know how long my current interest in board games will last. I get these phases, where for several months I am very interested in a specific game or type of games, and then something else comes along and that interest diminishes. This is another reason why I am a bit wary about backing a Kickstarter now: Not only do I not know how good the game will be, I also don't know if I am still interested a year or two later when the game finally is delivered. So right now I am happy with the admittedly more expensive option of buying a recently released Kickstarter game instead, and just having to wait weeks for shipping instead of years.

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- posted by Tobold @ 2:57 PM Permanent Link  (1) comments
Monday, December 21, 2020
 
This game is not for me

Have you heard of the Polish game company that recently released a much-hyped game to initial great reviews, but on second look the game turned out to be somewhat of a hot mess? You are probably thinking of CD Projekt Red and Cyberpunk 2077; but funnily enough the exact same thing happened with Awaken Realms and their board game Etherfields, just to a much smaller audience of board game afficionados.

Awaken Realms is a company that more or less mastered the art of the Kickstarter board game. They are making games that look awesome on a Kickstarter project page, attracting a lot of funding. I backed Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon (and am still waiting for it to be delivered, having chosen options that resulted in me only getting the game in wave 2 of shipping), and that game got 41,939 backers who pledged £4,940,030, which is a lot of money for a small board game company. I didn't back Etherfields, where 32,582 backers pledged £3,974,362, just because I first wanted my first Awaken Realms game to get delivered before I backed another one. After watching reviews like this or that, I am happy I didn't, although other people clearly liked the game in other reviews and videos.

But instead of just being happy to have dodged a bullet, I ended up reading and watching a lot of content about Etherfields, because I wanted to understand why the game didn't appeal to me, when I am still very much looking forward to Tainted Grail. And for that I have to zoom out a bit, and give the talk that I tend to give to people I introduce into pen & paper role-playing games: These games happen on two levels simultaneously. On the story level, interesting story stuff happens, e.g. your barbarian character chops off the head of an orc with his axe. On the game mechanics level, you as the player roll a d20 and get lucky enough to roll a critical hit. Role-playing games tend to work well when both of these levels are interesting and balanced. They tend to fail if one side of it isn't very good, or is concentrated on to a degree that the other side becomes neglected.

Etherfields is a game in which the story is about dark dreams. Now that already won't appeal to everybody. Even in a fantasy dungeon crawler type of game, the story follows a certain logic, while dreams are illogical. A dream story gives the writer lots of "well, it's a dream" excuses for convoluted story-telling. But with a really good writer, that can end with a good story anyway; I am quite a fan of Alice in Wonderland. So I wasn't immediately against Etherfields because of the setting.

But from the negative reviews and from watching playthroughs of the game, it became quickly apparent that the balance between story and game mechanics was off. Etherfields is designed as an "experience", the fun is discovering and playing through the different dreams. But the developers clearly had the mistaken impression that to enhance a dream-like story, it would be a great idea to have gameplay be equally vague and illogical. Etherfields does not so much have rules that dictate how you play, but rather has a game that plays with the rules. While the game mechanic of "specific rule on a card breaks general rule in the rulebook" is quite a well-established part of board and card games these days, Etherfields pushes this concept further and merges it with the concept of the story that events should be unforeseeable and illogical. That doesn't end very well. The game mutates on the table while you are playing it, but instead of leaving you in wonder of discovery, it leaves you confused and unable to plan ahead, as you don't know what is coming.

There are probably people out there who will be able to just go with that gameplay, and follow the instructions through the game. But for me, learning how to play, and learning how to play the game better, are important parts of any game. And in Etherfields it looks as if one never really gets there. The gameplay mechanics I have seen up to now aren't really clever and fun to figure out. And something is definitively off with the flow of the game, with a grindy part that you need to do to find keys that unlock the actual fun part.

