Monthly Archives: May 2018

MTG: Pet Cards VII, Lorwyn And Morningtide

Lorwyn is a wonderful world, and an almost wonderful set. It wasn’t a set well-designed for its high-profile purposes; the draft environment was so catastrophically complex and often so debilitatingly lopsided, where someone would wind up with three lords to your no lords and you’d lose games based on your board being overloaded.

There was a certain awkwardness to making tribal decks in Lorwyn, too! Because the environment was full of cards of a type, but the best cards of each type were pretty similar. There were only so many good soldiers, so many good kithkin. You could try and overlap on your synergies, but even then you just got these very dense decks full of Dorks that Attacked.

What’s more, the Spells – you know, those things That Make Game States interesting – were all a bit weak in Lorwyn block, attached as they were to the Clash mechanic.

I’m also sad about how Lorwyn introduced the Tribal supertype, which is an unsupported type, now. It’s sad because while the rationale for Wizards to never do it again is strong, it means that the only Changeling or Tribal cards we ever see are the ones we got. Sure, for [mtg_card]Nameless Inversion[/mtg_card], that’s great, a solid card, but [mtg_card]Blades of Velis Veil[/mtg_card] just isn’t in the same league. I love little effects like that, small corner case cards that are useful to a whole variety of decks you might want something like it in later building.

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May 2018 Wrapup

And now here we are at the end of May!

Daily posts again! This month’s favourite articles include The Whole Sort Of General Mish Mosh Of Confrontation, Helping You Write When You Can’t Write, and my review of Far Cry 4. Also this month I started making blog posts more directly from my PhD readings.

This month’s t-shirt is a pair of shirts – both designed to evoke the old TMs of Pokemon games. You can get them both on Redbubble!

Game launched? May’s game was The Roads To Springdell here at Invincible Ink and DriveThruCards! This time, it’s a gentle, pastoral trick-taking builder game, where you can make your own little town build up out of nothing.

Springdell is another game made possible by Patreon, thanks to people helping to finance the stock art I purchased from Anabal Casis.

This month’s video is honestly a bit weak, but it’s weak for a reason. Most of my videos so far have been some variety of a slide show, and I haven’t gotten into the habit of recording video of every game I play yet. This meant that when I was done with a game, reinstalling it and getting footage of it was basically another week’s work, time I didn’t have. Instead, I assigned myself a goal, to produce a video in four hours.

It’s weak and it’s inconsistant but I learned a lot from the tools. So I’m happy with that.

As always, this work is being financed, in part by my Patreon! As before, this is a way you can get tailored content for you! We’ve got a possible thing happening over there for patrons about getting copies of games for free or expanded copies of games for the print-and-players.

This month I started recording how often I ate fast food, how often I had no-meat meals, and tried to arrange so that once a week, I had a non-meat day. It’s been interesting and honestly, kind of fun so far.

The Whole Sort Of General Mish Mosh Of Confrontation

If you haven’t worked it out, since I read every day, and I don’t want this blog to just be a nonstop festival of Hey, Here’s Today’s Academic Boring Stuff, I’m doing some of these out of order.

More reading from Tracy Fullerton’s Game Design Workshop. In this case, this is super useful because it gives me an academic source for just a very simple list, a starting place, for my thesis argument of the idea of confrontation.

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Shirt Highlight: Pokemon Movesets!

Hey, here are a the shirts I made this month!

First of all, here’s the Play Rough shirt, which I first conceived as part of a series. If you want a particular move name, let me know and I’ll see about whipping one up for you!

(You won’t)

That design gave way to this one, with a big chunk retro TM disc – and I concocted this moveset as an example of a perfectly good, cool moveset for a person to have.

Story Pile: Deadthor

One of the reasons I shifted this particular blog feature from ‘series or movie’ to ‘media’ to ‘story’ is that some things don’t neatly fit into a constrained form like that, and I still want to talk about them.

Comics are a good example. If you want to talk about a comic story, you really have to go with this is a good place to start, because even the most contained comic is still part of and reflects a greater historical context. Things that are old enough to proceed no other comics like them still have to explain where they got some of their base ideas, like why Superman wears his underpants on the outside. If you want to talk about a comic story in like, 1990 well, good grief, you need to explain why then is different to now, what characters have moved on, all that stuff. Really, if you want to give a comprehensive rundown of comics you have to start a few thousand years before comics began and just kick it off with Enkudu and Gilgamesh.

Nonetheless, we are in a time where interconnected media interests allow us to see and partake of media that spreads far and wide into a deep and weird comics history and with that in mind, now we are finally in a place where, through staggering coincidence, people are generally aware of Deadpool and Thor’s Loki.

And to that, I want to tell you about my favourite page in all of Deadpool.

Here’s your basic starter point. Deadpool has found himself stranded on the moon, with Loki, who tells him that he, Deadpool, is his son, and that he knows the secrets that Deadpool knows. Continue Reading →

MOVED POST 2

This post was deemed important to my PhD and has been moved to my academic blog. If you don’t know where that is, that’s okay! Or you can contact me to ask me where to find it.

