Tobold's Blog: January 2023

Tobold's Blog

Monday, January 30, 2023

ISS Vanguard - Pre-play Considerations

In December 2020 I did not back the Gamefound crowdfunding campaign of ISS Vanguard. Mainly because I am more a fan of the fantasy genre than science fiction. Two years later, in December 2022, ISS Vanguard got delivered to backers, and I was able to watch people play it on YouTube. It was immediately clear that this wasn't the game I would want to play with my wife, or my board game night group. In many aspects, ISS Vanguard resembles a RPG video game, but as there is not computer to take note of what you did, there is a relatively heavy bookkeeping part of the game, where by writing things down or moving cards from one space to another you create a memory of what you did, and the game state for your future action. There is a part of the game where you do nothing but move cards around in a three-ring binder. Not an activity that is much fun to do in a group.

However, I don't mind doing that sort of administrative work when playing a solo game. I love 7th Continent, which involves a lot of moving cards around in an index card box. And the more I watched people playing ISS Vanguard, the more interested I became in the game for me to play solo. So I "late pledged" the game on Gamefound. Unfortunately the site wasn't very explicit about what "late pledging" means in detail. Turns out it means that you'll get a copy from a second print run in Q3/Q4 2023. And I didn't want to wait that long. So I searched the internet and found an online shop that sold a copy of the first wave that had been delivered in 2022. That copy is now in the mail to me.

So why the growing fascination with a game that has so much busywork? I think it is in part because of a challenge, and in part because ISS Vanguard has elements that I do like from playing JRPG video games. I have a peculiar way of playing JRPG: I love doing side quests and even some grinding in order to make my characters stronger than what is expected from somebody who is just following the main story. And from what I could see, that sort of strategy would work rather well for ISS Vanguard. My observation of the YouTube streams was that if you do what is logical for somebody who is streaming a campaign game, and never go to the same planet twice, but prioritize advancing the main story, you end up being underleveled for the campaign content.

A part of that is definitively flawed game design, especially of the rank-up system. Planetary exploration in ISS Vanguard is about pushing your luck; you have a dwindling number of dice and supplies to refresh those dice. There is a temptation to concentrate on your main mission, and leave the planet as soon as you did that mission. However, to rank up the characters you took onto the planet, you need to collect a certain number of success tokens, and fulfil a random secondary condition. Unless you are very lucky, if you only do the main mission on a planet, you will probably not rank up your characters. Maybe from rank 1 to rank 2, but unlikely from rank 2 to rank 3, which requires twice as many success tokens. And unbeknownst to you, if you don't rank up early, it will come to haunt you later.

Basically I have seen people play, and done some theory-crafting, and I think that A) I know how to play the game more successfully, and B) that more successful strategy is one that I am more comfortable with. It involves not only pushing your luck further on any given planetary exploration, but also visiting planets more than once to grab really everything there is on that planet. That has the added advantage that if you do a planet twice, you will also go through the ship phase (the phase with the three-ring binder) twice, and advance your research and production projects further. ISS Vanguard is a game that challenges you with nasty surprises and the necessity to roll specific symbols on your custom dice; by going deeper on each planet, and a bit of grinding, you can get prepared for those challenges, because you have more dice and more dice manipulation.

In a way my interest in ISS Vanguard is the same psychological phenomenon than the one that is used in a lot of mobile game ads: They show somebody failing at the game, which makes you eager to try and to do better. In this case it probably wasn't intentional, nobody could have known that I was watching a series of streams where people didn't do very well in the game. But my reaction was the same, I am eager to try and to do better. I just hope that works out and I will actually have fun doing so.

P.S. Another observation about ISS Vanguard is that it pretends you can play with anywhere between 2 and 4 characters, but in reality the game isn't balanced around the character count. 4 characters are more likely than 2 characters to reach the rank-up condition of a planetary exploration, and then all 4 of them rank up, instead of just 2. Playing with 4 characters is giving you an advantage, so I will solo the game 4-handed.