After having looked at it in detail, Etherfields is not a game that I think I would enjoy. For me it is too much of an "experience", rather than an actual game. You follow a sequence of events, and while there are decisions to make that lead to the sequence branching out, you never get the tools to understand the likely consequences of your decisions; making your decisions randomly ends up pretty much with the same result as trying to think and "beat the game". You can't beat Etherfields, you can't win in a meaningful sense of the word, you can only experience it.

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- posted by Tobold @ 11:01 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments
Friday, December 18, 2020
 
Sword & Sorcery

I am still in the process of building up my collection of board games that can be played solo or by two players, and that have some story and RPG elements to them. One game that I have been quite excited to try is Sword & Sorcery. It is somewhere half way between my descriptions of Gloomhaven and Folklore: The Affliction; Sword & Sorcery is a more typical dungeon crawler board game, doesn't require pen & paper to fill out character sheets, and has more story than Gloomhaven, but less than Folklore. I was quite attracted by the monster AI and combat system. I watched different people with different group sizes play through the first dungeon, and the experience was quite different every time, due to different tactics, group compositions, and random factors.

Opening the box of Sword & Sorcery, one disadvantage of miniature-based becomes immediately obvious: Miniatures are more costly to produce and take up more space in the box than cardboard standees, thus you end up with a much smaller number of different enemies. The core set of Sword & Sorcery, Immortal Souls, has just 4 different types of common monsters, and two boss monsters. However the common monsters each exist in different color-coded levels, and even the two monsters of the same color and type aren't completely identical. Also the 5 hero types exist in two versions each, a "lawful" and a "chaos" version, which play very differently. And you can choose different powers, so there is quite some replayability. Even if the base box contains only 7 quests to play through, there are several expansions with more content, and you can find player-made quests on BoardGameGeek.

As the delivery of my copy of Sword & Sorcery took several weeks, I had the opportunity to learn the rules and prepare for the game by watching YouTube playthroughs. Always just the first quest, to not spoiler the rest. But one thing I noticed lots of people having problems with is the relatively simple math of the combat system. Basically you produce a number of hits with your attack, and then subtract a number for defense from that. For example if you land 5 hits against a defense of 3, the target takes 2 points of damage. The problem is that both the number of hits and the defenses are calculated from a number of different factors: Various cards in play, decisions by the players, and the situation on the board. Those 5 hits you land might be 1 for domination of the space, 1 for having used your action on a focused attack, 1 automatic hit from your weapon, and 2 from the attack dice you rolled. And the defense of 3 might be 1 for the currently active event, 1 from armor, and 1 from the defense dice. It is quite easy to forget one factor of this, or losing track of something. The YouTube videos are full of people calculating a number of wounds, then remembering something and redoing the calculation. So I thought there might be a better solution, and designed a 3D-printed score board using TinkerCAD:
It is a simple board with one side for attack, and another side for defense. Each side has 1.1 cm square holes, in which 1 cm square cubes fit to mark the various conditions. So you just need to go through the (2D printed) lists for attack and defense once, mark the applicable conditions with a cube, roll your dice and mark those with cubes too, and then immediately see the difference between attacks and defenses.

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- posted by Tobold @ 9:30 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments
Thursday, December 17, 2020
 
A post scriptum note on reviewing games

In my previous post I wrote about what I liked and didn't like about two board games, in comparison. I do hope that, at least for those of you who have an interest in board games, such a post is of interest. Having said that, my experience over the last week with reviews is that they can be all over the place. Take for example Cyberpunk 2077, a game which was released to reviews averaging over 90 on Metacritic, but which is now slightly down on PC at 87, while the PS4 version is scored at 54. In the world of board games, Etherfields is getting reviews ranging from "game of the year" to "nightmare".