Otherwise, don’t worry about it.

The Misbegotten Design of Trivia

If you don’t know, I teach a class on game making. I do it at a University and it’s great fun and I like it, and I offhandedly joke that every class features two types of games that students are always going to suggest making. The first is a drinking game, and the second is a trivia game with the word ‘bullshit’ in the title. There’s a third type of game, which is a roll-and-move about being a university student, which always makes me a little bit sad, but anyway.

Now, I don’t think I need to point out why Drinking Games are a hard sell to me and I tend to judge them very harshly, but trivia games are their own special thing to me because while it’s a genre of game that clearly exists, it’s not ever one I’m excited to see someone try and design, for three reasons:

1. Trivia is mostly about your personal framing

When you make a trivia game, you are the person making it, and that frame influences what counts as trivia. For me, talking about Shamgar, Son of Anath isn’t really trivia, and neither is Bendan, Delilah’s Alter Ego, but neither of those things are good trivia questions because who else is going to get that. The trivia questions for a copy of Trivial Pursuit that are even 10 years old are sometimes gaggingly weird, because the people who made them frame them. What about trivia that cares about ‘history’? Who tells that story? Your culture moves and your framing moves and writing trivia questions is mostly done by the kind of person who wants to feel they’re the smartest person in the room, which in turn means those questions tend to be more annoying than interesting.

2. Trivia is high-variance in a boring way

You either know an answer or you don’t. When a game presents you with a trivia question, you’re either aware of the answer, or you aren’t, and there isn’t really a space to be ‘close’ and being ‘close’ is more frustrating than anything else. How do you balance that? How many answers in a row do you expect a player to get right? Half? Two thirds? How do you design a catch-up mechanic? Do you make easy questions for that? How do those easy questions represent anything other than not failing? And what’s more, what do you do when you play against an expert, or play against someone with wildly different levels of information? Is it hopeless for a child to play this game? Who does this game let you have fun with?

3. Trivia is really only good at being Trivia

Now, I’ve seen a few games that try and use Trivia as part of a non-abstract game design, like where you cross a bridge and one of the enemies challenges you by asking you trivia questions, but that particular variety of game jerks the whole thing to a halt. Answering a trivia question can’t be a metaphor for fighting a battle or climbing a wall or engaging a plane because the trivia is so actually itself. You’re always answering a trivia question because what else can your trivia question be? It’s like those old Christian videogames, where being able to provide chapter-and-verse memorisation of a Bible verse was a ‘skill’ you were using to ‘do battle’ but the action was so far removed from metaphor your mechanics don’t reinforce them at all.


This isn’t to say there are no good trivia games – I don’t like them but I can at least recognise some basic, interesting game mechanics that work around trivia as their abstract core? But while I can see ideas for using roll-and-move, trivia as a core game experience just seems fundamentally bad to me.

Game Pile: Yooka-Laylee

Yooka-Laylee is a collect-em-up game, in the vein of Psychonauts or a bunch of other games I haven’t played. It has a particular aesthetic, that singular form of storybook cartoon character, where people you meet are almost always some variety of pun. You travel around the world, you get the powerups, you collect the things, you solve the puzzles, and you win the game, at some point, I assume, concluding with a sort of tedious inevitability.

I’ve started writing this article about twelve times now, but I just stop, like I’m sliding off a waist-high invisible fence.

It’s not even that Yooka-Laylee is a bad game, I wouldn’t call it that. I really liked just randomly hopping around on Yooka with their charming little roll mechanic, bouncing and crashing onto things. I liked scrabbling around buildings and I liked the way you could just find odd things around the place. Then the game did something like hold up the game to give me an explanation for something and I alt-tabbed to check my email.

My work email.

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Helping You Write When You Can’t Write

Hey friends. If you’re anything like most of you, you have times when you struggle with getting anything done more complicated than getting out of bed and starting a Netflix queue. It is okay. Life is hard and emotional energy makes it harder. This can make planning long-term projects, like writing lite novels or comics or game development really hard. I wanted to share a technique here that I hope will be useful for people who struggle with writing big things and making big plans.

Disclaimer, of course; I’m not an expert in ADD or ADHD, the two major areas where we examine Executive Function. I’m not a medical professional or even a published writer. My expertise is mostly in practiced ways to get things done.

First things first, get some Index cards. They do not need to be numbered or lined. Having them be handleable is good. Too big is unnecessary. You want them small enough that you can easily handle them, not so big you need to write a lot of detail.

Take one card, and write on it something you want in the story. You can write a character’s name. You can draw a picture. You can do a map of a location. You can do some math to work out how long something might be or how much time it might take. The point is, nothing on a card has to be anything in particular. Some examples you might want to write down.

  • What’s a cool line your heroine says?
  • How does your heroine look?
  • Your heroine fighting a villain
  • Your villain doing something wicked

And that’s it. You write an idea down, and you put the card away and you’re done. You don’t need to do more than that.

