Steam informed me that a game on my wishlist was released, Pathfinder: Kingmaker. So I have a look at the Steam page and find that the reviews are only 60% positive. Not good. A bit of research reveals what the problem is: The difficulty of enemies is all over the place, from very easy to unbeatable. If you play at normal difficulty level, you get repeated total party kills. If you dial down the difficulty to very easy, the big encounters become playable, but the trash mobs are now completely boring. Too bad, I would have liked to try the game. But unless the devs fix the balance problem, I guess I won't.

Note that high difficulty by itself isn't a problem, as long as it is consistent. It is difficulty spikes that break the flow of a game and make it frustrating. Developers should know that. I don't know, why we still get games with bad flow in 2018.

I don't ask for money very often on this blog. Today is an exception. The role-playing club Saigneurs Du Chaos, of which I am a member, has started a crowdfunding on GameOn to pay for renovations of the house we play in. The owner of the house is willing to let the club have the house, if we pay for the necessary renovations. Already having a house to play in, instead of the back of a friendly local games store, is pretty nice for a role-playing club. And I don't know any other role-playing clubs having their own house. So we are collecting money by crowdfunding, to make this dream come true.

I understand that this isn't really a crowdfunding project with a lot of appeal to people other than members of the club. The project is in French, so most backer rewards aren't much use to the non-French speaking rest of the world. And backer rewards like 1 year or lifetime membership obviously make sense only if you live in Belgium. But any donations would be appreciated!

In 1857 Thomas Hughes wrote a novel Tom Brown’s School Days, in which the character of Harry Flashman appears as a bully. Over a century later George MacDonald Fraser used Flashman as his anti-hero of The Flashman Papers, a series of novels and short stories describing in a satirical manner Flashman’s further career. Harry Flashman is not a nice person; he is selfish, a womanizer, and a coward, but apt at manipulating situations to both save his skin and come out looking like a hero. I read the books a while ago, they are funny, and I was thinking of Flashman when I needed a character for a new Dungeons & Dragons campaign.

I am a player in that campaign, and I needed a character that would fit well into the world. The world is the one of The Witcher novels and video games, and it is not a nice place. Somewhat dark fantasy, with a world full of selfish and cruel people. A valiant knight in shining armor would be completely out of place in that world, and look like an idiot as well. So instead I made a bard with a character modelled after Harry Flashman.

I know a lot of people who basically play always the same personality for any of their role-playing characters. Me, I like not only to play different character classes, but also different personalities. Admittedly that is not that easy. What helps is to have a role model for your role-playing character in mind. Flashman is an interesting enough character for an anti-hero role. When I play for example a lawful good paladin, I model my behavior after Benton Fraser, the mountie in the TV series Due South. Using a character from books or TV provides you with concrete examples of modes of behavior, which is easier to follow than a more theoretical description of character.

In practice my bard worked rather well. We played the first two sessions this weekend, and I managed to be and look effective, while simultaneously playing up his cowardly and selfish behavior. Playing an anti-hero is a bit of a challenge, because in reality the social contract binding you to your group requires you not to be actually too selfish. You can’t really run from a fight and leave your group to die. So you need to do your best to help, while role-playing a coward. But I think I managed that and that resulted in some interesting role-play. Go, Flashman!

I played Dungeons & Dragons all weekend long, two 6-hour sessions of a new campaign in the Witcher universe. I'm playing an unexpectedly effective bard, specialized in melee combat, less in magic. But the bard remains a hybrid character, between spellcaster and fighter, and that makes the difference between the two concepts very evident.

In 5th edition D&D, fighters and other non-spellcasters have a rather constant output of damage. It is modulated by chance, sometimes you hit, sometimes you don't hit, sometimes you roll high damage, sometimes you roll low damage. But mostly you do the same attacks every round, with a decent average damage. Spellcasters work with a different model: The have a number of spells they can cast per day, and on average those spells are more powerful than the attacks of the non-spellcasters. But once they run out of spells, they are basically reduced to cantrips and less efficient weapon attacks, which deal less damage than the non-spellcasters.