The lesson here is that for a review to be useful, the review needs to clearly state what exactly it sees as the good points or the bad points of a game. Because sometimes I read a bad review that complains about an issue I simply don't care about. Maybe a game didn't get the lore of some famous license right, or isn't woke enough for the reviewer, but if I personally don't care so much about these issues, that wouldn't be a reason for me to think less of a game. I decided against both Cyberpunk 2077 and Etherfields, but for example the glitches on PS4 didn't really play a role in my decision on Cyberpunk (I don't even own a PS4), while the great quality of the miniatures didn't make me excited for Etherfields.

I don't think I can give a complete and accurate description of why I don't want to buy Cyberpunk 2077 or Etherfields. Sometimes it is small things that seem irrelevant, but make you decide one way or another. Sometimes I watch a game being played on YouTube, and it just doesn't feel like it is right for me. Very often that has to do with the "flow" of a game. Even from the positive reviews you can see that the flow of Etherfields isn't right, and that in a game where you jump between different modes of gameplay, one of those modes is clearly more fun to everybody than the others. But my personal decision against a game can also be based on my personal pet peeves, like failure forcing you to replay large parts of Etherfields, while other people maybe have no problem with that as a game feature.

I don't think that objective reviews even exist. Our circumstances define us, and make us more susceptible to some issues than to others. For example, due to my circumstances, I am not highly sensitive to the price of a game, while for somebody in different circumstances that might be a major issue. And because novelty can be an important factor in the enjoyment of a game, and everybody's gaming history is different, the same game can feel very different to people who have played something similar before and those who didn't.

I am trying to express as well as I can what I liked and didn't like about a game in my more review-like posts. But I am aware that the aspects I am talking about might not even be relevant to you. I wouldn't want you to follow my recommendations if the arguments I used didn't resonate with you.

- posted by Tobold @ 3:11 PM Permanent Link  (5) comments
 
Folklore: The Affliction vs. Gloomhaven

I just opened a parcel from Amazon with the Folklore: The Affliction - Dark Tales expansion inside. That shows that I really like this game: It feels like playing a dark fantasy version of D&D without a DM and suitable for solo play or 2 players. On the other hand it shows that the base box, with only 6 chapters in the story book I, is on the short side; if you like the game, the expansion with an additional 9 chapters plus 22 mini-adventures in the form of rumor cards is a welcome addition. My wife and me now play this more often than Gloomhaven, so this is well worth it.

Folklore has a dark fantasy theme, darker than Gloomhaven. But Gloomhaven is highly tactical, getting through a scenario without running out of cards is nearly a puzzle. Folklore is more of a "throw around some dice and see what happens" kind of game, more random, less planned. On the other hand, Folklore requires a lot more bookkeeping than Gloomhaven, you are constantly noting and erasing things on your character sheets. In other words, Folklore plays a lot more like a pen & paper RPG, while Gloomhaven plays a lot more like a board game.

In Gloomhaven, I am using the Forteller app to read the story to me. But that app shows the length of the audio track, so I know that for Gloomhaven I get between 2 and 3 minutes of story for a 2-hour scenario. So the story aspect in Gloomhaven is rather light, and you don't really play the game for the story. In Folklore the story takes a much bigger part of each scenario, and tactical combat a smaller part. Again, Folklore more like a RPG, Gloomhaven more like a board game.

The downside of Folklore being more story-centric is that you wouldn't necessarily play through the same story chapter repeatedly. While one story in Folklore is longer than one scenario in Gloomhaven, as I mentioned before the 6 stories of the Folklore base box are on the short side. I can see myself playing through Folklore, which is why I spent money on the expansion. I can't see myself playing through Gloomhaven completely: It has 95 scenarios, and to play a campaign to the end you'd play around 60 of them. Even the much cheaper and easier to get into Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion still has 25 scenarios, and offers more playtime per dollar than Folklore. On the other hand, as I own the Gloomhaven core box, my interest in both Jaws of the Lion and the sequel Frosthaven is very limited, as they are still mostly the same game, and I don't really need more of the same Gloomhaven.