The idea is that when you can’t think of much to do, when you’re struggling, you can take these cards, and identify what order you feel they should be in. You can make a story out of little scenes, out of single ideas, lined up. Then when you line all the cards up, and build up from one card to a dozen cards, to twenty cards, all with very little effort, you can look at your cards and see the outline, the structure, of a story. Looking at the cards will give you ideas of other things you want. You might decide you don’t want some cards, or get rid of others, or want to turn some cards into other, new ideas. That’s okay too!

And you never had to start out a plan. You just had to think of something you want, in the story, that’s cool.

Comic-Gong Wrapup

Today, I was bustling my hump at Comic-Gong. This is a local fandom convention, and the first year that Fox and I felt, with our finances as they are, that we could get a pair of tables.

The day starts at nine and ends at four. It really starts at seven, and really, really, starts at midnight the night before when you have to start making cuts of what you get made. And then you get three hours of sleep because you push yourself all night to try and get things made.

It’s a rough night. It’s a rough night because when you’re the smallest of producers, when you’re not a proper business yet, and your entire stockpile is just a set of small card boxes, you’re left with this weird paranoia for everything. Should I stock this? what if it doesn’t move and I wasted the space? Should I not stock that? What if someone comes by and there’s exactly one person who really wants it? What if someone was holding out for this one thing?

Still!

There’s a chance that you were one of the people I spoke to today. In which case: Hi! I’m super glad you’ve taken some time checking this out. I make games, I talk about games, and I believe in your ability to make games.

I hope you enjoy what you find here!

You can check out the pages for our games at the main Invincible Ink website!

Story Pile: The Blues Brothers

Okay, hold up.

I watched this movie kind of. Back in the fundamentalist church, there was this thing some families with VCRs would do, where they’d record a movie from TV, pause at points they knew the movie would get bad, then unpause afterwards. Think of it like cutting the ads (which they did as well), but for swearing and sex and music.

Yeah, music.

The fundamentalist cult I was in had their own special twist on Evangelical Fundamentalism (weird how little evangelism we ever did), where church leaders believed that music itself, the very nature of how it sounded and affected people, could be a sin. Thought crime, for rhythm. This was part of how we insulated ourselves from the outside world. There were sins of the mind, sins you couldn’t control, and they could come from hearing an errant snatch of music. The tones of a beat faster than your heartbeat was a toxin that could summon literal actual demons.  In my youth group, after I left that church, I saw Blues Brothers 2000 with Youth Group. It echoed of something. There was a church scene! They did things inspired by God! There was a Faith-Ish message! It could be tied back into what our youth group leader wanted to talk about, like The Matrix! I remembered really liking Blues Brothers 2000, because hey, that was really cool music.

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Weekend Games: Tips

This past January we had a long weekend with some wonderful friends we love. The weekend was tons of fun, where we played a game of fighting our way out of a tomb we’d been stuck in for thousands and thousands of year. A dungeon crawl of sorts.

I’d run a similar game of this type earlier, where I used the dungeon crawl structure to create an action movie pastiche, and in the process I just want to offer five short tips:

  • You can probably get through N combat encounters, where N is the number of players minus one.
  • The players are learning their characters and that means first encounter will be completely rough, the second will even out and the third will be when they’re confident enough to use their abilities cleanly and consistantly.
  • The higher level a game you conduct the more complex the game is. The more complex the game is, the more everyone’s turn has to be spent double checking every other player’s behaviour. Lower level games will run smoother and faster.
  • There are some game elements that are going to stop a story dead in its tracks while it’s solved. These arrests are often around puzzles or mysteries. Think like an action film – you don’t want to structure your story so the puzzles are silly or easy, so instead focus on the puzzles as a way to get characters to express who they are in a dramatic way.
  • Double back! If you make maps for 2-3 encounters, have players fight their way in, then have pursuers block their exit so you can use those same maps for the players fighting their way out!

 

MTG: Pet Cards VI, Time Spiral Block

Why, what fortuitous timing, that we’re talking about the first Return To Dominaria, just in time for the new set, Return To Dominaria 2.

I have very unhappy memories of this block. First time I had work impinge on my writing at Starcity Games, and also the time I stopped writing for them. My departure article was seen as too bitter to publish which I honestly don’t remember clearly enough but I’ll assume was pretty justified. I had to choose between paying money for Magic, which was making me unhappy, or paying money for City of Heroes, which was making me happy. It wasn’t a hard choice, really.

Yet, I never really left. I just slowed down a lot, and stopped trying to position myself on the cusp of FNM casual. That space – of designing standard decks that were interesting and affordable and fun to play, but recognised the expense of a bigger and wider standard – was something I felt fairly underserved as more and more writers in that space moved on to either become proper grinders or burned out trying to go rogue. And Time Spiral, as I’ve mentioned, was a throwback set to a period of Magic I thought it was best we get away from.

Still, there’s always new cards. There’s always pets.

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Virtually Virtually

With this talk of Virtual Reality going on, ever sit to wonder what virtual means?

What do you mean when you say something is virtually done?

