Character deaths

I got into a rather interesting discussion recently which helped me around some bloggers block. One of the things brought up was the idea of a game where it was hard for PCs to die, or as he put it 'Care Bearing'. I thought about it, now in my games character death can vary wildly depending on systems but I will admit that I tend to be a bit more merciful than some, maybe due to player complaints or because of how I feel about games. Some of it is that I have fairly clever players, and some of it is that I try to avoid doing games that are going to eat the players alive consistently. Another person that was somewhat intermittently involved mentioned that he enjoys the look on players faces when their characters die, usually the shock that it happened, and complained that modern games coddle players too much. The person I was talking more directly to also complained about ideas like game balance and the like.

I disagree on a few fronts, but some of it also has to do with how I view the games. For example, in most editions of gamma world I've played you can whip up a new character quite fast and frequent deaths are part and parcel of the experience. The same can be said for games like All Flesh Must be Eaten or even certain games using the Cthulhu mythos. Some old school fantasy games are similar, in these cases death might be annoying but the relative speed in which you can make a new character means that the death won't mean that either the player is sitting out for most of the night or that everyone else has to put things on hold while a new character is made. In such games character deaths aren't a big deal and can even be a source of amusement.

Take games that have more involved character generation however, say for example something from the folks at Palladium, and a character death could set you back hours in terms of time spent generating a new character. There is also the argument about how a character dies, is it different if they die from a single failed saving throw than if they died in a mass battle? If there are resurrection options in the game that might change things too, but how accessible do you make it for players? (IE at low levels do they have to suck it up and just wait until the cleric gets high enough to resurrect before they can die and keep their character?) Then again there is the question of if character deaths mean anything to the players or game itself. If you have a big story planned is it better to just keep the basic group alive so they don't have to keep reading the new guy or gal into the groups mission and enemy list or is it necessary to make sure that you prune their numbers so they don't get too sure of themselves?

Well, any readers out there are welcome to comment, hope to hear from you.

The right way to play pt. 2 (sorry this took so long)

Sorry to any readers out there, real life got in the way of things for a while, I guess I'm back and will hopefully be able to put out more posts and make something enjoyable.

When last I left my second issue in the idea of playing right or wrong had to do with the concept of a player focusing more on the mechanical aspect of the game, and when the others in the group complained he argued that he got into the game to fight monsters, slay dragons, and find treasure not sit in town conversing in 'thees and thous' with local yokels. For those who are familiar with such arguments part of this is from the whole 'roleplay vs rollplay' or 'optimization versus RP' and other things that crop up.

In some cases it's a false dichotomy started by people more enamored with RP than mechanics arguing that a person who has any interest in mechanics is clearly only interested in that and they don't know how to properly roleplay. While there can be cases where people obsess over raw numbers to the exclusion of any RP elements I think this is the exception rather than the rule. I also would argue that to an extent optimization IS roleplaying but that might be a discussion for another day. Now, some people might argue that the mechanically focused player in the example is playing wrong, or at least isn't playing the game to its full potential. Conversely people might also feel some sympathy for him, if he's in a game like Dungeons and Dragons, Hackmaster, or any other game that sells itself as a game full of action and exploration then it does seem a bit like the player in question might feel like they were the victim of a bait and switch. Depending on the game some might even argue that the roleplay centric players might be 'doing it wrong' if the game they're using is a much more heavily action oriented one.

This isn't to denigrate roleplayers either, roleplay can help bring a game more to life. It can help flesh out characters and work out backgrounds for them as well as make players feel like they're a part of the world and really care about the story and feel excited about that happens around them. Some games do a better job of stimulating roleplay than others and I won't say much more on that subject.

The real crux of the issue in this one is more a matter of player expectations and group style. I have had players who have told me of my own games that they are alternately too roleplay light or heavy, that we need more or less action, etc. Now a lot of it boils down to personal preference of the players and what the person running is comfortable with. This might be a case where the group would either need to seek a compromise, maybe doing more action sequences if reasonable along with trying to get the recalcitrant player to interact more with the story. It might also just be that the player is a bad fit for the group, he or she would be happier with a group that did more action, adventure and exploring in their games rather than emphasizing social interaction.

At least this is my view, if anyone has any comments, feel free to offer them in the comments section.

When Roles Go Bad Pt. 2

Here I am for a belated part two. I apologize for taking so long but I hope it will be worth the wait. I mentioned that one issue that comes up in the role system is simply that the roles themselves can get in the way and screw things up trying to keep everything balanced. This area is a bit more subjective but can do a lot to impact fun as well as being common in video games as well as tabletop games. In essence it's a matter of things feeling overly similar, or 'samey'. IE two classes that are supposed to be different and distinct end up feeling identical in results and play.

In tabletop games I would argue this is somewhat easier to notice than it is in video games, the main reason I say this is that a video game can mask similar mechanics with graphics and thematic things that a tabletop game has to do a lot more work to conjure. Now things feeling samey is somewhat subject to interpretation and it can come from a lot of different things and have different levels of annoyance or frustration for the person working on things. Some matter more and some matter less, and I will try to address them quickly.