Labels: Board Games

- posted by Tobold @ 10:10 AM Permanent Link (0) comments

Saturday, January 28, 2023

Have you no sense of decency?

About 7 decades ago, America was in the grips of the Red Scare and McCarthyism. It started out with a not totally unfounded fear of communist spies, but quickly spiraled out. And one of the most damaging ideas of the time was that it was very dangerous to have somebody with communist beliefs working in Hollywood, because subliminal messages might be hidden in a movie script and turn all of America communist. Hollywood writers, actors, and directors were blacklisted, including such obvious dangers as Charlie Chaplin.

McCarthyism began to crumble when in a carefully staged moment on television lawyer Joseph Welch asked Senator McCarthy "Have you no sense of decency?" in the context of a character assassination that McCarthy was doing. The Hollywood blacklist officially ended in 1960, although some of the blacklisted people had their careers already permanently destroyed by then.

After that, for some time, it was widely recognized that you shouldn't blacklist people for their political beliefs. The danger that somebody in the entertainment industry subverts the public with his political beliefs is much smaller than the danger to democracy and liberty the blacklisting itself does. If somebody is committing a crime because of his political beliefs, that should be dealt with by the justice system. Just holding political beliefs and speaking out about them should never be the reason for somebody losing his livelihood. Freedom of speech is one of the most important pillars of democracy and the rule of law.

What also needs to be considered is that Hollywood movies and other big entertainment projects are never the work of a single person. If you ban or boycott a movie because of the political beliefs of one person in a huge team, you are equally hurting a large number of people who don't even hold those beliefs. As if punishing somebody for "thought crimes" wasn't bad enough, you end up punishing people for "associating with people who committed thought crimes".

It makes me very sad that these days the idea that you should punish people for their political beliefs is back. That is not because I necessarily agree with those political beliefs. Although Voltaire didn't actually say it, his point of view was correctly described as "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it". The right to state their political beliefs of a public figure is the higher good, however much you might disapprove. It is the hallmark of tyrannies all over the world that they first attack this freedom of speech, before attacking other freedoms.

So if you might be tempted to participate or promote a boycott of an entertainment product this year, maybe you should ask yourself: "Have you no sense of decency?". Is attacking the livelihood of somebody you disagree with, or somebody associating with somebody you disagree with, really the morally correct choice? Aren't you getting blinded by your passionate support for one cause into hurting much more important pillars of a free society? If you participate in making it socially acceptable to destroy somebody's career or means of earning a living because of their political beliefs, what will you say if some day the tides turn and it is your political beliefs that allow others to destroy your life?

- posted by Tobold @ 7:56 AM Permanent Link (24) comments

Thursday, January 26, 2023

Heavy Metal Mouse

Last year in October my old gaming mouse broke and I had to replace it. I didn't want a cheap $10 mouse, as those aren't very suitable to play games with. But as I am not into e-sports or games with very fast reaction times, I didn't want a $100 high-end gaming mouse either. I ended up buying a Razer Deathadder Essential for $30, thinking that it would go well with my Razer keyboard, with which I am quite happy. 3 months later, the Razer mouse started malfunctioning: When I use the scroll wheel to scroll down, sometimes there is a wrong signal and the page jumps up instead of down. Quite annoying!

So I looked up the problem on the internet and found that other people had the same problem with the same mouse. And while one could fix it by disassembling the mouse and cleaning the contacts of the scroll wheel, the mouse wasn't built to be disassembled. You need to first remove glued on stuff from the bottom to even access the screws to open the mouse. People reported that cleaning the mouse on the inside also caused some irreparable damage. So I decided that I'd rather buy another new mouse. And this time I was doing more market research, looking for a solid product, and one with a good scroll wheel.