It’s a weird word, isn’t it? It has some connection to the word virtuous, perhaps, and we use it so freely to describe digital spaces that it has a sort of connotation of the internet, or videogames, or something like that, but that’s not really what it means. When we describe reality, we mean pretty much reality. What makes that really interesting is that for a lot of intangible things in our virtual spaces, they are already virtual reality.

Brendan Keogh wrote about this, in that thesis I’m grinding my way through.In that, he outlines the question of virtuality as it pertains to things that are secretly trying to obscure their connection to the real world, that they are virtually real, and we are prone to pretending they are not. There’s no reason in particular we do this. We don’t file Warcraft goals as more important than Solitaire goals and yet less important than local sports team goals, even though one of those three is much more complex and within our control to influence.

When we say a task is virtually done, we mean that it might as well be done. When we say a thing is virtually real, we mean the same thing. It is real, or might as well be.

This comes back to my idea, the idea I can’t stop circling. We need to take games seriously, because they matter to people.

Game Pile: Far Cry 4

At what point do you let a story end? I’ve ruminated on being done with games well before their end points – games that fail to keep me entertained and engaged, games that want to be treated with veneration as whole works but don’t even themselves know what in their work counts as part of the text.

I’m going to avoid specific spoilers for Far Cry 4, but for those who are curious, I played up to the ending credits and stopped. There is More after that if you go looking for it, but the game themselves describes such extra information as ‘secret.’ I personally don’t feel they’re necessary or meaningful to the text of the game where you have agency.

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Thoughts on Ethical Jealousy

These past few months I’ve been stewing on the idea of ethical jealousy. There’s this notion that’s been haunting the world of criticism, pretty much since the dawn of the webcomic era, that the work of the critic is echoed with the notional frailty of jealousy. Anyone who examines a creative work, there’s always something of an assumption, is doing it out of a sadness at their own inability to create such a thing themselves.

Now I don’t think that jealousy is never a factor in criticism but I think it is very much not the factor people think it is. In my case, specifically, though, I do know there are times when I swallow jealousy at a work. I don’t really do long-form critiques of some things, knowing that I can’t trust myself to separate my envy of the work from the work.

I don’t think that everything we think of as a vice has to be seen that way. I don’t think I have to see the wish, the yearning to have done something, to be able to do something, as an evil. It’s, in a way, a valuing – I can see the value in that thing, and wish that I had had some hand in it. A healthier way, a more ideal way, would be to see the creation and its existence as worthy, in and of itself – but I see the admission of envy, the acceptance of jealousy, to be in part a step towards that more blessed autumnal state.

And so, when I see myself jealous, I admit it; I accept it; and I seek to not let that jealousy corrode my appreciation, but in its admission, be disempowered. Do not let that you want become a poison that depletes your ability to appreciate what a thing is.

The Semiotic Threesome

Is it weird to call a PhD thesis’ language erotically charged?

In A Play of Bodies: A Phenomenology Of Videogames, Brendan Keogh, author of Killing is Harmless: A Critical Reading of Spec Ops: The Line, Australian games academic and probably someone I’m going to have to call ‘sir’ at some point going forwards, writes about the challenges of videogame texts. In the thesis, he forwards that videogames are a unique medium where there’s a challenge in divining a text, and that we have to re-examine what a text means and –

Look.

There’s good stuff there.

But, during this writing, he says (quoting Aarsith, describing Ergodicity), the semiotic threesome. The model of semiotics we normally use is one of encoding and decoding; the creator makes the text (encoding), the consumer experiences it (decoding). But that term, that turn of phrase, the idea of the semiotic threesome, where we consider an encoder, and their experience, the decoder and their experience, and the text itself as a trio of entities.

It’s romantic, in a way. It’s something I quite like to imagine – the encoder glimpsing the edges of the decoder, through the text. The text, curling and sinuous between all, entwining them, a thread that transforms and mutates and becomes its own thing. And it in a strange way, means that there is a time, a moment, when the art, the artist, and the audience are all together, in the moment when the audience enjoys the work, and considers what it might mean to mean.

It’s quite sweet.

Story Pile: There are Crocodiles

Okay, it’s like this.

Press Gang was a short British TV show from the late 80s and early 90s that centered around the running of a school-then-more Newspaper connected to a comprehensive school, a sort of state public school that doesn’t get choosy about who they take. It was the debut show for a guy called Steven Moffat, and if I’m being honest, the work of his I have the least contempt for.

Content warning; Suicide.

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Bad Balance: Incarnum And Cognitive Load

One of D&D 3.5’s biggest problems was its magical system, which was by default bonkers and broken. Despite that, though, there was an almost constant attempt to expand the magic system, to fulfill every specific small variant visions of magic. The Expanded Psionics Handbook, the Tome of Magic, the Artificer and the Archivist, wings of spells in The Book of Vile Darkness and The Book of Exalted Deeds – there was a near-constant effort to expand the magic systems to do different things in different ways.

You can approach design from either a strong mechanical position, or a strong theme and Incarnum was a power idea that came hard out of a mechanical interaction. Magic of Incarnum brought its own system, called the Incarnum system.