One area is when different classes in the same role start to feel samey, this could be due to similar mechanics or just because build information and damage output end up near identical. This can be frustrating in some regards but it isn't necessarily a major issue. In video games the mechanics, graphics, etc. can be utilized to make the differing classes seem more dissimilar while their overall output is about identical. In a tabletop game this is somewhat more obvious but it can be fairly manageable so long as the gameplay elements keep the classes feeling distinct or at least different enough so that the player doesn't wonder why there are two classes if they functionally do the same thing and are identical in most regards.

Another area has to do with different aspects of the same class, IE if there are different build options but both end up being about the same. On the one hand this can be somewhat expected, but when literally everything seems to be identical a problem crops up, the variant options seem superfluous when the end result is the same. It can make the player feel like their choice meant nothing and it can also feel like the book or supplement that the new option was put in was ultimately a waste. The way this can happen is if power choices, augmentation options etc. end up with a character functionally identical mechanically to the build of another type.

The basic problem is this, if classes feel samey, or if allegedly different options for the same class feel samey, it means that the designers screwed up. Part of the fun in a game that offers customization is making a character that feels unique, that is YOUR character, when the ability to do that is compromised the game suffers a bit. It gets worse when this sort of thing ends up being a means to nip system mastery in the bud, essentially making any abilities that improve hitting, defenses, etc. as a necessary and assumed thing, thus ensuring that there will be little to no ability to make your character 'better' than anyone else. The reason I link this as a problem the role system faces or at least tends to conjure more is that roles by nature have limits and locks on them, a healer should not be doing more damage than a straight damage dealer for example and this can lead to overreaction by designers and a fear that any customization could break the roles set up.

4th Editions good points

I’m going to be a bit rough on 4th edition and while plenty of people are likely to agree that it deserves some of the lumps it’s getting it also needs to be pointed out that they actually did do some things very right. Some of them aren’t necessarily ideal for all games but they were improvements or at least worthwhile ideas. I’ll try to cover each of them and explain where I think things went well and where…well where they kind of screwed up. The main point of this though is that because I have seen a lot of examples of people strongly disliking 4th edition the goal here is to provide a kind of counter as well as try to give a more balanced take on what worked and what didn’t and trying to figure out why. Now I stress that pretty much all of this is opinion but I will explain my views as much as I can on each.

One idea that was a major winner in my view was the change they made to hitpoints. Just to clarify hitpoints were an abstraction showing how much damage you could take before you died. In the earlier games you started out small, especially if you were an arcane spellcaster, and in many cases even if you were incredibly hardy one good sword hit could knock you out or even kill you. The main issue I have with this is that it wasn’t a matter of doing something stupid and dying, it was a stray shot killing someone who had just started. It was making a situation where you could easily go through two or three characters in one night at low levels, especially at first through third level. The issue with this is threefold. First, new players were likely to experience a great deal of frustration, losing one character let alone two or more could make them wonder what the point is (and I am mostly using D&D as the example here, I know some games with very fast generation can allow for instant generation and thus death is less an issue). Second is that when starting the game a player is, at least in theory, learning their characters abilities and the rules of the game at low levels the game should have some form of training wheels be it more durability, comparatively fast recovery or something in that nature. Third was simply that it meant that the players weren’t constantly outnumbering each enemy they faced, IE four people to kill an orc or goblin creatures not exactly known for their supreme power.

Greater hitpoints meant that a player could handle attacks from a few more creatures, it also meant that they had time to try to get a handle on their abilities. They could learn about what their class did, what the others in the group were capable of, and figure out how to use abilities together. Part of it was also that hitpoints were gained more slowly, a flat small amount each level rather than wild swings as levels progressed. It made it easier to balance and build encounters on the designers end as well as helping things on the playing end. An encounter could exist where the players were outnumbered and not end with their characters all dead. It also meant that the players could be a bit more daring, stupidity would likely still end up with a dead or badly injured character but now they were unlikely to lose one simply due to one bit of bad luck or a rookie mistake.

The second improvement would be in the reintroduction of the roles system. I say reintroduction because in a lot of ways what they did was simply put in a more codified version of what we had back at the start of the game ‘Fighter, Thief, Magic User, Cleric’ or ‘Defender, Striker, Controller, Leader.’ The role system caught a lot of flack, claiming that it was ‘video gamey’ but the truth is that most games, at least many fantasy ones, run with the idea of a class focused on damage, a class focused on being ‘tough’ a class that heals and probably some skill classes or AoE ones. The concept of roles existed but either weren’t as codified or weren’t set in stone. The role system allowed for a few things, from a design standpoint it helped benchmark class abilities and figure out if something seemed too high or low since they had a clear set of parameters to test it against. From a playing standpoint, well it helped to know what the class was meant to do, in 3rd edition there were classes that I seriously had no bloody clue what they were meant to do because their design felt off, a class with full armor proficiency and full weapon proficiency and yet with the same attack bonus as a primary caster is a class that seems like the designers weren’t really thinking or at least weren’t considering how such a design looked. In some cases a class was made that was interesting but didn’t seem to have a hint as to what it was meant to do or how it worked in a group.