I can't give you some universal recommendation whether you should buy Folklore: The Affliction or Gloomhaven. Both of them are Kickstarter board games, that is to say somewhat niche, needing more commitment from the players than the average board game. Gloomhaven is a fantastic game, although I'd really recommend starting with the Jaws of the Lion version unlike I did. But if you want less of a deep tactical board game, and more of an "RPG in a box" experience, Folklore: The Affliction might be the better game for you.

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- posted by Tobold @ 12:03 PM Permanent Link  (0) comments
Wednesday, December 16, 2020
 
Banning face masks?

At some point this year you probably wore a disposable face mask, you know, one of these white and blue things. And maybe you weren't aware what material these are made off. They feel a bit like tissue or cellulose, but in fact they are mostly polypropylene plastic. The plastic is spun into very fine fibers, which is then randomly stacked (the technical term is "non-woven") and heated just enough so that the fibers stick together and form something textile-like. So, what difference does it make that the masks are made from plastic? Well, polypropylene isn't bio-degradable. And with millions of people wearing disposable masks, a huge number of these masks get used, and some of them end up in the oceans.

Most people would agree that plastic waste in the oceans is a bad thing. However, the masks floating in the oceans reveal the craziness of the previous environmentalists approach to plastic waste. Up to now, plastic waste was deemed to be the fault of the producers of the plastic or plastic products; and the proposed solution was to ban those plastic products. Many countries have banned plastic straws, plastic bags, or similar disposable plastic items. Now suddenly the same people are surprisingly silent, and nobody is calling for a ban on face masks. Because it is pretty obvious that the positive effect of face masks far outweighs the negative effect of them floating in the oceans.

Even if you happen to live next to an ocean (few of us do), you probably didn't throw your disposable face mask into the water after use. If you think it through, it becomes obvious that the *use* of disposable plastic items isn't actually the problem, as long as the plastic waste is either recycled (preferably), or at least properly incinerated. Some well-meaning first world country banning disposable plastic items achieves exactly nothing in the fight to keep our oceans clean. The only way these first world disposable plastic items might potentially end up in an ocean involve some criminal activity, where somebody who is paid to properly dispose of the waste is instead shipping that waste elsewhere, where it is then dumped into the ocean instead of being treated.

While plastic gets a bad rep from environmentalists, it *does* have environmental benefits. As long as plastic is recycled, a plastic bottle for example is better for the environment than a glass bottle or an aluminum can. Glass and metal need a lot of energy to make, and are a lot heavier, thus producing more green house gas emissions on transport. Banning plastic, which sounds like an "easy" solution for the environment, thus has hidden environmental drawbacks. Promoting plastic recycling would be a far better idea for the environment. And if you don't want to see face masks or other plastic items floating in the oceans, you need to go after the criminals that make this happen, and help third world countries to improve on their environmental standards.

- posted by Tobold @ 9:48 AM Permanent Link  (9) comments
Monday, December 14, 2020
 
Call me Dr. Tobold

I am the proud owner of a Ph.D. degree in natural sciences. Proud in the sense that it took years to get this degree, and is in what is considered a "hard" science. That is to say, I stood in a lab and created new molecules that were unknown to mankind before. Having a doctorate gives me some insight into the tricky question whether you should address somebody who has a doctorate as "Dr.". In Europe it depends very much on where you are, the Austrians and to a slightly lesser degree the Germans are rather fond of using titles, while many other countries don't. I'd say use it or don't use, as you like, but don't write an article in the Wall Street Journal that somebody doesn't deserve to be called "Dr." if it is not a medical degree, just because the specifically targeted person belongs to a different political party than you.

It is easy to dismiss this as just another mean-spirited attack on a political enemy; but there are some indications that this is an early warning signal about the next big political fault line: Education. The Democrats are more and more positioning themselves as the party of the educated, and instead of countering that by promoting education themselves, the Republicans more and more tout lack of education as a value. I think that both sides are wrong in that fight, and risk doing a lot of damage to the future of their country.