The Incarnum system, as simple as I can explain it, is that you could create virtual items in your item slots, and then invest a small pool of points into these items to make them better. This could give you special abilities that got better, from turn to turn, and you could rearrange all these points every turn. When you needed lots of defence, you could sink those points into defenses. When you needed to kill something fast, you could put those points into offense. This system was pretty interesting and cool! You could really customise a character in a lot of ways, and there was this balancing act of choosing where your points were by default.

Incarnum however, was a really bad system, not because it was bad, but because as a player, you had to spend the bulk of your time juggling a small list of points for a small advantage. None of the Incarnum values were particularly large, and the niche utility of some of the shifting was as much a matter of pooling skill bonuses into your armour at the right moment at the right time, rather than really changing what you did. The system was designed to be careful enough as to not get out of hand like the existing spell system (which was broken), but still be an alternative worth playing (which was pretty hard, when the spell system was broken).

The real thing though that kills Incarnum is cognitive load.

Cognitive load is the concept in psychology that describes the amount of active memory you have to track to keep a task executed. It’s how you concentrate on something, it’s the work required in your brain to manage the information presented to you organised. Incarnum was a system that started with cognitive load problems, and it got worse as you levelled up.

You might sometimes hear a player describe a game as ‘smooth’ or hear a designer say something is ‘frictionless.’ Mostly, that feeling is attained by making sure your design does little to demand cognitive load without a reason. It’s one thing to concentrate on a complicated turn or a crucial strategy, but you don’t want the everyday operations of play to require you to make a lot of complex planning and contend with juggling information.

There’s a reason designers preach the idea of simplicity. It’s not for its own sake, it’s because you want to make it as easy as possible for the players to make decisions about what they want to do in your game, rather than have to do math on working out how what they want to do can work.

MTG: Brawl

I don’t think of Brawl as being necessary, at all.

I don’t want to be a jerk about it, I mean, you know, any question of ‘is this necessary’ can always be met in response by a smug ‘well how necessary is any game.’ It’s Standard Commander, which feels like it would have been a simpler way to describe it, but there is the rule that Planeswalkers are valid commanders too, I guess, and that rule in big-pants Commander would have made a lot more Tezzeret-does-something-busted games.

Honestly, I feel really bad about how much of the past year of Magic has been full of me going ‘well I guess it’s okay, fine,’ since I really like the top-down decision making going on. I’m proud of what Magic is doing, I advocate for it as a teacher and a writer, I just, as a player, haven’t been excited by the cards I get to play with.

Still! Far be it from me to turn the whole thing down. I like Commander, I sometimes like Standard, and we have a whole new set full of Legendary creatures who probably can’t swim in the dank water of 1v1 Commander, so why not do something more interesting?

I design Commander decks usually seeing an interaction I want that hinges around something the format makes available (like [mtg_card]Heartless Hidetsugu[/mtg_card] + [mtg_card]Grafted Exoskeleton[/mtg_card]). I like playing a game of Magic where you can always rely on drawing a particular card, especially in an otherwise high-variance game. What then, would I make in standard, with Brawl?

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Procedurality

I don’t know if anyone else is using this term to talk about this, so here we go, my best effort to try and coin this term so I can talk about it easily.

The Procedurality of a game is the degree to which game pieces imply the existence of one another. That is, when you’re confronted with a game pieces, you can probably extrapolate what the other pieces mean. As a player this determines how you learn and study the strategy, while as a designer, procedurality shows you the extent of a design space.

Here are some examples:In this pretty ordinary poker hand, you can look at the cards and glean some information. First, there are cards that number up to ten, and cards that number down to four. There are numbers on most cards, and there are some different symbols – a heart, a diamond, a club and so on.

Based on just this information, if you’d never seen the deck before, you could probably extrapolate what forty of the cards are, maybe forty-four based on the Jack probably not being totally unique. The design of a deck of cards works with this – there are two jokers, but aside from that, the whole design is contained pretty tightly within the two variables of each card: Value and Suit.

These are cards from a packet of Dark Signs. One of them is very much unlike the others, the area pieces that you’ll play to win. But two of the cards kind of imply the values of other cards, while the third shows that there’s at least some cards in the deck that don’t fit that pattern. The basic runes in Dark Signs represent the lowest sort of procedurality – they show some value that the players will have to deal with, but they aren’t the whole of the game. The procedural cards in Dark Signs show a sort of design space, but they aren’t super obvious. Also, and it’s a small thing, in Dark Signs, the basic runes all have prime number values, which makes them just a little bit trickier to make score ties.

Finally we have the most procedural game I’ve ever made:

There are 26 cards in You Can’t Win and 24 of them are immediately obvious the second you look at any given card. The other two are Wild cards. Each card shows a value, and a rule that relates to cards with that value.

Procedural games are a good place to get started. It helps you get your mind in the space of working out how many cards you need, and if you do it right it can help you explore spaces, defining boundaries by how many different permutations you need of an effect.

