Tobold's Blog
Monday, August 30, 2021
 
Cards and Dice

I was watching the D&D Beyond Honest Trailer, and remarked how awkward the service sits between the two chairs of real life gaming and digital gaming. I spent a lot of money on D&D Beyond, mostly to buy digital versions of books I already own in physical form. But I prefer the legal digital version to some pirated pdf version. Plus the character creation tool and database are nice. But the one feature that is now most heavily advertised is the one I never use: Chucking digital dice. I don't mind digital dice on Roll20, but there the whole D&D game is online. D&D Beyond doesn't have a virtual tabletop; and if I am sitting with friends around a table, real dice are an important part of the experience, and a lot more fun than digital ones.

I am a big fan of dice. Yes, they create randomness, and some people don't like it. But the impact depends on the game system. Often board games have means to mitigate the randomness, like rerolls. And ultimately the fun comes from the outcome not being certain, and the dice creating a risk to be managed. In D&D, dice ideally become the "third party" around the table, next to DM and players; especially lucky or unlucky outcomes turn into memorable story moments that weren't foreseeable by neither the DM nor the players.

Another popular method to create randomness in games are cards. However, cards are slightly different than dice, in that earlier results impact future results. Imagine a hypothetical deck of 6 cards, simply numbered 1 to 6. Drawing 3 cards from that deck isn't the same as throwing 3d6. Even if you had a thicker deck, with 18 cards, each number from 1 to 6 appearing 3 times, the chance of "drawing" an 18 is lower than the chance of "rolling" an 18 with 3d6. Every time you draw a card, you change the probability distribution of the remainder of the cards, until you reshuffle. The thinner the deck, the bigger the impact.

As a result, cards don't work well for slim decks. For example my experience with LOTR: Journeys in Middle-earth, where the decks are very thin and have to be reshuffled very frequently. I was trying to play that game solo, and ultimately gave up, because then I had to constantly reshuffle the decks of every character. Dice would have worked better for me there, although I understand that it isn't possible, because the deck manipulation of keeping or returning cards with successes to change probabilities is an important part of that game. But while I am good at shuffling large decks (to the horror of some other players I riffle-shuffled by Magic the Gathering decks, without using sleeves), I find shuffling thin decks repeatedly extremely annoying.

In the end, it is probably a question of numbers: Cards scale down badly to thin decks, because of the shuffling, and the extreme impact of a single card draw on the probability of the rest. Dice work well in small numbers, but you wouldn't want a game system that requires you to physically roll 60 dice.

- posted by Tobold @ 9:52 AM Permanent Link  (5) comments
Sunday, August 29, 2021
 
Class warfare

I recently wrote about the board game Descent, saying that I wouldn't buy it, because it is too expensive for me. But I predicted that the game is important, because it tests the market acceptability of a $175 board game outside of crowdfunding. Since then, I have seen several videos on YouTube from board game channels discussing the high price of Descent and some Kickstarter games. And in one of them, Alex of BoardGameCo mentions that 78% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck (and that was from data before the pandemic).

In the context of my work, and with me being part of the Boomer generation, I have also been reading up and watching videos on generational conflict. Millenials think that they have it much worse than Boomers, and they believe that the Boomer generation deliberately went out of their way to screw them. Looking at various economic data, it is obvious that in many respects Millenials *do* have it economically much worse than Boomers. But while Boomers might occasionally give well-meant but not very relevant comments to Millenials about success being a consequence of life choices and values, the idea of a generational conspiracy against the younger generation is pretty absurd. If you study human behavior, one recurring psychological trait of humans is that they go out of their way to make life better for their children. Not that they always do a very good job, see for example climate change. But it is extremely unlikely to the point of ridicule that a whole generation joined in a conspiracy to make life for their children economically worse.

On an individual level, I believe that your economic success comes from a mixture of luck, economic circumstances, and life choices. If you take a whole population, the influence of luck and life choices becomes statistical noise, and only the economic circumstances remain. If 78% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck, it basically means that the whole economic system is rigged against what Marx would have called the proletariat, the social class of wage-earners. A large part of the inequality comes from the different tax treatment of wages and capital gains, heavily favoring people living from capital income. Thus the famous story that Warren Buffet pays a lower tax rate than his secretary. Or, as he says: "There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.".

Now obviously there is some correlation between age and wealth, older people are richer than younger people, and increasingly so. But there are a lot of older people that are poor. And as easy it is to make fun of the hippy generation 50 years later, at least they would have correctly identified the problem as one of class warfare. The identity politics, including generational identity politics, of the last decades are mostly a distraction from that. Basically the economic circumstances that were kicked off in the 80's by the Reagan/Thatcher power couple, with less regulation and more globalisation, created winners and losers. And the so-called "knowledge workers" ended up on the side of the winners. Which was a bit of a moral problem for them, because they were leftist intellectuals. So the left abandoned class warfare, and replaced the struggle for better economic conditions for wage-earners by identity politics. You don't protest to "tax the rich" if you *are* comparatively rich.

I think that the old school left politics are superior: If we taxed capital gains as much as wages, and gave workers a fairer share of the wealth they help create, a lot of of the identity-based social problems would be solved at the same time. Better economic conditions for low-income wage-earners would help black families far more than some well-off white intellectual carrying a "Black Lives Matter" placard. That isn't communism (which obviously didn't work). Nobody should want to turn the USA into communist Russia. But we should want to turn the USA (and everywhere else) into a Scandinavian country. Because it has been shown that their economic system works, and makes people much happier.


- posted by Tobold @ 9:11 AM Permanent Link  (10) comments
Wednesday, August 25, 2021
 
Curse of Strahd - Session 8

The Curse of Strahd campaign is only advancing slowly, due to European Summer holidays. In the previous session, the group gained an ally in Rudolph van Richten, a famous vampire hunter. That was lucky, because in this session a new player joined the group, and he is now playing Rudolph (by name, I still let him make any character class etc. that he wanted).