I ended up with the best-selling mouse on Amazon, the Logitech G502 Hero, for $40. And it is a heavy gaming mouse, which I didn't even know was a thing. The weight of a mouse affects its performance, and there are advantages and disadvantages to both very light and very heave mice. It turns out that for the games that I am playing, where precision is more important than speed, and for my large hands, a heavier mouse is better. The G502 Hero even comes with a pack of additional weights which you can use to make it even heavier, but I haven't tried that out yet.

But the feature I like the most about the G502 Hero is the metal scroll wheel. While you can use it like a regular scroll wheel, you can also unblock it, and it becomes an "infinite" scroll wheel. That is to say that it is so heavy and so well balanced that if you give it a flick to spin it, it will keep spinning for quite a long time. Enough to scroll to the end of even the longest document. That works pretty brilliantly for my purposes.

So right now the Logitech mouse is already a big improvement over the Razer mouse. I will have to see how long this new mouse lasts. But the 24,000 Amazon reviews, of which 80% are 5 star, make me think that this is probably a solid product.

- posted by Tobold @ 7:22 AM Permanent Link (8) comments

Saturday, January 21, 2023

Trickle-up economics

My interest in hobbies like gaming leads to me coming across more news about companies that make games and other forms of entertainment than news about companies in let's say heavy industry. And lately all the news about these companies have been bad. Tech companies like Apple are laying off record number of employees. Game companies like Hasbro are making very bad decisions in an attempt to stop the rapid shrinking of their profits. The share price of Netflix is half what it was at it's peak in 2021.

None if this is actually surprising. The current economic problem is a cost of living crisis, where between inflation and rising energy prices the average household is increasingly squeezed to pay its bills. And while that is bad news for the whole economy, it obviously disproportionally hits companies that make things that people buy from their disposable income. Share prices of energy companies are doing just fine; Exxon's share price nearly doubled in 2022. But once people have paid for all the necessities of life, these days there isn't much money left, if any. It is easier to not buy the latest iPhone, or Magic cards, or cancel your Netflix subscription, than to cut your spending on rent, food, and heating.

Previous recessions, like the one after the 2008 financial crisis, have shown a curious phenomenon: Countries with higher minimum wages and stronger worker protection got through the crisis a lot better than others. A prime example was Germany, where a deal was struck between unions, industry, and the government for workers to work shorter hours, receive some wage subsidies, and not be fired. That turned out to work brilliantly, because recessions do end, and it is a lot easier to increase cut hours than to rehire people you fired.

In 1914, Henry Ford more than doubled the salary of the workers in his Ford Motor Company, from $2.25 to $5. Henry Ford wasn't a socialist. But up to that time a typical worker didn't earn enough money to even consider buying a car. With Ford being the only one to produce affordable cars, the salary increase led to Ford's workers buying Ford cars. Giving money to working class and middle class households works wonder for the economy, because they tend to spend most of it. If the same company profits go into dividends payed out to already rich people instead of increased salaries, the money tends to get stuck in savings accounts. Ben Bernanke coined the term "savings glut". It describes a situation in which the spoils of capitalism are distributed in a way that gives the holder of capital too much, and the providers of labor too little. But beyond a certain point, capitalists can't find any productive investment for their money, which leads to it getting stuck in low-interest savings accounts, or wasted on bad investments like crypto. Economists talk of the "velocity of money", and it has fallen dramatically since the start of this century.

The short term economic future of Europe will see a lot of strikes. To an American that might look like a bad thing. But the end result will be an at least slightly larger share of the pie going to working class and middle-income households. And that money will have a higher "velocity". Unlike trickle-down economics, which has been repeatedly shown to not work at all, trickle-up economics makes everybody richer.

- posted by Tobold @ 9:21 AM Permanent Link (2) comments

Thursday, January 19, 2023

Retire as a millionaire! Self-identify now!

Dear Californians!