4ed Problems: Splintering, Part 2

Yesterday, we talked about how long the lifespan of 4ed D&D was, and we talked about how, it was good, actually. Our framework was, basically, that players had expectations of classes, and we named the problem of splintering.

When you built a character in 4ed D&D, you might be startled by how many feats you got. Every even level you got a new feat, and you started with one as well – meaning a character wound up with sixteen feats. This meant that the game had a reason to make up lots of feats, and that was where the game offloaded a lot of mechanical responsibility – rather than making tons of variant rules for how your classes changed as you levelled up, most of them gave you a starting package, and you could use feats to unlock the bits of it you wanted.

This was true of races as well, by the way – in the Monster Manual there were a handful of extra races just starting out, but none of those races had any feat support, unlike the Players Handbook races, and that meant those races were always permanently underpowered. Making a race or a class was not just making powers – it was also making feat support.

There were other places feats did the heavy lifting the system needed done, like the ‘feat tax’ feats like Expertises and Defence feats. The game math was curved, so as you got to higher and higher levels, the enemies assumed your ability to hit them wasn’t just improving linearly, and the same for their ability to hit you. This meant there were two feat families you just kinda assumed you’d get.

This meant that for any given class or race there was a need for feats. They’d be the things that brought that race up to par with other races – just small incentives that hopefully pulled them up to the level of (for example, almost always) the Dragonborn or Dwarf. These two races came up early, and people had a clear idea what they were like, so they almost always got some feat support in every product for every new idea, and they were pretty good to start with.

Classes suffered this same problem; feat support was where a lot of class options were offloaded, and Wizards only published so many feats at a time, and sometimes, they’d low-ball feats. If they made an overpowered feat, they’d fix it, but when they made an underpowered feat, they let it be. This means any class or race introduced after other classes or races had to do catch-up and hope their feat support was good enough in the smaller window of time. And then Essentials came along.

Now, I am not against Essentials. I’m really not. The books are nice, and they’re pretty, but they brought with them mechanical directions for existing characters that have problems.

Specifically,they took some classes and gave them entirely new purposes and mechanical needs, which meant all the feat support for those classes became about their new variant. Which in turn meant that races and classes released after the Player’s Handbook, but before Essentials often had a truncated window of support compared to most, which also meant that what support existed was being split up between different types. Anyone building a PHB2 druid was left confused why they’d be getting feats for supporting healing in the compendium, for example.

There’s a lesson here: Ensure you support your design, and be willing to make adjustments up and down if things are too weak. The policy of 4ed seems to have been one of nerfing downwards and replacing upwards – which means that now, looking back, most classes have a host of slightly weak feats lying around.

4ed Problems: Splintering, Part 1

Before I can talk about this problem I need to outline to you just what problems were going on in D&D 4ed.

4th Edition D&D was a long-running game, and it was successful. It grew the game during its run and it tried, tested, and improved on a bunch of stuff, like online sales. Remember, when 3rd edition hit the shelves, WOTC had their own retail outlets, the Wizards Stores – and they were still going until 3.5. The needs of 3.0 and 4ed were very, very different beasts.

4ed was, based on release dates, about as long-running as 3rd edition. I personally consider 3.0 and 3.5 incompatible games – 3.0’s balance formulae were all hecked up, you couldn’t port anything, really, not even feats, and 3.0 characters couldn’t hang out with 3.5 characters. The monsters, feats, and character options weren’t compatible, so they were as different, in my opinion, as 2ed and 3ed. That is to say, 3ed lasted 3 years, 3.5 lasted 5 years, and 4ed lasted about six, better than both of them.

Now, you might point to the Essentials books as the ‘3.5 of 4ed,’ but that’s rude, don’t point, and also you’re wrong. Essentials characters and rules were 100% compatible with 4ed. A character built in Essentials could adventure alongside a character build out of the PHB and be, largely, as functional. The whole common spellbook wasn’t rewritten with different versions of everything. Cavaliers and Paladins are the same class, by the letter of the rules, and can even borrow powers from one another. Essentials wasn’t a new game, it was the same game, repackaged and reprocessed to try and make it more approachable.

Our problem here starts with one of expectations.

Back in 3.5 D&D classes weren’t balanced against one another, and they didn’t have clear, defined roles for how they interacted with one another. You knew clerics healed (more conveniently than druids) and that druids and bards could heal too. You knew rogues could sneak and do damage just like rangers, and fighters did damage, either with one big weapon, two medium weapons, a weapon and a shield or sometimes one small weapon depending on the Flynn-ness of your Erroll. And Wizards could do everything, pretty much.

These assumptions were great for getting players who never played the game in and I don’t begrudge them but the game doesn’t really back them up. For example, the rogue is explosively high-damage compared to its compatriots in melee, the druid and cleric were such juggernauts healing was best done out of combat by stick magic, and the fighter should go home for a nice nap. When 4ed D&D introduced party roles, it assigned each character a role which was meant to make the game easier to start. No more parties with two fighters, a paladin and a barbarian that all folded to a single mind flayer.

Immediately fights started.