The largest part of this session was taken up by a long battle against Baba Lysaga, a witch and former nursemaid to Strahd, who thinks of him as "her son". In order to help Strahd, Baba Lysaga orchestrated the attacks on the Wizards of Wine, as the Martikov family of wereravens are enemies to Strahd. So she has the third gem that produces the best wine if brought back to the vineyard. But she planted that gem into the heart of the large tree in which her hut is built, and that brought the tree to life. So the combat was against the witch flying in an upturned giant dragon skull and a ginormous tree who hit very hard. But the group managed to kill them both.

In Baba Lysaga's hut, they found a surprise: A crying baby. It was even more of a surprise when the gnome found the "baby" to be too heavy to lift. It turned out to be a clay golem with orders to behave as a baby. Creepy, but otherwise harmless. The group recovered the gem, and then also found the second artifact they were looking for against Strahd. As their fortune reading had told them, it was hidden in the monument to a local girl which was a previous reincarnation of Strahd's love Tatyana. The locals had killed the girl, rather than give her to Strahd, which then made Strahd destroy the whole village.

The group brought the gems to the vineyard, and then remembered another task they had been asked to perform: Bringing a wedding dress to the abbot in Krezk. However, two sessions previous to that, they had brought a young werewolf to the abbey, not wanting to bring him to Vallaki. They new that the abbey was full of crazy mongrelfolk, former humans who had accepted "help" from the abbot, who had made them "better" by replacing various of their body parts by animal parts. You must imagine these mongrelfolk as being very open to gaining animal power by scarifying their humanity. So when the group came to the abbey, they found the place full of 80 werewolves, with a somewhat angry abbot. That turned out to be a fight they couldn't win, and they had to turn and run. [None of that is planned in the module, but it seemed a logical development, as well as narrative gothic horror gold.]

The group then decided to go towards Amber Temple, the location of the third artifact against Strahd. That artifact is the Sunsword, which is also the patron of the Hexblade / Paladin of the group. To get to Amber Temple, the group needs to go over Tsolenka Pass, which is what will be upcoming in the next session.

- posted by Tobold @ 10:51 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments
Sunday, August 22, 2021
 
Not disappointed in Humankind

While humankind is sometimes disappointing, Humankind from Amplitude Studios turned out to be exactly what I expected it to be, which is kind of a Civilization 6.5. You lead your tribe from the neolithic era to modern times on a hex-based map, explore, expand, exploit, and exterminate (4X). The main difference to Civ is that you don't lead one civilization, but you choose a different one in each era. In my current game I started with the Harappans for quick growth, then went with the Huns to conquer the continent I was on, then concentrated on builders with the Khmer, improved my influence with the Ming, went for builders again with the Siamese, and finished with the expansionist Soviets. This system, and the nomadic era in which you start, works quite well, and I would judge it as an improvement over Civ.

Through all these eras, you and your competitors keep the same avatar, who is just dressing differently in each era. By playing several games, you can unlock strengths and biases, with which you can equip the AI persona of your own avatar. Via a website your friends can then download your avatar, and play against a virtual "you". Interesting idea, horrible execution. The avatars are mostly uncanny valley kind of ghastly. And the systems to find avatars to download, and to include them as opponents in your game are both very badly done and annoying. You will miss the opponent selection of Civ.

World creation is working quite well. I played two games with 3 and 4 continents, with a total number of 4 and 6 players. With the "new world" option set to yes, each time there were exactly 2 players per continent, and one empty one to discover. Last time I played Civ 6, that sort of world was a lot harder to set up, but I don't know if it improved since then with updates and DLCs. While I do like the kind of world where there is an uninhabited continent to discover, in reality it turns out that it is a huge bonus to the player, as even AIs with "maritime" traits never manage to find that continent before you. In fact, pathfinding for ships that should stay in coastal waters is horrible, and even when you have ships that can go everywhere and you set them to "auto explore", they just go around in circles. Last time I tried, Civ wasn't doing much better with ships. Maybe I should just set the world to "Pangea" and not bother with ships. One interesting change from Civ is that the world is divided into territories, so you don't need to "create" territories with city districts.

Overall, playing Humankind felt a lot like playing Civ. You get in that "one more turn" mindset and suddenly hours have passed. Fun enough for a while. I have been playing "normal" game length of 300 turns, and every time the game reaches a tipping point way before that, where you already know you won (or lost) the game, and just have to click through turns to finish. While there are a number of different win conditions, you can also win by simply having the most fame at the end of the game, which is a nice way of keeping score. Maybe I should play shorter games, there are options for 150 or even just 75 turns, and you can always opt to keep playing afterwards. How many turns you want to play is hard to predict, as a turn can be very fast if you don't have any units moving around, but can take very long if you are mobilizing large armies or exploring a lot.

While not exactly a "Civ Killer", Humankind is a very nice game that is similar enough to appeal to anyone who liked Civ, but different enough to offer something new. I don't know if I would have wanted to pay €50 for that. Fortunately I am playing for "free*", as the game is on XBox Game Pass for PC since release. Weirdly the Game Pass version is minimally different from the other versions, e.g. you can't rename cities and armies in the Game Pass version, but you can in the version available on Steam or Epic. The game still has a few minor bugs, e.g. with battle area previews not going away, but nothing gamebreaking. If you are a subscriber to the Game Pass, you should definitively check this out!