I would like to direct your attention to a brilliant opportunity to retire as a millionaire, at zero cost to yourself. The only thing you need to do is to self-identify as "black" on any official documents from now on. And in some years, you will receive $5 million. That is the opportunity offered by the San Francisco Reparations Plan, which foresees such a $5 million reparation payment for any citizen who has been self-identifying as black for a number of years. While the wider California reparations plan only comes out in June, and is currently still planning to base reparations on people being able to prove they descend from slaves, that plan has already been widely criticized. Who has documentation of his ancestry dating back over a century and a half? Given the political climate in California, the San Francisco version based on self-identification could very well be adopted state-wide.

So what if you aren't actually black? I have good news for you: You are! Pretty much any human being who would do a self DNA test, available for around a hundred bucks on Amazon, would find some percentage of being descendant from Africans. There is no scientific definition of "being black", so nobody can contradict you. And you are actually allowed to self-identify as something that you biologically aren't, so there really isn't any argument against self-identifying as black. Worried about you self-identifying as black leading to discrimination? Well, you only need to do it on official documents. Any possible employer, landlord, or other person who could possibly discriminate against you isn't going to do so based on such official records, but rather on how you look, or what your first name is.

I would especially recommend self-identifying as black to anybody who is actually a descendant of Chinese immigrants to California in the 19th century. While that might seem strange genetically, I would say that morally you have a much stronger claim at a local level. The State of California harmed a lot more Chinese immigrants than black slaves, which is both a function of geography, and because California was a Union state.

The San Francisco plan foresees a requirement that to qualify for a reparations payment, you must be an "individual who has identified as ‘Black/African American’ on public documents for at least 10 years". So I would advise you to start self-identifying as black now; it is likely that it will take at least 10 years before the plan is actually carried out. And the requirement time might still be reduced. After all, putting a 10-year minimum requirement on other policies based on self-identification would obviously be inacceptable. If you self-identify as black in California now, you have a chance of retiring a millionaire!

- posted by Tobold @ 10:46 AM Permanent Link (12) comments

Tuesday, January 17, 2023

Chillaxing Against the Storm

I am still playing Against the Storm. Steam tells me that I am at 86+ hours played now. I also reached the level cap, and nearly all the upgrades. I might make a second profile and start over, but for the moment I am still playing the first playthrough. Only, I am probably not playing it the way you might think.

Against the Storm technically has 24 different difficulty settings. There are the 4 basic ones: Settler, Pioneer, Veteran, and Viceroy. But if you beat Viceroy, you get the option to play on Prestige 1, beat that to get to Prestige 2, etc., until you reach Prestige 20. That suggests that this is how the game is meant to be played: Play at increasing difficulty levels, try to push it to the hardest setting, and get more rewards for each run. I don't do that. I play most games on either Pioneer or Veteran difficulty. I basically can't lose a game at Pioneer, so I have a 97% win rate, with my losses coming from the occasional dabbling at Viceroy. I unlocked Prestige difficulty, but never used it.

I am basically chillaxing the game, and not challenging myself. Rather than trying to play in an optimal way, I am trying out different things. For example you gain embarkation points and can use those to buy resources for a run; while I know what resources would be optimal, sometimes I just buy something that is interesting, but sub-optimal and see how the game goes.

Against the Storm is surprisingly welcoming to such a more casual approach. Yes, if you play always at lower difficulty, it takes a lot longer to level up and gain upgrades. But that is the only disadvantage. And the rewards you get at higher difficulty down go up all that fast for prestige, so it isn't as if meta advancement slows down to unbearable levels if you play on easier settings.

The main advantage of playing at lower difficulty is something that you can observe with many different games: The higher the difficulty, the more options of the game become unviable. You can choose to do certain things, but you can't win high difficulty levels if you choose the sub-optimal stuff. You are supposed to have learned what works best, and play like a well-oiled machine. At lower difficulty you can goof around and experiment with things. You can take risky timed orders and not worry if you end up being unable to complete them. You can choose to play in interesting locations with modifiers that are rather bad. And you can change your strategy in function of the random forest events, cornerstones, and building choices you get. That keeps the game fresh.