At low levels this is reasonably balanced: The spellcasters have limited amounts of spell slots, so they either preserve them, or run out. That gives the non-spellcasters opportunity to shine, especially in long fights, or when there are lots of fights in an adventuring day with little opportunity to rest. The so-called "linear fighters, quadratic wizards" problem appears a mid-level, and gets worse with high-level characters. Basically the non-spellcasters keep getting a bit better with every level, improving their combat stats, improving their proficiency, or getting additional attacks. But the spellcasters get much better over time: They get both *more* spells, and *better* spells. Instead of running out of spells and having to cast cantrips that are less good than non-spellcaster attacks, they only run out of ultra-powerful high-level spell slots, and still cast lower level spells which are better than anything a non-spellcaster can do. The concentration rule makes spellcasters in 5th edition a bit less overpowering than in editions 1 to 3.5, but they still rule at higher levels.

The Dungeon Master can modify this a bit with the kind of encounters he presents, and how many encounters he puts between two opportunities to rest. Many damage spells are area effect spells, and thus gain in power when there are lots of enemies around, preferably close together. Fights against a single big monster is more of a gamble for spellcasters; they might have spells that effectively neutralize the big boss monster, but usually that involves the monster failing a saving throw, so it is not a sure deal. A big fireball is less efficient on a single big monster than on a group of smaller ones. The number of encounters per adventuring day is a big tricky, because lots of fights one after another fit well into a dungeon setting, but less well into some other settings.

One of the consequences of this linear fighter, quadratic wizards problem is that campaigns rarely reach high level. The disparity in power becomes so annoying that the group falls apart, and then starts another campaign at lower level again. Even many of the official WotC published campaigns end somewhere between level 11 and 15, and there aren't any campaigns getting mid-level players to the level 20 cap. I also like the solution of the warlock class, which has few spells (only 4 spell slots at level 20, compared to 22 spell slots for a wizard), but recovers them more easily, and casts them at high power. But seeing that people disliked the much more balanced 4th edition, it seems that the linear fighters, quadratic wizards problems is here to stay.

I received a notification that the credit card which I used a long time ago to pay for my lifetime membership of Lord of the Rings Online has expired in 2013. I'm told "To link a new card for automatic renewal of subscription Lifetime VIP in project The Lord of the Rings Online ™, click here. Otherwise, your subscription will be cancelled on January 1, 2038.". So apparently a lifetime is 25 years after your credit card expires.

I think I won't link a new card. I'll have to live with the fact that I won't be able to play any more in 2038. :) This Lifetime VIP membership turned out to be a bad idea years ago, as I didn't play LotRO all that long. In addition the game went from subscription model to Free2Play model, so the lifetime membership made even less sense. I think I had a certain idealism at some point in time in which I believed that MMORPGs would be eternal and the gaming model of the future, but that turned out to be not the case.

I'm joking. Mostly. The term Pay2Win has been misused so much, that it has become nearly meaningless. So when I made an observation of facts in Destiny 2, I couldn't really tell who would consider that as Pay2Win, and who wouldn't.

The fact is that if I enter a PvP ("Crucible") match today in Destiny 2, I am a burden to my team because I am only level 20. This is because I only have the basic version of the game. If I wanted to achieve a higher level, there is nothing in-game that I can do. I need to pull out my wallet and buy the DLCs and Forsaken expansion. Thus only if I pay, I could possibly "win" in PvP.

Of course that is the same as with any MMORPG in which expansions increase the level cap. If you don't buy the expansion, you can't level up. And if you can't level up, you can't compete. Kudos to Blizzard for at least making all expansions before the current one free. For Destiny 2 you can't even use the Forsaken expansion if you haven't bought the two previous DLCs, which is why there is a "legendary edition" which contains everything. Many people would not consider this "Pay2Win", because DLCs and expansions are primarily sold as being additional game content, the level cap rise is secondary.