- posted by Tobold @ 7:58 AM Permanent Link  (2) comments
Tuesday, August 17, 2021
 
Forgetting games

Einstein once said that education is that which is left after you forgot everything you learned at school. In the past week, I launched two games that I hadn't played for some time, Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, and World of Tanks. For Zelda, I was trying out the NFC cards I bought as cheaper alternative to amiibo. For World of Tanks I had received a mail telling me to log in to get anniversary rewards. The experience in both cases was similar: Although I have over 15,000 battles played in World of Tanks, and over 200 hours of Zelda, I had problems remembering all the controls. For Zelda it took some trial and error to find how to activate amiibo rewards. For World of Tanks it was more a feeling of not feeling all that comfortable remembering all the tactics for each tank on each map, so I didn't start a battle at all.

That is not to say that I have completely forgotten these games. In Zelda it just took one look at my surroundings to know where I was. The map of Hyrule is in my head, and I would have had no problems to navigate from one point to another. And in World of Tanks I had no problems remembering what the rewards I received were good for. And I know the World of Tanks controls well enough to be able to play, it's just the terrain knowledge one needs to play well that faded.

In both cases, I could relearn. However, only for Zelda do I actually consider starting a new game, in which case the Great Plateau would teach me all the controls again quickly. I might actually wait until I forgot a bit more about the game, as the fun of playing is all about exploration. For World of Tanks it takes way too long to "git gud" again, and the fun is less in the playing than in the mastering of the game. I already once stopped for years, and taking it up again was a rather long process which took a lot of effort. I don't think I would enjoy playing this casually from time to time and sucking at it. Especially since World of Tanks is a game in slow decline.

I am wondering whether I have a rather specific memory, that I forget about certain things in games, like the controls. Or whether that is perfectly normal, because we tend to remember "experiences" longer than "muscle memory" fine motor skills and game details. How are your experiences with starting old games again?

- posted by Tobold @ 9:58 AM Permanent Link  (4) comments
Friday, August 13, 2021
 
I nearly fell for buying Humankind

When I opened my Epic Games Launcher today, it told me that I had only 4 more days to pre-order Humankind for $10 off and some pre-order bonuses. As I was faintly aware of the game as being basically Civilization 7, I started to wonder whether I should actually pre-order. Fortunately I decided to solve that question by doing some research, and that research came up with a very surprising answer: I absolutely shouldn't pay $50 to pre-order Humankind, because I can get it for free instead.

Well, maybe put an asterisk next to "free*", as it isn't free "free". I get Humankind for "free*" because I already pay $10 per month for an Xbox Game Pass for PC. And Humankind will be on that game pass right from the first day of release. In other words, I can mentally substract $50 from this year's tally where I compare the $120 annual cost of the game pass to the amount of money it saves me on buying games.

Obviously that fact isn't advertised on the Epic Games Launcher. I mean, they would be bloody stupid to do so. If you have neither Humankind nor the Game Pass, you have an option of either buying Humankind and being able to play it forever, or spending the same money on 5 months of Game Pass, and playing a whole bunch of different games for that period. You would need to be a pretty extreme Humankind fan in order to make the former look better than the latter. The large majority of games I play, I play for significantly less than 5 months. I only played Civ6 for 40 hours (but Civ5 for 80 hours).

So my problem is mostly that I am not always aware of the games coming to Xbox Game Pass, and I might accidentally buy a game and then find I could have played it for "free*". Is there a newsletter I could sign up for somewhere?

- posted by Tobold @ 3:11 PM Permanent Link  (5) comments
 
Descent: Legends of the Dark

As I mentioned before, I am not planning to buy Descent: Legends of the Dark. So why would I want to blog about it? Well, look at it that way: The Lands of Galzyr game that I am more excited about has 1,500 backers on Gamefound. It is safe to say that while some people might love it, the game won't rock the board game industry. Other than on a few niche sites, the game will be unknown to most people. Compare that to Descent: Legends of the Dark, which got a long article full of hype on Polygon, and you will see that this game is playing in a very different league. Other game companies will watch this, and its success or failure will have implications on a bunch of future board games. BoardGameGeek has a "hotness" measure that shows which of its thousands of webpages for board games is interacted with most, and Descent is the hottest game of the month.

Why is that so? Descent: Legends of the Dark is basically a "Kickstarter board game", but without Kickstarter or another crowdfunding platform. It is the attempt of an established board game company to make something with the same scope and success as the crowdfunded Gloomhaven. If this is a commercial success, we might see more of these big box, expensive, more complicated board games produced with traditional financing instead of crowdfunding. At the very least it will push the envelope what companies think they can get away with regarding board game price point, and the related quantity and quality of the components in the box.

So, how does Descent: Legends of the Dark compare to Gloomhaven? That is in fact not such a straightforward comparison. To somebody not playing board games, the two big boxes might look similar. But they do fall on different sides of the Eurogame vs. Ameritrash divide. Gloomhaven is fundamentally a Euro game, in which you plan three moves ahead based on the cards in your hand. Descent is an American style game, with more randomness, and more built-in scenario surprises. Both types of games can be good. The American style games have a stronger focus on style, which is why Descent has fantastic miniatures and 3D terrain, while Gloomhaven has cardboard standups and flat token terrain. Descent is also a lot more accessible, gameplay-wise. At least at the start you follow relatively simple rules on moving a couple of squares and rolling dice to attack. The original Gloomhaven doesn't have a tutorial at all, which is why for new players I would always recommend buying the cheaper and more accessible Jaws of the Lion version, which uses the same combat system.