I never expected a future president Biden to be perfect, I'm too realistic for that. But I had hoped for at least a few progressive politics from him. So I was absolutely horrified to learn that one of his first planned moves is forgiveness of student debt. What a horribly regressive idea! People who have student debts are mostly holders of college degrees, have a higher income than the average American, are whiter, and more male. Because the policy is retroactive, it doesn't even encourage more people to increase their education, because they don't know whether this forgiveness will happen again. Student debt forgiveness is just a boondoggle, the Democrats giving free money to their core supporters. To increase education, you need to decrease future education cost, not retroactively give money to those who got an education in the past. (And I am not saying that student loans aren't a burden.)

But that seems to be the politics to come: Democrats giving money to well-educated people, and Republicans mocking the value of education. Neither of which is a good idea. The Democrats risk to lose their less-educated supporters, just think of Florida 2020. The Republicans risk to eternally become a party in which bluster is more appreciated than intelligence. William F. Buckley Jr. is turning in his grave.

- posted by Tobold @ 9:39 AM Permanent Link  (10) comments
Friday, December 11, 2020
 
Nemo's War

Posting a second blog post today, because it relates to the first. There was a Kickstarter ending today for Nemo's War, which I ended up not backing (you can still late back it, if you want). The game was on my radar, because it fits some of the criteria of what I am looking for in a board game: It can be played solo, and it has a theme/story that I find interesting. So I watched some playthrough videos on YouTube, because that tends to be the best way to find out whether a game is really for you.

The result relates to my previous post, where I said that collecting currency instead of finding item treasures is a bit boring. In Nemo's War, your goal is to collect a currency, victory points. For example, you can draw a random treasure that gives you some victory points, or you can decide to do an adventure that gives victory points, or sink a ship that gives victory points. The challenge of the game is correctly judge what resources to expend when in order to a) not lose the game, and b) get the most possible victory points at the end. But you only see the degree of victory (or your loss) very late in the game. At the moment you get them, early in the game, "2 victory points" means nothing, and changes nothing to the current state of the game.

I rather play a game like Gloomhaven, where at best you find an item you can immediately use, at worst you find a currency like "20 gold", which you can use at the end of the scenario, before the next session. Furthermore in such a game, your character most of the time gets stronger, and character progression is always fun. In Nemo's War, you submarine is getting weaker over time, you are trying to make it to the end before you become too weak or fail; that is more stressful, and less fun, I think.

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- posted by Tobold @ 2:38 PM Permanent Link  (1) comments
 
Treasure!

If you were digging in your back yard and found a treasure chest, you would hope that it was filled with gold coins rather than some artefact of the same value. Currency is more practical, anonymous, easier to convert into whatever you really want. An artefact would be more likely to attract the attention of some previous owner, and harder to cash in on. However, real treasures are rare, and most treasure chests you open happen in some game, where the situation is different.

Whether it is Diablo or Borderlands, there are tons of games based on constantly finding loot, whether in a chest or not. The motivation comes from always finding some better weapon or equipment. That is a lot more exciting than a treasure chest which just increases one or more currency counters. Which is one reason why I am not really excited about hunt for treasure chests in Fenyx Immortal Rising: While you can find weapons and armor in chests, your find only affects the look and added bonuses of that weapon and armor. How much damage a sword or axe does, or how good an armor is, depends solely on some universal sword/axe/armor upgrade level, which is bought with currency. So the chests you find contain shards of various colors, and to make your sword hit harder, you need a certain number of shards of specific colors to upgrade. And then all the swords in your inventory hit for the same damage.

In short, you don't care much what weapons you find in those chests. You just accumulate shards, together with other materials that allow you to upgrade other aspects of the game: Number of potions or arrows you can carry, power of those potions, and so on, and so on. Your inventory screen tracks 4 materials for potions, and 8 kinds of shards and similar materials for updates. And for some of the shards you need to collect tens of thousands over the course of the game to upgrade. Finding a part of the shards that you need for some upgrade is not useless, but it is hardly exciting. You are missing out on the experience of opening a treasure and finding some useful epic weapon. So in a game I prefer finding spectacular items rather than currency.