Some people didn’t like the idea that fighters were defenders, and they didn’t like that rangers were damage and ‘controller’ was nonsense and boy howdy did a lot of people coincidentally seem to dislike the idea that the ‘healers’ (ie, support characters) of the last edition were now the ‘leaders.’ In fact, I have a whole hypothesis that one of the unspoken points of resistance for a lot of players to the terminology was the idea that support characters were actually important enough to warrant being called something other than ‘support.’ Fighters should be damage! Paladins should be damage! Everything I like should work the way I want it to, and what’s even going on with the druid?!

Lots of people were real mad.

Now, I’m a big fan of the role system and I also like that essentials is cross compatible – but these two things combined did bring about one of the biggest problems 4ed D&D has: Splintering, which we’ll talk about more specifically next time.

Story Pile: Batman V Superman

I don’t need to talk to you about this movie. General wisdom is that this movie is bad and you have a bunch of different sources giving you different reasons for it to be bad, and there’s even a comprehensive, thoroughly done, four hour long video essay breaking down a whole host of the problems I had with it.

Honestly, if you’re into movie criticism it’s a very engaging, thoughtful and thorough examination of the movie’s failings, complete with a very reasonable perspective on Zack Snyder’s work, and a recognition of some of the movie’s virtues.

That’s if you want to go look into the movie. It seems pretty unnecessary though.

What’s interesting to me, though is the people who love this movie.

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Bad Balance: The Problem With The Tome Of Battle (Which Isn’t What You Think)

Right at the tail end of 3.5 D&D, there was a book released that ruled.

There’s a lot of critical talk about the Book of Nine Swords. There were comparisons to Anime, as if that was inherently a dismissal point, as if Anime wasn’t regularly cribbing from D&D in the first place.

The Tome of Battle presented a solution to the problem of melee combatants in 3.5. As you levelled up, melee combat just didn’t keep pace with the kind of things spells could do. Spellcasters even in the early game had an edge on the melee characters, and increasingly, the game became about countering spellcasters rather than countering melee characters. You can view late-game combat as about trying to shut down the Wizard long enough that the Paladin could get some licks in.

But in Tome of Battle, melee weapon-wielders and armour-wearers got to stab things in the face real good. They touched on the core idea of 4ed, which is time spent in a turn is actually more valuable than hypothetical infinite options. It was a great book, created great characters, had a wonderfully varied lore you could use a little or a lot from, and mostly didn’t have total turkey prestige classes (as most books did).

Yet at the same time I am comfortable and confident declaring that Tome Of Battle is, as it stands, a mistake. Not because of anything the game did intrinsically, but because the book was released into a world with poor Tordek here. 

The Fighter in 3.0 D&D was a really rough sell. The fighter at level 1 was already comparable to another class’ class features, and their design scaled up very linearly. The best levels of Fighter were 1 and 2, because the class was frontloaded enough to let you rush up to some sort of mid-tier trick slightly early (like Whirlwind Attack, the game’s idea of an ‘End Game’ Fighter Feat). The next best one was level 4, because at that point you had unlocked access to everything the Fighter could get access to and you only had to take one level that Didn’t Really Do Anything to get there.

There were a lot of things wrong with how they updated it for 3.5, one of which is the removal of the ‘Fighter’ subtype from the way they presented feats in the Players’ Handbook. Back in 3.0, feats that the Fighter could take with their bonus feats had the subtype [Fighter]. In 3.5, this was removed in favour of the new line

Special: A fighter may select [this feat name] as one of his fighter bonus feats.

This was in my mind a blatant mistake. They could have made it so that Fighter feats had riders or bonuses if they could check the number of Fighter feats you had, but only if Fighter feats had a subtype.

Anyway, the thing is, the fighter was pretty weak and attempts to fix the fighter had almost all missed, usually because they approached the problem in the totally wrong way – Fighters got better on a linear, additive scale, while spellcasters and things balanced against spellcasters got better on a quadratic scale. A level 20 fighter could do a decent bit of damage to a dragon in one full round of combat, assuming he could close – but the wizard could disintegrate the dragon or take over its will entirely.

But if you wanted to play a character in armour, with a weapon, whose primary interaction with enemies was hitting them with the weapon in increasingly skillful ways, though, the obvious look for most players was that the Fighter was your jam. And the fighter, as a character class, was made totally unnecessary by the Tome of Battle’s inclusion. In some cases laughably so – the Warblade got some bonus feats, got Weapon Specialisation (formerly a Fighter-only benefit) and got all those maneuvers that let the Warblade hang at the level of the Wizard.

The Tome of Battle classes didn’t wholesale replace all the fighter-style classes. Paladins and Crusaders compared to one another. The Sword Sage could do a lot of interesting tricks, but the Monk could still do other things the Sword Sage couldn’t.

But the poor Fighter?

The closest thing the Fighter could do is spend their bonus feats to buy Maneuvers. Once you had Warblades there really was no reason to play Fighters beyond their simplicity. They didn’t quite measure up to threats the game thought of as reasonable, but you could cover that with your party. They didn’t give you the kind of options they thought they did, but you might never notice that either.