While I enjoy a bit of shooter gameplay from time to time, I am neither very good nor very interested in PvP, or "winning" this sort of game in general. My initial interest in Destiny 2 was low, and I only ended up buying it because of a $12 deal from Humble Bundle Monthly. Buying the $20 DLCs or $60 "legendary edition" of the expansion doesn't really make sense for me. I finished the main story, but I can still do some "adventures" or just do some open world content when I feel like shooting some aliens. I don't know how many hours I played Destiny 2 (there is no internal system to determine /played time, and the external websites that offer it don't appear to work for me now), but I guess I played the game enough to consider the $12 I paid to be not wasted.

After playing so many MMORPGs and expansions, I am a bit weary of full-price expansions. By definition an expansion isn't a new game, but just more content for something you already played. There is a high risk that paying the price of a full game for an expansion ends up being bad value for money. But as people get attached to their characters and want to progress them further, they are willing to pay for that further progress, more than just for the new content. So in a way Pay2Win isn't a completely inaccurate description of the situation.

From a purely theoretical point of view I find people working together online a better idea than people trying to kill each other online. However if you look at chat, forums, and other places where gamers talk among each other, it becomes clear very quickly that cooperative multiplayer is a source of extreme frustration and anger. In team vs. team games in which the community has been described as "toxic", you will find that most of that toxicity is directed to people on the same team, not the opposing team.

After having reached the level in Destiny 2 where I get access to "strikes", which is Destiny's way of saying "LFG dungeons", I came up with a theory of why cooperative multiplayer is so problematic. I believe that it is much easier to tune single player difficulty to the right level. With only one player, knowing his level and gear/stats enables a game to provide him content of a challenging but not impossible difficulty, because the effect skill has on the performance of a single player is limited. But if there is a group, the effect of skill, or rather coordination between the players, makes the possible range of power of a group much wider. You can easily see that in places where a game makes it possible for a coordinated team (e.g. from a guild) to fight a team of random strangers. Coordination, especially the use of voice chat, makes a team far, far more powerful than a team that doesn't talk to each other.

Some people, like Gevlon or the Jacksonville shooter, are obsessed with the idea that the purpose of a game is winning. I always believed that the purpose of a game is playing, that is exploring options without having to fear consequences too much. What if I tried this crazy stunt move? Can I circumvent this challenge instead of facing it head on? Cooperative multiplayer makes this "playing" of a game much harder, while having the potential of making winning easier, if the other players on your team know what they are doing. If fun in games comes from a learning experience, the guy in the team who is there for the very first time and is probably having fun figuring out how this works ends up being a drag and a problem to his team mates, who are just there to win.

Theoretically clever game design could work around this problem. A game could estimate better how new and thus how proficient a player is, and get a better and better idea of the skill of a player by keeping score of his individual contribution over time. That would enable the game's matchmaking system to work much better, both in team vs. environment and in team vs. team mode. However the fundamental problem of matchmaking is that the better the game is in matching the right players together, the longer the wait for that match to happen becomes. So most matchmaking algorithms in games are very basic, and lead to the above mentioned problems and toxicity.

My preferred solution would be games in which the performance of a team isn't subjected to a simple fail or pass test. If you don't need to "win" against AI or another team, cooperation becomes much less contentious. For example in games like A Tale in the Desert people can work together to dig holes or build pyramids. Any contribution to such a task is a positive contribution, even if somebody is for some reason bad at this particular task. A guy carrying bricks slower than the others is still better than the guy not being there at all. Wouldn't it be great if we could have more games in which people could work together without constantly frustrating and angering each other?

I’ve been playing D&D twice now in the past weeks as a DM using a small dungeon of up to 10 rooms, built in 3D printed tiles. I would like to do some more of that, but I am out of ideas for interesting dungeon rooms. I’ve been looking for ideas via Google, and noticed that a lot of the suggestions I can find on the internet share a common flaw: They don’t share the fun with the players, they are only (possibly) fun for the DM.