- posted by Tobold @ 10:05 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments
Thursday, December 10, 2020
 
The death of retail

In our living room there is a hifi sound system which is so old, it still has a tape deck. So, my wife, when asked what she wanted for Christmas, asked for a new hifi sound system, fit for the modern age: Digital radio, CD player, bluetooth. I wanted to order it from Amazon, but the wife preferred me buying it at a local big electronics store, because it is easier to return something that doesn't work for some reason. And as we are currently in a period of "lockdown lite", where even non-essential shops are open, I went to buy a hifi sound system.

The good news is that I came home with one. The bad news is that the experience left me completely disappointed and wishing I had just bought something of Amazon. I went at a time where the shop was relatively empty, and there were a number of vendors around. But none of them actually wanted to sell me something, instead fobbing me off to the next guy. Finally I ended up at the end of the food chain, some intern who normally sold telephones and had no clue about sound systems. We managed to find a box that I could buy that had all the keywords I was looking for printed on it, but that was all the advice I was getting at that place. A combination of an online shopping site with a review site open in another window on the PC would have netted a better result, with a greater chance of me actually buying a good system, and probably cheaper to boot.

While I didn't actually want to buy a PS5, I did check in the store that they didn't have any, and didn't have a clue when they would ever get one. The whole supply chain of electronics these days has moved online, where it subsequently was hijacked by bots and scalpers. The ultimately much fairer system of distribution where retail stores have stacks of consoles, and limit customers to buying just one, is dead. Instead the console makers spend more money on marketing than on actually making consoles, launch their new consoles with far too little supply, and get bought out by organized scalpers. To the console company that looks like a success ("Hey, we sold all our consoles!"), but the experience for the average gamer is that only the most affluent end up being able to afford a new console. It is raw Capitalism, worse than Pay2Win or loot boxes, because with Pay2Win or loot boxes the free players at least get to play *something*. In the end, that is very bad for the console maker as well, as their customers are either angry of not being able to get hold of a console before Christmas, or they are angry because they had to pay twice the price, or got scammed by somebody on EBay.

The conclusion is that retail stores have simply given up. Instead of trying to make the retail experience somehow superior to the online shopping experience, they just set up their own website and cut cost on the retail part of the business. Instead of creating foot traffic in their shops with stacks of the latest consoles, they sell all of that console inventory on not very secure websites which are easily overrun by bots. Instead of using their inherent advantages, the human touch, to compete with the likes of Amazon, they are trying and failing to beat Amazon at their own game. I think they will be surprised how the business they lost during the pandemic will not be coming back afterwards.

- posted by Tobold @ 8:26 AM Permanent Link  (5) comments
Wednesday, December 09, 2020
 
Cyberpunk 2077

Once upon a time, about 3 decades ago, for a short time I played the pen & paper role-playing game Shadowrun. I haven't done many games with a cyberpunk theme since, but I had a general interest in the much hyped Cyperpunk 2077 coming out tomorrow. At least enough to watch a couple of reviews on YouTube to decide whether this is a game for me.

Turns out, it probably isn't. Half a year ago I wrote a post about Watchdogs, a game not totally unlike Cyberpunk 2077, and how I couldn't play it because of my difficulties driving a virtual car in a game like this. So I was immediately struck by the video reviews I saw of Cyberpunk 2077, where the reviewers not only spent a good amount of time in a car, but also visibly and repeatedly bumped into stuff while driving that car. Look, if a professional video game reviewer can't take an exit on a highway without scratching his car, I'm pretty sure that I won't be able to control those cars well. And as there are apparently quests where you need to race somebody to fulfil the quest, I am now wary of this part of the game.