- posted by Tobold @ 10:32 AM Permanent Link (1) comments

Sunday, January 15, 2023

Is that really the legacy?

One of the major game releases of 2023 will happen in 4 weeks, when Hogwart's Legacy is released on February 10. So I looked through the various information available about the game. And I can't get a solid grip on what the game is really about.

Hogwart's Legacy is to the Harry Potter books/films what Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor is to the Lord of the Rings books/films: You get to play in an open world that depicts the world you know from the original, but in a different age; thus you don't play as the main character you know, and don't encounter the other characters from the original. So in Hogwart's Legacy you interact with the school of Hogwart's, including surrounding areas, and including the school system with attending classes etc.

While it is easy to see how that will attract a lot of Harry Potter fans, it is a lot less obvious how it will allow them to have a similar experience than the books/films. We know how open world games play; there are usually a myriad of points of interest on a map to explore and things to interact with. That is necessary, because an open world which you can only fly over and look at would become boring pretty quickly. And thus there will be something like collectibles or "side quests" which make the player visit all the nooks and crannies of Hogwart's and surroundings.

At first glance that corresponds to Harry Potter and his friends exploring the school. But the story in the original is a lot tighter and linear. Harry Potter doesn't go on side quests. Nor does he get into a series of wand fights to level up. The use of combat magic in the books is pretty rare. Grinding through combat encounters and open world points of interest to gain levels doesn't really *feel* like Harry Potter.

My prediction for Hogwart's Legacy is that it will follow a trend we have seen a lot for major film and game releases in 2022: Well-paid critics giving really high review scores, and the user reviews having an average score that is a lot lower. While the numbers don't really tell you anything, reading what users complain about is usually a better indication of the quality of a game than the paid reviews. So that, and streamed playthroughs is what I am going to look for to decide whether this is the game for me.

- posted by Tobold @ 7:52 AM Permanent Link (6) comments

Saturday, January 14, 2023

Baldur's Gate 3 - The problem with companions

Dungeons & Dragons has character classes which are designed to have unique advantages, allowing every player around a table of a pen & paper game to shine in different situations. In a dungeon full of traps and locked doors or treasure chests, a rogue who can disarm traps and open locks is so useful as to be almost indispensable. A fireball-throwing wizard is an enormous advantage in a fight against a horde of goblins, as melee characters have a much harder time to kill multiple enemies at once. You need a divine spellcaster to cast healing spells. And so on.

So what happens if a group doesn't contain any character that has a specific advantage? In the pen & paper version the answer is easy: The DM adjusts the adventure. If there is nobody who can pick locks, there won't be many locked doors in the adventure, because that would be frustrating. Even if the adventure module foresees a door to be locked, the DM can simply decide otherwise. Unfortunately, a computer DM in a game like Baldur's Gate 3 isn't all that flexible. If you try to play BG3 without anybody able to pick locks or disarm traps, you are going to miss out on a lot of content, and have a really hard time in certain locations.

The "standard" way to play Baldur's Gate 3 in early access is to custom create a character of any class you want, and then relatively early in the adventure choose 3 NPC companions out of a selection of 5. That selection contains 4 rather essential character classes (fighter, rogue, cleric, wizard) and a warlock, who is an arcane spellcaster like the wizard, and can replace the wizard (although that wouldn't be optimal, given the camp system of BG3). So if your custom character is a fighter or similar class, let's say barbarian, you wouldn't take the fighter NPC, but rather the rogue, cleric, and wizard to create a well-rounded party. And so on, if you want to play a cleric or druid, you might want to take the fighter, rogue and wizard as companions. Yes, you can custom create a sorcerer, and then take the wizard, warlock, and cleric to have an all-spellcaster party. But you would probably come to regret that lack of balance later in situations where you could really have used a fighter or rogue.