Is Descent: Legends of the Dark a good game? I think it is. I've studied the game by playing with just the app, and by watching people play the full game on YouTube. And the American Style games are a lot more watchable than Euro games, where a lot of the action happens only in the heads of the players. Also, miniature-heavy games become truly spectacular when the miniatures are painted. Paint your miniatures, and you can turn Descent into a display that will make heads turn at a gaming convention. (Too bad I can't paint at all). But beyond the show, Descent is also a surprisingly deep tactical combat game, with some quite interesting game mechanics. The further you get into the game, the more parts of the game are revealed to you. And when you have the full complement of weapon upgrades, armor, skills, and consumables, and you are getting into a dance of powering attacks by loading fatigue tokens onto your cards, and then flipping those cards over to get rid of the tokens, Descent becomes a game of mechanical beauty.

Much of the controversy and hate towards Descent: Legends of the Dark is about the game relying heavily on an app. Critics say that it is a video game. Unfortunately for me, it isn't. I would absolutely buy the Descent: Legends of the Dark video game on Steam, if it existed. I did buy the Gloomhaven video game on Steam, despite owning the board game. But for solo play, having a computer handle everything is just so much faster. But while I don't hate apps, I don't think the Descent board game app is the best it could be. Imagine a table with 4 players sitting on the 4 sides: How do you make sure that everybody gets the full experience of a story told by an app on a phone or tablet? The obvious solution is voice acting for all narrative, but the Descent app doesn't have that. Instead it has written dialogue you need to click through. That works great for one player, to some extent for two players side by side, but for 3 or 4 players you basically need some extra hardware to cast the app on a nearby TV screen. And it's not just a narrative. Between quests you are also supposed to buy and sell crafting materials, spend money on recipes, use recipes and materials to craft weapon parts, and then equip them. All on an interface that works great for a single player taking all decisions, but has absolutely no mechanics for different players wanting different things.

The Descent: Legends of the Dark app makes heavy use of "hidden information". You don't know what damage type a monster is weak against, until you hit it with that damage type for the first time. You don't know how many successes it takes to open that chest. You don't know what is going to happen in the scenario once you reach your first goal. You don't even know how long the scenario is. I find that a bit excessive. In the playthrough videos linked above, the players are completely surprised how long the first scenario is, and end up with a 7-hour video. Of course showing the game off on YouTube adds hours, but even regular players will have to reserve at least 3 hours to play through a single scenario. This is not a game to play quickly for 1 hour, not unless you have a dedicated gaming table on which you can leave the game. There is no "save" mechanic in the middle of a scenario, you can only stop playing between scenarios. And, unlike Gloomhaven, the app doesn't allow you to replay a scenario unless you start the whole campaign over. That is in line with the American style of the game, in which much of the scenarios is based on surprises, and a second playthrough would be much, much easier.

But in spite of all that, I would buy and play a Descent: Legends of the Dark "light" version with no miniatures and no 3D terrain for the price of a typical Fantasy Flight Games board game, e.g. Lord of the Rings - Journeys in Middle-Earth (which I hated), currently for $80 on Amazon, or Mansions of Madness at $70. I'm not buying the actual Descent: Legends of the Dark game for $175. Because that is basically paying a hundred bucks extra for 3D terrain and miniatures. And yes, the HIPS miniatures of Descent: Legends of the Dark are of extremely high quality compared to other board games. It is just that I am not that much of a miniature guy, and I'm happy with the comparatively low resolution stuff I can print on my own 3D printer. Especially since I don't paint miniatures.

But that is just me. While I did back a bunch of Kickstarter games, I never did it for the miniatures. And I stayed away from the really expensive Kickstarter games with tons of miniatures, like Kingdom Death: Monster for $400. Instead I backed Lands of Galzyr, for €70, with wooden meeples. But hey, over five thousand people backed Kingdom Death: Monster, and other miniature games attracted even more backers. So I think Descent could do well. Kickstarter has its advantages, but also its disadvantages, for example in terms of availability of the game after the Kickstarter. Some people will walk into game stores and end up buying Descent because the game is on stock, and on display. I'm pretty sure a clever games store owner can have the miniatures painted by somebody and put up a Descent display that just wows every gamer that sees it. And fortunately, people who fall in love with the miniatures will end up with a pretty decent board game as well. For people who don't like miniatures, the $175 price tag is a bit prohibitive.

- posted by Tobold @ 9:59 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments
Wednesday, August 11, 2021
 
Micro-adventures instead of random encounter tables

As I mentioned before, I am planning to run a more open, player-driven D&D campaign next year. Less prepared main story with a pre-determined archvillain, more freedom for players to go in whatever direction they want. Now one thing that tends to feature heavily in such more open campaigns (but also sometimes in more linear campaigns) is the use of random encounter tables. The players are traveling through a forest, and on a roll of below 5 on a d20, they will have a random encounter. Roll the d20 again, it's a 12, that means you encounter 5 wolves. The DM throws down a generic battlemap, and the group is occupied for half an hour with combat fighting those random wolves. And I always hated that style of gaming for D&D.

I kind of like random encounters in video role-playing games. I find it open helps that if you feel underleveled for the next story content, you can run around in circles in that forest until you have a "random" encounter, which gives you some xp and loot, making you stronger. But combat in a video game is a lot faster, and it is easier to play every day. In D&D I tend to get only one or two sessions per month, of 4 to 6 hours. I don't want to waste that precious time with a combat against some random wolves.

That isn't to say that every combat in D&D needs to be epic, or every encounter be some dramatic piece of the overall story. I can see the appeal, and even necessity, of having dangerous encounters while traveling. I just would like them to be a tad more interesting. So I was thinking of creating / collecting a list of micro-adventures to populate my random encounter table with. For example, instead of meeting 5 wolves in the forest, the group meets a wounded merchant, who has been robbed by bandits. The group can track the bandits to their camp and fight them. As the DM, I can prepare a battlemap with a bandit camp, so it's already more interesting than a blank map with 5 wolves. But also, as Sid Meier said, a good game is a series of interesting decisions: If 5 wolves attack the group, there are no decisions other than what combat abilities to use. With the wounded merchant encounter the group can decide whether they want to go after the bandits or not, and whether they want to return the merchandise or keep it.