But when the Warblade sat down next to you, did most of what you did, and a host of exciting, additional extremely extra things as well, it was hard to not notice.

Painful Paladin Problems

It’s hard not to see trends in conversations about tabletop RPGs, and one enduring trend, for decades now, has been some form of The Paladin In Our Party Is Being A Butt, or its companion I’m Playing A Paladin And I Feel The Rest Of The Party Are Being Unreasonable.

I’m going to assume here I’m dealing with people who don’t need the basic idea of the Paladin explained to them. You probably don’t need a rundown on history that features Charlemagne and Roland and stuff. There is a sort of idea of Paladin-ness amongst players, but there doesn’t seem to be a single, easily-reached, agreed-upon example of what a Paladin is.

Paladins seem to almost be more of a D&D convention than an actual conceptual thing. A divinely empowered warrior, someone who’s turned the dial of ‘swords at people’ a little higher and the ‘casts spells’ a little lower, the Paladin is nonetheless a very D&D part of D&D. And they seem to be split, culturally, between two pretty hard binaries, one end of which is A bossy frictious dick, and the other is Inoffensively not that. Part and parcel of the idea of the Paladin is this sort of moral imperiousness. In 3.5 D&D it was pretty stringent – Paladins couldn’t associate with people who did certain things, which meant a Paladin in the party created a tension where the other players might be limited from certain actions.

Making this more complicated was the 3.5 D&D morality system that worked as a sort of omniscient snitch. In a narrative sense, there’s an interesting tension to a Paladin’s friend secretly doing things they know the Paladin won’t approve of, and the ways you keep that secret. When the moral fabric of the universe can shift you to an evil alignment for losing an argument, it simply dobs you in and you lose that potential complexity.

Now, I love Paladins. I love them since I first learned the word from Rakeesh.

Rakeesh is a Paladin from the Quest for Glory Games, games that were definitely informed by their designers’ D&D campaigns, or campaigns that derived from them. But he wasn’t a western sword-and-sorcery type, nor was his Paladin status informed by such. Rasha Rakeesh Sah Tarna was a man of African mythos, from an Egyptian culture. He may have used the word Paladin (which is kinda French) to describe himself, but he did not learn that way from anyone French or otherwise fancy. He learned it from within.

Rakeesh spoke of the Paladin as someone who conducted themself with honour, and whose moral framing was powerful enough to enact their will on the universe. They could heal wounds – both their own and others, light their sword aflame, damage dreadful foes and even cast some magic thanks to being a Paladin, and being a Paladin made the universe itself recognise your righteousness.

I also learned of the Paladin from Oriental Adventures. Which, yes. I know.

Oriental Adventures sought to write about the D&D system in the context of the Legend of the Five Rings setting, using the existing sets of clans and their families. The books said that if Paladins existed, they would be much more like the Akodo and Matsu family champions, individuals focused intensely on Honour as their strength. These families, when you look them up, are full of stories of people doing the right thing when it brought them low, holding to principle when it meant doing what they did not want to do, and also, expressing their values in the face of opposition with face-wrecking violence.

The principle these books outlaid for the Matsu, particularly, who are members of the Lion Clan

Which is the best clan, by the way,

Are the ones who describe the idea that honour is not imposed, given, or taken. It comes from within.

These two voices helped shape my conception of the Paladin in 3.5 D&D. The Paladin was not an expression of armour and rules – it was about an entity of principles, a warrior whose ideology informed their methodology. It’s really been bedrock to how I play my Paladins and why it never seemed to me to be interesting or worthwhile to treat the Paladin ruleset as if it was somehow a perfect template.

In 3rd Edition D&D, there were Chaotic Paladins (sometimes using the Holy Liberator prestige class, sometimes using the alternate path). There were evil ones and even Neutral ones – and sure, while Lawful Neutral paladins were boring, it was still able to present that shell of an idea; an ideology as expressed through a character. The alignment rules were so wobbly it wasn’t like being Lawful actually meant anything. Lawful was not the same thing as Law-Abiding. After all, ants are lawful – they behave in strict adherence to rules of their society. It makes sense that ants and ant-creatures are lawful. But do they know the rules of the city in which they live? Why would they follow them? Does not following those rules make you less lawful?

In the end, the Paladin doesn’t need to be the party Load or the party Conscience. They need, instead, to be a character for whom ideals and morality are much more tightly wound, fixed precepts of their worldview. A fighter may fight for money or love or rage or all three from day to day – but the Paladin always knows what they fight for.

The Paladin’s honour comes from within.

Game Pile: Watch_Dogs

You don’t need, really, to hear anything about Watch_Dogs. You can make the case there’s no reason for me to be going over something that’s so well-explored and well-covered as this game. Perhaps another writer who finds the game a deep and personal love may come back to it with an eye towards the games’ inner life and maybe find something to love. I don’t think I’m going to be that guy, though. I’m the guy who inspects the game, experiences the game, and mainly tries to see if I have anything new to complain about.

Fortunately, I kind of do.
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