So, from a tactical optimization point of view, in Baldur's Gate 3 you will want to choose your companions based on their character class and specific advantages, which will be needed at some point in the adventure. But one of the big selling points of Baldur's Gate 3 is the relationship management between your main character and his companions. And the companions you most want to have for tactical reasons might not be the ones you want to hang out with.

I felt that very strongly when I was trying to play Baldur's Gate 3 as the typical good aligned hero adventurer, helping the weak and trying to not do evil. As it turns out, 3 of the 5 possible companions *are* evil, with a 4th one being neutral, and only Gale the wizard will approve of your actions when you are consistently nice. If I wanted to make an arcane spellcaster as main, and thus not take any arcane spellcasters as companions, I would be forced to group up with a murderous fighter, a blood-sucking rogue, and a cleric of darkness. Then I would either need to play evil myself, or "cheese" the approval system by constantly save-scumming, and reloading after dialogue options lead to disapproval. You can temporarily dismiss a companion, do the dialogue that he would disapprove of while he isn't around, and then get him back into the party. Obviously not a fun way to play the game. But if you constantly play in a way your companions disapprove of, they will leave the party.

Unless you want to play an evil character, Baldur's Gate 3 doesn't have enough companions you'd actually want to go adventuring with. Which is really strange, because lots of story elements revolve around being a hero and helping the weak. You either play against the story, or against your companions. Not really a great choice from a role-playing perspective.

- posted by Tobold @ 10:48 AM Permanent Link (5) comments

Tuesday, January 10, 2023

Baldur's Gate 3 - Playing with 4 custom characters

I just managed to start a new game of Baldur's Gate 3, in the patch 9 early access version, using 4 custom characters. To do that you need to turn the video settings to very low, and then start 4 different copies of the game. You then create a direct access multiplayer game, and let the other 3 copies of the game join the hosting first copy. Once you created all characters, and joined the game, you can quit with the other 3 copies and save the game. From then on you can play with 4 custom characters with normal graphics settings and just one instance of the software running.

I first played Baldur's Gate 3 back in October 2020, when the first early access version was released. These past weeks I have been playing the patch 9 version, because I wanted to see the characters at level 5, and try out the bard. But Baldur's Gate 3 normally is played with just one custom character, and 3 companions from a list of five choices (fighter, cleric, wizard, rogue, and warlock). Which means that with 11 character classes currently in the game, it is somewhat hard to try out different classes if you always use 3 companions. Yes, the interaction with the companions is a big part of the final game, but for exploring which class you like best, they aren't ideal. So now I have a game with a paladin, a druid, a bard, and a sorcerer. Which is much better, but still leaves the barbarian and ranger to test.

Between the level cap of 5 and more limited choices of subclasses, you can't really recreate all you favorite pen & paper D&D characters anyway. For example some recent pen & paper characters I had were a hexblade warlock and a war cleric, neither of which exists in BG3. Plus, some of my favorite spells in D&D, like the cleric's Spiritual Weapon, don't exist either. I managed to turn my Tabaxi paladin into an elf equivalent, but will have to see whether the combination of dual-wielding with divine smite works as well in BG3 than in the original rules.

Another important factor is the available gear. My dexterity-based paladin is probably a good choice, because I haven't seen any armor heavier than scale mail in the game, which limits the option of making your paladin an optimal tank. On the other hand the wizard is probably superior to the sorcerer in BG3, because of the frequent availability of scrolls, from which he can increase his spell repertoire; plus in BG3 it is easier to switch prepared spells than in pen & paper D&D, and easy to long-rest, which makes wizards really powerful.