I will see in the adventure material I already have, as well as what can be found in places like DriveThruRPG / RPGNow / DMsGuild, for collections of micro-adventures. I know that "5 room dungeons" are a thing, and those might fit the purpose for things like a small tomb or wizard tower. But that would basically be the biggest possible micro-adventure I would put on an encounter table; with something like that bandit camp being the smallest possible micro-adventure on the same table. I don't want "you randomly meet X monsters", but I also don't want "you randomly meet a large dungeon that will take you several sessions to explore".

Fortunately the theme of my future campaign, pirates and naval adventures, fits rather well with that concept. If the players control a pirate ship, an encounter with another ship, whether that is a merchant to rob, or a ghost ship chasing them, makes for a good micro-adventure. So does a small island on which possibly a treasure is buried. The Ghosts of Saltmarsh book actually has some micro-adventures in the back, in the Underwater Locations section, with battlemaps like a sunken ship and ideas how to populate the area.

Labels:


- posted by Tobold @ 11:03 AM Permanent Link  (4) comments
Monday, August 09, 2021
 
Whose fault is climate change?

Politicians in the US Senate are proposing the "Polluters Pay Climate Fund Act", which would fine major oil companies as Shell, ExxonMobil and Chevron for a total of $300 billion as punishment for having caused global warming. That seems like a cheap political stunt to me. So, let's have a look at the issue.

First of all, I do agree with previous legislation that fined tobacco companies for having hid lung cancer risk from their customers. The new legislation tries to paint the actions of oil companies in the same way. Is that justified? That burning petrol produces carbon dioxide has been known since the 18th century. Arrhenius first calculated the greenhouse effect of carbon dioxide in 1896. With the legislation specifically mentioning the time period from 2000 to 2019, it would be very hard to argue by anyone that he couldn't possibly have known in 2000 that using petrol could lead to global warming. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change exists since 1988. The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change was in 1992. While some people still deny climate change exist, I don't think a viable claim can be made that customers were misled by oil companies.

The second problem is that oil companies themselves emit only about 10% of the carbon dioxide that their customers emit when using their products. If you decide to buy a plane ticket, who is responsible for the carbon dioxide emitted? Saying that the fault lies exclusively with the company that sold the kerosene is a bit of a stretch. What about the airline company? What about the individual booking a flight? The same applies to cars: Is ExxonMobil responsible that you are driving a Hummer instead of a Prius? Or that you drive a lot instead of taking a bike?

The third problem is a rather fundamental one that applies whenever somebody is trying to punish a company: Who exactly is being hurt by that punishment? A lot of the CEOs and decision makers of companies like ExxonMobil have changed over the last 20 years. Any punitive tax is not hurting them, but hurting the shareholders. And ExxonMobil is known as a "widows and orphans stock", a low risk investment being held by many people with little investment knowledge. A lot of the money that ExxonMobil would be forced to pay would ultimately come out of the pockets of ordinary citizens, who hold those shares via pension funds and the like. You can tax a company out of existence, so the current shareholders (not the ones that held the shares at the time the implied bad behavior happened) would be wiped out. If the tax doesn't destroy the company, the company then needs to find the money somewhere, in this case by raising gas prices. Which again would be paid by ordinary folks.

I think that we all to some degree are responsible for climate change. It is a consequence of our living standards, and the way that we power it. Punishing any individual or organization for it is basically only an exercise in public anger management, and serves no real purpose. Why punish oil companies, but not coal companies? How about the emissions of other industries, like cement and steel? Carbon dioxide emissions are so integral to all economic activities everybody does, that pointing out individual culprits can never work. It is a societal shared responsibility.

What can work, but is politically difficult, is punishing everybody *starting from now*, for their future carbon dioxide emissions. That would require a carbon tax. And that would, justifiably, make everything from gasoline to flight tickets somewhat more expensive, in proportion to the emissions caused. However, people like cheap flights and cheap gas. A politician who tells you that you can keep your cheap flights and your cheap gas, because he is going to find *somebody else* to pay for climate change is just lying to you.

- posted by Tobold @ 12:11 PM Permanent Link  (10) comments
Sunday, August 08, 2021
 
Simulating the D&D experience

There are a lot of board games and video games that use the label "role-playing game". However, they never fully reproduce the same experience that you would have if you played a tabletop role-playing game like Dungeons & Dragons. This is mostly due to the absence of a Dungeon Master: In D&D you can announce any action you can think of, and a good DM will at least let you try, and have you make a skill check. So, yes, in D&D you *can* jump from the balcony onto the chandelier and attack the troll from above, even if that action wasn't foreseen by the adventure module your group is playing. In a board game or computer game, if "jump onto chandelier" isn't a listed option, you simply can't do it.

Having said that, let's have a look at the gameplay elements of D&D that can be simulated by a board or video game:
  • Story, in which your decisions alter the outcome
  • Characters, that have stats and abilities
  • Actions, the success of which is linked to character stats and abilities
  • Combat, also linked to character stats and abilities
  • Rewards, in the form of xp/level or items, usually improving character stats and abilities
If you play a video game like Baldur's Gate 3, you will find all of these elements. So, as long as you don't mind that your list of possible actions is limited by whatever is coded into the game, you get an experience that is at least very similar to D&D. To some extent these games usually at least try to give you the illusion that your decisions alter the outcome, and might have a limited number of slightly different outcomes. But sometimes the facade is very thin, and if you play the game a second time, you will notice a lot of story elements that you can't change, even if you try to make different decisions. *Spoiler Alert* In Baldur's Gate 3, the Nautiloid "ship" of the mind flayers will *always* crash and end you up in the same location, regardless of what decisions you take in this early part of the game.