Also, one of the reviews I watched was from Gamespot, and it was a lot more critical than other reviews. It mentioned one point which has bugged me before in other games: The game allows you to build your character as you wish, for example making him/her a hacker instead of a fighter, but then the main story forces you into a boss fight, where you regret not having put your skill points into fighting skills.

I don't think I will buy Cyberpunk 2077. I think I would like the RPG part of it. But ultimately what a game is depends mostly on what activity you are doing most of the time in it. And as far as I can see, in Cyberpunk 2077 that would be shooting and driving. I'm not really attracted by that.

- posted by Tobold @ 5:38 PM Permanent Link  (4) comments
Tuesday, December 08, 2020
 
Skill checks in role-playing games

After being disappointed with Lord of the Rings: Journeys in Middle-Earth (JIME), I started with another board game called Folklore: The Affliction. Now this resembles a pen & paper RPG much more, to the point where it is barely a board game, and more an "RPG in a box". Very early in the first story (minor spoiler!) you come across some highwaymen threatening a priest, and you can make a skill check of your "speech" skill to persuade them to leave. And that skill check really drove home one of the points I disliked very much about JIME: Skill checks with boring outcomes.

In Folklore: The Affliction, both possible outcomes of that skill check are interesting. Either you succeed in a peaceful resolution of the conflict, or you fail, and combat ensues. Both possible outcomes have their advantages and disadvantages. "Failing" the skill check isn't all that bad, and it still moves the story forward.

In JIME you are constantly making skill checks called "tests", many of them to investigate a search token. Some search tokens need a shown number of successes, and you need to tell the app whether you passed or failed. Other search tokens need a hidden number of successes, but those can be accumulated; for example you need 4 successes, but if you have only 3, the next time you'll need just 1 more to pass. The problem with all these skill checks is that absolutely nothing happens if you fail or partially fail. The search token simply stays in the game, until you try again and at some point succeed. And you need to eventually succeed with certain search tokens to drive the story forward, so this isn't optional. Failing a skill check doesn't move the story forward, but simply forces you to try again until you succeed. Boooooring!

This is something that you really learn early if you are the Dungeon Master in a pen & paper role-playing game like Dungeons & Dragons. You don't want a failed skill check to block the story, or instantly kill the character / reset the game to a previous state (see previous post on Fenyx); you want a skill check to have different possible outcomes, all of which are interesting and move the story forward. Does the rogue succeed to sneak up to the dragon without waking him? If yes he can steal some loot or do a surprise attack, if not the dragon wakes up. Both options are "good" from a narrative point of view. You really don't want "you fail to sneak up on the dragon, the dragon stirs, you have to retreat. Try again!" three times in a row until the roll finally succeeds, because that makes the skill check pointless.

Folklore: The Affliction ends up being a far more interesting game, because both decisions and skill checks have different possible outcomes, all of which move the story forward and are thus interesting. Lord of the Rings: Journeys in Middle-Earth has the "you failed, try again until you succeed" version of skill checks, and is a much less interesting game because of it.

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- posted by Tobold @ 10:20 AM Permanent Link  (6) comments
Saturday, December 05, 2020
 
Immortals Fenyx Falling

Dear Ubisoft!

I would like to lodge a customers complaint. I went to your Ubisoft Connect store and bought the game Immortals Fenyx Rising, but what I got delivered was the game Immortals Fenyx Falling.

You see, the game I wanted was some sort of Zelda Breath of the Wild clone, a role-playing game with a large world to explore. What I got resembles that to some degree, but has large puzzle / platformer sessions that are unskippable. And in these platformer game parts, I am frequently required to double jump to get from one platform to the next. However, the double jump is not a simple double press of a button, no, far from it. You need to press the button once, then wait exactly 358 ms, then press the button again. If you wait only 357 ms and press the button again too early, you fall. If you wait 359 ms and press the button too late, you fall. And there are dozens of such jumps in every vault. So my Fenyx is falling, then falling again, then falling again. It takes me bloody forever to finish an otherwise boring vault, because I constantly fall to my death.