The release of Baldur's Gate 3 is now announced for August 2023. I might actually wait for 2024 before playing the release version, to wait for the bugs to be ironed out. The early access version is very playable, but there are still bugs: In my recent playthrough (where I played through absolutely all the content available in early access), I had frequent problems with the pathfinding of my companions, and a recurring bug in which Shadowheart forgot which spells she had prepared every time I loaded the game. The other big disadvantage from playing early access is that it totally spoils everything in chapter 1. BG3 is a game in which all the encounters are heavily scripted, there are no random encounters. That makes them a lot easier if you know what will happen, and can approach them differently. Some fights, like the one against the Spectator or against Grym are rather unfair unless you did them before and can avoid getting a nasty surprise. So I don't think replayability is actually the strongest point of this game. In some aspects, Solasta - Crown of the Magister is a better PC version of 5th edition Dungeons & Dragons.

- posted by Tobold @ 1:08 PM Permanent Link (2) comments

Friday, January 06, 2023

D&D and Lawyers

Dungeons & Dragons always had "rules lawyers", that is players who were overly concerned about the correct interpretation of the rules. But if you follow any D&D YouTube channels these days, chances are high that they feature actual lawyers. This is due to Hasbro / Wizards of the Coast planning a new "open gaming license", OGL 1.1. And this license is somewhat less generous than OGL 1.0a from the year 2000. I am not a lawyer, but let's zoom out a bit and explain a bit of context.

It is basically impossible to play Dungeons & Dragons without "creating content". Even if you play an official adventure or campaign module, the DM always needs to flesh things out. And of course you might want to invent your own adventures. As long as that happens within the confines of a single gaming group, this process doesn't involve licenses or lawyers at all. But of course some people who did create content for Dungeons & Dragons then wanted to share that content further. And as D&D content doesn't make any sense without referencing D&D intellectual property, you can't legally publish and especially not make money of that sort of D&D content without the permission of Wizards of the Coast, the owner of the D&D IP.

In the very early years of the internet, when D&D was still owned by TSR, they were infamous for aggressively going after anybody even publishing free homebrew D&D content on Usenet. Which turned out to be not a good idea, because they basically destroyed free advertising for their game. By the year 2000, and the third edition of D&D under Wizards of the Coast ownership, it had become clear that some sort of legal framework was needed that would allow players to put homebrew D&D content on the internet. Thus Open Game License was born. Wizards of the Coast provided a "system reference document" SRD, which was basically a rules version of D&D that was compatible with the D&D rules that WotC published, but without the "product identity" of specific WotC material. For example the D&D rules had "Melf's Acid Arrow", but as Melf was a specific character owned by WotC, the SRD just had that spell as "Acid Arrow". While WotC published 4th edition D&D under a more restrictive "game system license", they went back to the OGL with 5th edition.

Now for much of my time with Dungeons & Dragons, the OGL meant that both players and small publishing companies like Kobold Press could legally publish D&D adventures and homebrew rules. That was no big deal, as this was all very much niche stuff and didn't involve large sums of money. But these days companies like Critical Role playing D&D on Twitch and YouTube make millions of dollars every year. And while there is some collaboration between Critical Role and WotC, it is easy to see why WotC would quite like to get some licensing fees from Critical Role rather than allowing them to operate under a free license. Thus OGL 1.1 makes a big difference between publishing non-commercial D&D stuff, and people making more than $750,000 a year from D&D content. And it specifies that the OGL “only allows for creation of roleplaying games and supplements in printed media and static electronic file formats. It does not allow for anything else, including but not limited to things like videos, virtual tabletops or VTT campaigns, computer games, novels, apps, graphics novels, music, songs, dances, and pantomimes.".