In board games, sometimes the story is even more linear and/or short. Most board games don't have apps, and there are only limited means of telling a story visually, so if there is a story, it is limited to some read aloud text. For obvious reasons, you don't want that text to be too long, at least not if the game has more than one player. I just ordered Legacy of Dragonholt, which is basically a somewhat overpriced choose-your-own-adventure book with character sheets; I will probably play this only solo, because if I'd play it with my wife, I'd need to read a lot of text out loud. But at least in Legacy of Dragonholt, there are a lot of decision points, and the abilities you choose on character creation determine which choices you can make. So if you make an orc brawler or a gnome alchemist, you will end up with different skills, and thus different options, even if you play through the same story. The only thing that is missing, in my opinion, is a system of dice rolls and skill checks. Other people might prefer that if you choose for example the Stealth ability, you will always succeed when Stealth is actually an option in the story.

While I prefer board games to be strong on the story side, that of course is also a matter of taste. I mentioned yesterday the new Descent: Legends of the Dark, which I won't buy. But that is based on my preferences; if you were looking for a game in which you mostly have tactical combat, and an extensive system of character development with lots of abilities and skills, the new Descent might actually be the game for you. You'd still need to consider in how far the app bothers you, whether the $175 price tag isn't too high for you, and how happy you are with the 3D cardboard terrain. But if you want mostly a dungeon crawler with nice miniatures and a decent tactical combat system, I'm wouldn't rule Descent out. Especially if you prefer dice-based combat over Gloomhaven's card-based combat.

I still believe that Lands of Galzyr will come very close to a lighthearted, 2-player, D&D-like experience for me and my wife. But of course that game is still being crowdfounded, and it'll take at least another year before I can actually verify this assumption. Baldur's Gate 3 is also only being released next year, although you can buy the game now and play the beta. So, on the video game side of things, I would recommend Solasta: Crown of the Magister, if you prefer an already released game that comes rather close to D&D.

Labels: ,


- posted by Tobold @ 1:00 PM Permanent Link  (1) comments
Saturday, August 07, 2021
 
Board Games with Apps

In my previous post I mentioned two board games, both of which are using apps to play. Yesterday Fantasy Flight games released one of the hotly debated games of this year, Descent: Legends of the Dark, and it is app-based too. On BoardGameGeek the game right now has 308 user ratings, of which 148 are a 10, and 107 are a 1. And it appears as if neither the 10s nor the 1s are actually about the game, but about the fact that it is a hybrid board / video game. Some people who like board games don't like the use of apps, and some people who like video games don't like the comparatively expensive use of a board game box full of terrain and miniatures. As somebody who likes both board games and video games, here are my thoughts about this issue.

Let me start by saying that I own Gloomhaven, which is a pure board game without an app. And when I play it, I use two third-party apps: Gloomhaven Helper to keep track of combat, and Forteller to add voice-over. My wife and me like two-player, cooperative, story-driven games. So either we both try to read a text at the same time, or one of us has to read the text to the other, or we use an app that does the reading aloud for us. It is pretty easy to see how an app that reads the story is an advantage, with basically no downside. Your mileage may vary on the use of an app to keep track of various game scores, I think that for a rather complex game like Gloomhaven it can help.

Now these story-driven games that don't rely on an app have a book of stories in the box. That often works like a choose-your-own-adventure book: You get a starting paragraph, and then are told to move to some other paragraph based on either your decisions, or for example in function of the result of a skill check. Such a book gives you the maximum of freedom to cheat, if you want to. You can read ahead, you can move back if you don't like a result, and so on. In Lands of Galzyr that I mentioned in my previous post, the app does have a "back" button, so if you make an innocent error *or* want to cheat, you can wind back. In Destinies, also mentioned, there is no back button. Some might welcome the elimination of cheating, but pressing the wrong button by mistake sure is annoying if you can't reverse that.

Where I don't really like apps is when they are used for hidden information. In pure board games you by necessity not only make decisions and roll dice, you are also the person checking whether your dice rolls resulted in a success or failure. I like the app of Lands of Galzyr, where you are still being told whether a skill check is easy, medium, or hard, before you decide what to do and roll the dice. I don't like the app in Destinies, where that information is hidden from you, you roll the dice blind, enter the results in the app, and find out whether what you rolled was good enough afterwards. There are a bunch of other uses of hidden information, where the Destinies app keeps track of something, and modifies results in function of that, without really telling you why. I prefer transparency.

In Lands of Galzyr, the app only basically replaces a book, and thus saves a tree. In Destinies, as well as in the new Descent game, and previous games from Fantasy Flight Games like Journeys in Middle-Earth, the app also shows the map of the game. You end up with a weird situation where you basically have two copies of the board: One physical, made up of tiles on your table, and one virtual on the app, where it shows how the tiles should be arranged. I must say that I am not a fan. You spend a lot of time making the two versions of the board align with each other, and ultimately you wonder why you bother with the physical version. If you play solo, you can play Destinies using *only* the map on the app. At which point only your player board and the item cards from the physical game are still a reminder that you are playing a board game.

In summary, I am not totally against the use of apps in board games, but I like to limit their use to managing (and if possible reading aloud) the story. If I want a game in which important game mechanics like how success is measured or how the game decides what happens next are mostly hidden from the player, I'd play a pure video game. And no, I'm not going to buy Descent: Legends of the Dark. Not only because it uses an app for more than what I like, but also because the 3D terrain looks problematic and unstable to me, and the $180 price tag rather high.