Now I really appreciate your thought of providing the game with several difficulty levels, the easier ones of which reduce falling damage. However, even at the easiest difficulty, I still need to time the second button press for the double jump exactly right, or I still fall, respawn, and need to try again, over and over until I finally make the jump. Have you considered changing the parameters of the jump ability in function of the difficulty level, widening the window of opportunity for that second button press and making it possible for the slower among us to succeed regularly in double jumping?

I would have liked to play Immortals Fenyx Rising. But Immortals Fenyx Falling is a very tedious game, that is no fun at all! Please provide me with the "Rising" version of the game, as soon as possible.

Regards,

Tobold


- posted by Tobold @ 8:36 AM Permanent Link  (6) comments
Wednesday, December 02, 2020
 
Lord of the Rings: Journeys in Middle-Earth and the app

As I said in my previous post, I have started to play Lord of the Rings: Journeys in Middle-Earth (JIME). What attracted me to the game was the lore. I am playing Bilbo, Gimli, and Legolas, instead of some generic rogue, fighter, and ranger! I also wanted to switch to game which has a bit more story and less tactical planning, for a more casual option than Gloomhaven.

The interesting part about JIME is the app. This is not an optional app from some third party, like Gloomhaven Helper. The JIME app is integral part of the board game, and you can't play the game without it. I really liked the idea in principle: Let the computer handle the fiddly part, and I can concentrate on actually playing the game! I wasn't worried about the criticism I read that maybe some day the app wouldn't be available anymore. Rather I was happy to see that since release the app had grown, and you could purchase for a reasonable sum some additional campaigns and content. And it was interesting to see that if you played the same scenario several times, the map would be different every time.

And then I set up the game, played through the first scenario, and was surprised how much I disliked the experience. I felt that rather than doing the fiddly stuff, the app was hiding the stuff that I wanted to know, while I was doing the boring, repetitive stuff. In JIME every character has a small, 15-card deck. Every time you try something, you turn over between 1 and 4 cards of that deck (depending on your stats), and then count the number of successes marked on those cards. Some cards have a success symbol, some don't, and some have a symbol that can be transformed into a success by spending an inspiration point. It is all easy enough. But every character only gets 2 actions per turn, not all of which necessarily result in a test. And at the end of the turn, you need to shuffle your deck, and "scout" the top 2 cards. Playing solo with 3 characters meant that I had to shuffle 3 decks at the end of each turn. And I felt that the turns were short, and the time I spent shuffling was long. On the other hand, I came into contact with 4 types of different monsters in the first scenario, but they all felt the same, because the app only shows you their hit points and armor, and not how dangerous the attacks of these monsters are. For some of the tests it also hides how many successes you need.

In the end I felt the app was actually making the game worse. I would have much preferred if the app would have handled the cards and the randomization / shuffling, and had given me more information about the monsters and tests. After some more research, I found out another big flaw of the app: You can't replay scenarios. If you lose the final scenario of the campaign, the game is over, and you would have to play through all the scenarios again to have another go at the end boss.

Maybe it is just me. I like throwing dice as a random number generator in games, and do prefer physical dice to virtual ones. But you don't need to shuffle dice. Cards are okay in games like Magic the Gathering, where you shuffle rarely. But if you have to shuffle small decks every turn, and that for several characters if you play solo, shuffling quickly becomes quite a chore and not fun at all.

So, no recommendation from me for Lord of the Rings: Journeys in Middle-Earth. Besides the shuffling issue, I found the game thinner on lore and story than I had hoped. And for what's in the box, I actually found the game a bit overpriced; you'd get more game for less money if you bought Jaws of the Lion.

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- posted by Tobold @ 8:56 AM Permanent Link  (3) comments
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