I talked earlier about decision points. Many of the suggested ideas have those decision points; but the reasoning behind what happens remains completely obscured from the players. For me as DM it is always important to look at any dungeon room both from the perspective of the DM, and from the perspective of the players. If the DM information says that a room has this or that function, I also wonder how the players are supposed to find out. What do they see when they come in? How can the consequences of their actions enlighten them to what is really going on? In the stuff I read these questions frequently aren’t answered: As DM you get told what the room does if the players behave in a certain way, but not how they can find out what to do. In extreme cases the players are supposed to do random stuff until a door opens and they’ll never find out why.

In his Theory of Fun Raph Koster explains that fun for players is the result of understanding game elements. Yes, being able to open the treasure chest is important for a D&D player, but if there is a puzzle or trap involved, it is more important that the player *understands* what this challenge is about and how to solve it. A dungeon location with a rich backstory but no way for the players to find out about it is a wasted opportunity. I’ll keep looking for better material for my dungeons, but it is hard to sort out the wheat from the chaff. Any suggestions?

I like the idea of the Humble Bundle Monthly: Once per month you get an offer to buy a triple-A game for $12, and you get a bunch of indie games thrown in for free. I bought Civilization 6 and Destiny 2 that way, both way cheaper than any other offer, and some of the lesser games I got in the bundle look interesting too. Because of this I am still subscribed to the Humble Bundle Monthly newsletter, although it is a bit spammy, informing you of the monthly offer once a week. And while I am having a negative reaction to the current offer, Overwatch for $12, this is just because it pushes a wrong button for me, a pet peeve.

I have been playing MMORPGs for many years, more than a decade, and spent a considerable amount of time not only playing them, but also analyzing them and blogging about them. In my mind MMORPGs had a great potential to become online worlds in which we would want to hang out forever, but they never fully realized that potential because of lack of courage and innovation on the side of developers and game companies. So the trend faded, and even I am not playing MMORPGs any more, because they evolved into a bunch of derivative and repetitive chores instead of living and breathing worlds.

While I am somewhat okay with MMORPGs having gone out of fashion, it makes me angry what came and replaced them: Online multiplayer PvP games, from League of Legends to Fortnite. To me these games are the essence of all what I hated about bad MMORPGs: Competitive, hate-filled places instead of social, collaborative ones. Players being lured in to serve as content, so that game companies save money on creating content. Exploiting player’s weaknesses for virtual gambling in the form of lootboxes instead of subscriptions. It is as if a sociologist studied MMORPGs for years, discovered all human weaknesses in online games, and set out to exploit as many of them as he could for monetary gain.

So, sorry Humble Bundle, but I think that games like this are a plague upon gamers, and I wouldn’t even play them if you paid me $12. I just hope the trend fades away in another decade.

After having a lot of trouble trying to print with PLA on my Zortrax M200 Plus, I finally discovered what the problem was. The symptoms I had were that my PLA wouldn't print at all at the typical PLA temperatures of up to 210°C, but the printer would make some clicking noise. At higher temperatures the PLA finally came out of the nozzle, but not as much as it should be. The result was very bad rafts, but which due to the high temperature stuck very much to the printed piece and couldn't be removed.

Finally the whole system broke down and wouldn't print at all any more, just making that clicking noise. Cleaning and then changing the nozzle didn't help. Ultimately I had to open the extruder to fix the problem. What turned out was that the Zortrax M200 Plus only has a single roller in its extruder, without a second metal roller to press the filament against while transporting it. The PLA I used had a very smooth surface, and is rather hard. So the roller couldn't grip the filament right and didn't push it properly into the heated channel and the nozzle. The clicking noise the roller slipping of the filament.

The only solution was to go back to ABS, which is softer, and thus the roller gets a better grip on the filament. But I have to say that I am a bit disappointed with the Zortrax extruder: All other 3D printer extruders I have seen up to now are using two metal rollers, and not just one.