Labels:


- posted by Tobold @ 11:03 AM Permanent Link  (5) comments
Thursday, August 05, 2021
 
Win/loss conditions in narrative board games

I haven't played any board games lately. I was on holidays, and most of the board games I have are too big to bring with you in a suitcase, or to play on a small holiday apartment table. But I have been looking at two board games this week, in order to decide whether I would want to buy them.

The first is Destinies, a game that got a lot of rave reviews on YouTube. It is from Lucky Duck Games, who previously made Chronicles of Crime, and works with the same "scan the QR code with your phone to get information" technology. Only this time the story is some sort of dark medieval fantasy, with witches and werewolves. One of the reasons the game got so highly rated is that it is *very* accessible, the rules are easy, and there aren't a lot of things to get confused about. It is quick to set up, explain, and play, even with beginners. In no time you are exploring a tile-based map, interact with various locations and NPCs, find items, improve your skills, and try to advance the story towards you fulfilling your "destiny", your choice between two possible options on the back of your card.

What Destinies doesn't have, in one of the weirder game design decisions I've ever seen, is a loss condition. You can't lose all your health and die, because you don't even have health. If you succeed your skill checks the game advances faster than if you fail them, but that is the only difference. If you play solo, without a time limit, the game will always end with you achieving your destiny and winning. You can select a challenge solo mode, but all that this does is to tell you after X turns that you haven't achieved your destiny in time and kick you out of the game. So why would you want to play that? Destinies can also be played by 2 or 3 players, but then simply the first player to achieve his destiny wins, and the others lose, and don't see the "good" end of their story.

Because of this system, Destinies doesn't have a cooperative multiplayer mode. You can't work together to overcome the challenges of the game, because there simply aren't any challenges of the game. Every player simply follows their own destiny, which might overlap with the destiny of another player, and explore the map looking for specific stuff, e.g. three silver items to forge a silver weapon to kill the werewolf. But the success and speed of that is mostly a matter of luck, you might find a silver item on the market, or you might not; you might decide to move north and find a silver item there, or it might turn out that the silver item was south of you. You might roll high or low on your skill checks, with only limited option to mitigate risks. If you don't care about gameplay and all and manage to simply get immersed in the story, that might be a good experience. If you are a strategist / tactician who likes to learn how to play a game well, you'll be severely disappointed. In the end I decided that the game wasn't really interesting for me solo, and because of lack of cooperative play it wasn't interesting for me and my wife to play together. So I ended up not buying it.

Instead I ended up spending my money on crowdfunding Lands of Galzyr on Gamefound. This is another story-based game, still not overly complicated, but it can be played cooperatively. Lands of Galzyr is a lot lighter-hearted than most of the story-based games I currently own. You play an anthropomorphic animal exploring an open world. In many ways Lands of Galzyr is similar to Destinies:  No health points; a character board on which to mark your skills, against which you make rolls to succeed skill checks; a personal adventure to follow; items to collect that can help you with said skill checks; an app to tell you the story and the consequences of your decisions.

So why would I like Lands of Galzyr more than Destinies, especially if I could buy Destinies right now on Amazon, while I will have to wait at least a year for Lands of Galzyr to be made and delivered? Several reasons: Lands of Galzyr can be played cooperatively, and I'm sure my wife will love it; the skill check system is more interesting and at first look feels more tactical to me; but most importantly, the prestige point system: Lands of Galzyr is played in sessions that aren't overly long and limited in the number of turns; but how good or bad you played is measured on the prestige track. You don't just get a binary "you win / you lost" feedback, but you see how many prestige points you made out of the target number. And your story doesn't end there. You can either start another game directly and continue, or "save" the game and continue another time, with the possibility that decisions you made this game will affect the next session. If you did a lot of good prep work and it didn't pay out this session, maybe next session you'll make a lot of prestige points quickly and do much better. Your "win" or "loss" doesn't end your story, or give you a less good outcome to it. There probably is a campaign end somewhere, at which point you'll need to reset the game, but you can play many sessions on the way there.

In other words, at the end of multiplayer game of Destinies, one player will have achieved his destiny, have a "hard" win, and get a good end to his story, while the others get a "hard" loss, and a failure epilogue to their story. In Lands of Galzyr, at the end of a multiplayer game, the players will have a "soft" win or loss together, having either reached the target amount of prestige, just failed it, or done really badly and not advanced prestige much at all; but the prestige counter resets to zero, while the story and adventure continues. There are no negative consequences from a loss, just maybe some ideas how you could do better next time. The soft win/loss system of Lands of Galzyr fits the story-driven adventure gameplay much better than the hard system of Destinies. I'm really looking forward to play Lands of Galzyr, even if I still need to wait at least a year to be able to play it.

P.S. There are still 27 days left to participate in the Lands of Galzyr crowdfunding, and the game is already 182% funded.

Labels:


- posted by Tobold @ 9:50 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments
 
NFC Cards

I own a lot of games, but barely any toys. You won't find a shelf full of Star Wars action figures or anything like that in my house. The only thing similar I have is 4 figurines with characters from Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, so-called amiibo. And the only reason I bought those was that when I play Legend of Zelda: Breath of Wild, once per day per figurine I can touch that amiibo to the right thumbstick of the joycon and get some in-game items for that. More importantly, there are special in-game things, like a wolf pet, which can *only* be gotten this way. Other Nintendo Switch games have amiibo systems too, for example in Monster Hunter Stories 2 you can get special outfits as well as general resources via amiibo.

While I did buy those amiibo to try them out for Legend of Zelda, I am not a fan. Other than for the in-game items I don't have use for those figurines, and they are rather large and take up space. And they are expensive, and sometimes hard to get. Even a regular amiibo costs around $20, and good luck finding the Wolf-rider Link one for below $100 these days (I bought mine when it was still cheap). Nevertheless I did look on Amazon for those Monster Hunter Stories 2 amiibo, just to check what was available.