Thus a lot of the D&D stuff already out there, like the PC game Solasta: Crown of the Magister, or various YouTube videos, aren't covered by the new OGL, and need some other license to operate under. Which might cost them some money. On the other hand, WotC is unlikely to go after every person making a D&D video on YouTube. This is further complicated by this all being contract and IP law, which is notoriously difficult. You can write *anything* you want into a contract agreement. You and me could make a contract in which you sell me your soul. But that would just be a piece of paper, as I don't have the technical means to actually harvest souls. Yet! :) In the case of the OGL there is a lot of discussion in how far WotC can actually change their original OGL, as it contains words like "perpetual". Different people with different degrees of legal experience have different opinions on that, but before a case comes in front of an actual judge, I would say the matter is somewhat undetermined. Nevertheless, if you are a small scale YouTube D&D content creator, and Hasbro sends a copyright infringement notice to YouTube, your channel is likely to get taken down without a court case. And it would be very expensive and time-consuming to reverse that. Thus the large number of D&D YouTubers who are currently so unhappy and posting videos featuring actual lawyers.

- posted by Tobold @ 1:45 PM Permanent Link (12) comments

Thursday, January 05, 2023

The Zombie Apocalypse

As a scientist I can think of a long list of possible scenarios on how humanity might undergo an apocalyptic downfall, or even extinction. The scientific probability of the actual apocalypse involving any zombies is exactly 0%. Unlike nuclear explosions, pandemics, or exploding suns, there is no known or even hypothetically possible scientific pathway which turns people into the sort of zombie frequently depicted in literature, movies, or games. You can turn a person into a near-comatose entity that you might call a "zombie", or you can turn him into a bundle of uncontrolled aggression, but you can't possibly create a shuffling zombie army hunting down everybody else. While the chance of an alien invasion is very slim, it is infinitely higher than the chance of a zombie apocalypse.

As I don't find the scenario very believable, I don't like movies or games featuring a zombie apocalypse very much. And I had hoped that the trend would sooner or later lead to an oversaturation of the market, and then disappear. Unfortunately it seems that in 2023 we will still get a lot of zombie apocalypse content. HBO will air a The Last of Us TV series. The long list of upcoming 2023 video games contains quite a lot of games involving zombies, from The Day Before to Dead Space, to a number of sequels of zombie games. Even the previews I saw of upcoming board games had zombie games, as if the million different versions of Zombicide weren't enough.

In the end it is all part of a greater trend: Lack of creativity and imagination leads to reheating of old ideas. While you certainly could come up with an enemy for a game which fulfills a similar role, being dangerous mostly in large groups and thus satisfying to kill in large numbers, nobody is bothering to come up with a better story. It is just easier to reuse the existing zombie apocalypse trope.

- posted by Tobold @ 9:56 AM Permanent Link (7) comments

Wednesday, January 04, 2023

Switch 2023

I don't play all that often on my Nintendo Switch. I use it a lot during 3 weeks of the year, my summer holidays. But at home I usually gravitate towards the PC for gaming. Some of that is a preference for mouse and keyboard controls where viable. But a bigger part is probably that my PC games library is so much larger than my Switch games library. Games on the Switch tend to be rather expensive, and not go down in price as much as PC games.

The one advantage of that is that my Switch gaming is somewhat predictable. I'll play only a few games, and usually just the Switch exclusives. And because I usually have to pay full price for them anyway, I might as well get them on release. So I just ordered two Switch games from Amazon: The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom and Fire Emblem Engage. Given how much I likes Breath of the Wild and Three Houses, those two game look like pretty safe bets to me.

The one risk that I am taking is that the games won't run very well. The Switch was not the most powerful console to begin with, is now aging, and as a result some high-profile titles in 2022 had some serious performance problems. The "mid-generation upgrade" / "Switch Pro" never materialized and was now more or less officially cancelled. It isn't clear how downward compatible a Switch 2 would be, and it is unlikely to be released this year.

So I am taking that pre-order gamble. Worst case scenario is that the games don't run well on my Switch, and not at all on a future Switch 2. Which would probably mean that I wouldn't buy that Switch 2. Buying a console just for a few exclusive games isn't really viable if there is no backward compatibility.

- posted by Tobold @ 2:24 PM Permanent Link (1) comments

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