To my surprise, there was a *much* cheaper option available: NFC cards. Basically the same "near field communication" chip that makes an amiibo work, on a small plastic card. You can get complete sets for the game you are playing (12 for Monster Hunter Stories 2, or 24 for Legend of Zelda) for around the $20 that a single common amiibo would cost you. I was a bit sceptical whether that was legal and would work, but I tried it out, and it does.

Now obviously these NFC cards are produced by copying the information of the original amiibos. But that information can't be copyrighted, so the NFC card copy is perfectly legal. Only the artwork of the amiibo is copyrighted, which is the images on those NFC cards look as if a kid had tried to draw his favorite video game character. You can barely make out who it is supposed to be, so no copyright problem.

For me, this is perfect. I am never going to buy a real amiibo again. I only ever wanted the electronic function of them, and was never interested in the actual figurine. Of course I understand that this won't be true for everybody, and some collectors will want to have the figurines for display. But for me the cheap Chinese rip-off product is superior to the original.

- posted by Tobold @ 7:11 AM Permanent Link  (2) comments
Wednesday, August 04, 2021
 
Might & Magic X : No More Legacy

In January 2014 I bought Might & Magic X : Legacy for €29.99. I played it for 24 hours, wrote a small blog post about it, and then forgot about it. On June 1st 2021 Ubisoft shut down the online services for Might & Magic X : Legacy and a bunch of other games. And while they were at it, they also shut down the DRM servers for the game. Which the game needs to get past chapter 1. So, unless you "hack" the game to not check ownership anymore, Might & Magic X : Legacy is now effectively unplayable, even for people who legally bought the game.

I wouldn't say that this is a big loss, but there are more unhappy people about this than you would think. Because it drives home some very unpleasant truths about game "ownership", that everybody had been trying to forget. You don't ever own a game, you are just buying a limited license to play it. And while in some cases the actual owners just forget about that and just let you play your old games forever, that is more by accident than by some legal right of yours. With DRM, the accident can happen in the other direction: Without even thinking, a company can cut your access to the game you bought years ago. My guess is, that this won't be the last case.


- posted by Tobold @ 6:30 AM Permanent Link  (2) comments
Tuesday, August 03, 2021
 
The fragility of the influencer business

On YouTube I have a long list of channels I am subscribed to. That serves a dual purpose: I get updates when these channels post something new, and the content providers get increased ad revenues, so it is kind of my way of at least minimally "paying" them for the content they create. One of the channels I am subscribed to is The Spiffing Brit, who makes amusing posts about how he is breaking various games with in-game exploits. The Spiffing Brit recently fell for a scam that got his YouTube channel deleted (but he recovered it since). So did Jim Browning, who has a channel exposing scammers. And apparently there are a number of other YouTubers who fell for the same scam. Now the scammer apparently wasn't all that much interested in monetizing his exploit, to me it appeared that he was deliberately targeting people who have channels about scams and exploits in order to measure himself against the most informed possible targets. But for me that action was somewhat revealing about the fragility of the influencer "industry".

You probably heard how earlier this year a ransomware attack shut down a major pipeline in the USA, resulting in gasoline shortages and price increases. It is one of a handful of examples of hackers causing real industrial damages, as opposed to causing damage to reputation. A lot of companies simply have their industrial process control systems deliberately *not* connected to the internet, so a hacker would need to first gain physical access to the location before being able to do any harm. But even more importantly, these process control systems tend to have failsafe mechanisms hardwired, so a hacker can shut a pipeline down, but he can't make that pipeline explode. While hackers are able to damage companies, ultimately a brick & mortar company always retains controls over their physical assets, and recovers from the attack.

In the case of influencers on YouTube, their YouTube channel basically *is* the company. If that channel gets deleted, and the YouTuber can't manage to persuade YouTube to reverse that deletion, the business is gone. I have some small scale personal insight into the influencer business from the time my blog was actually popular and I had my 15 minutes of Warholian fame on the internet. At the time some people recommended that I should move away from Blogger and onto Wordpress for this or that reason. And the reality of things is that you can't: Whatever subscriber base you have as an influencer, your Google page rank that leads searches to you, and all other similar systems are linked to your one output channel, whether that is a blog or a YouTube channel. Even if you have all the content saved on a hard drive, and you make a new channel with the same name and the same content, your history is attached to your original channel, and is gone if you switch. My blog was never a commercial enterprise, so a destruction of my blog wouldn't have hurt anything but my pride. But these days, some YouTubers make significant amounts of money, and actually employ other people, for example video editors. Some channels effectively are small companies in the content creation business.

The way the scammer got YouTubers to delete their channel was by pretending to be from YouTube and threatening their channel with deletion if they didn't follow certain steps in the account settings. That, and the fact that these YouTubers managed to get that deletion reversed by contacting the real YouTube, reveals that hackers aren't the greatest worry: The company controlling the platform is. YouTube channels get deleted all the time by YouTube, because the channel owner did something that is against a very complicated and imprecise set of rules and regulations. This is what made the scam believable. But it also means that the company YouTube is basically holding all those small content creation companies hostage.

It is hard to really understand the amount of power that platform provider company has over those other companies. One is tempted to see them as a sort of landlord. And yes, any small company renting an office somewhere could be evicted by their landlord; the difference is that such a company could probably easily find another office in another building to rent from somebody else. If your "landlord" YouTube is evicting you, not only will it be nearly impossible to find an equivalent alternative for your content; but your "landlord" basically controls all of your customers, and you can't take them with you to the new location.

- posted by Tobold @ 10:41 AM Permanent Link  (5) comments
Newer›  ‹Older

  Powered by Blogger   Free Page Rank Tool