It also did help to avoid a problem that seems to come up frequently with classes that do the hybrid thing or ‘jack of all trades master of none’ schtick. The idea of a jack of all trades kind of class is nice in theory but in practice they will usually run into one of two walls. In one case their abilities are spread too thin to be anything more than middling in any area, if you have to take over for a teammate that falls you can’t really duplicate their skills in that role or you often just find yourself outperformed in everything. The other side of it is when a class is too potent, say 75% ability in a few roles of a base class coupled with synergy and while they might not be as good at X as the class focused on it they’re close enough and bring other things to the table so that the non hybrid ends up being worse in comparison. It can be a tricky balance and it often either falls into over or under power. There is also the fact that it can be hard to objectively determine balance when clear roles aren’t established and many classes can perform multiple roles, in some cases they can do it nearly simultaneously.

I also give them partial credit for making the monsters more interesting, or maybe it’s more accurate to say making the battles work more cleanly. At low levels players could face swarms of enemies, the minion rules and higher starting hitpoints made things like goblins and orcs a threat and it wasn’t a situation where you needed four people to kill one of them. The battles felt more interesting, the players felt stronger and scope of the campaign felt more epic. Also the idea of having monsters in different style categories similar to player roles helped new DMs design encounters and things like Elite and Solo monsters also helped people set up fights with a clearer concept of scale and threat.

They also did manage to make good on the promise of greatly reducing dependency on magic items. Bonuses to hit and damage and various things provided by items were often less important than player abilities and powers and I actually think that this was a fairly good thing. That being said, the changes did help make it so that you were no longer a set of items wearing a character for some of the classes, now the magic items while useful were no longer the defining characteristics.

In later posts I will point out flaws and issues and why my group walked away from 4th. Some of their initial plans went haywire and some things went wonky, but at the very least 4th edition did some good things and I feel they should be mentioned first.

What makes a good game

A question that can come up relatively often is what makes a good game? What makes a game better or more interesting? Why do we choose some games over others? The most obvious answer is how fun a game is but fun has the problem of being somewhat subjective as well as being rather difficult to quantify, so my focus is going to be more on aspects of fun, IE what makes different games fun/not fun.

One basic part on the idea of fun might be participation, IE being able to be and stay involved in the game. This is why I've met some people who hate monopoly because it is very easy to be eliminated from the game and the game itself can take hours (or that lovely record setting months). It does get a bit hard to enjoy a game when you can get knocked out of it and be forced to watch everyone else. This is dull, not to mention frustrating, in fact this is probably where a lot of relatively well known variant and house rules come from to help keep people in the game longer. RPGs have similar elements, most players hate being hit by things that remove them from combat or enemies that they are unable to affect.

Another area could be random chance vs. stability. IE how much random chance (dice rolling, drawing cards, position in turn order) affects the game versus relatively stable rules that affect everyone more or less equally. A game that is perfectly stable gets dull, everyone moves X squares, etc. it can feel incredibly dull. One example I see people use is Risk, almost anyone that has played it normally wants to start in australia because that lets you constantly build up large numbers of troops. While there is the element of dice rolls in risk there is still the problem that no matter what some areas are just hands down better regardless of chance. However, go too far on the side of random chance and you can develop issues of your own. Random dice rolls/card draws/RNG decisions start making any hope of strategy or planning moot. One example there might be the Handheld RPG game Lunar Dragon which didn't even let you target enemies, you hit attack and your characters bounced randomy attacking different targets, focus fire and strategic assaults were out.

The last big area I can see is in the idea of games playing to strengths. People enjoy showing off talents that they have. Those with an encyclopedic knowledge of various subjects are likely to enjoy trivial pursuit for example. Those who are good at persuasion are likely to enjoy games like Malarkey. That being said I kind of want to know what my readers, if I have any, think. If you feel that there are other elements of what make a good game or make a game fun, feel free to reply.

Game Weights

Tabletop games, computer games, board games, all of them have a certain degree of weighting involved. The idea is where the majority of the power, the focus of the system, and the theoretical goals of the game lie. In my experience you either will see games weighted on the side of the player, games weighted centrally, or games weighted in favor of the system. Now, an important note, here is that none of these is necessarily inherently better or worse than the others, however they tend to lend themselves more easily to certain types of games. For example, a game weighted more towards the players tends to create excellent heroic games, more neutrally set games are theoretically more versatile and able to work with many genres, and the ones weighted more towards the system are best used for horror and survival games.

Games weighted in favor of the players are games that expect the players to win. The players are on average more durable and more powerful than the monsters and it is relatively difficult to lose if the game is used in its standard format. The players can be challenged but it is indeed difficult to wipe them out. Most heroic tapletop games follow this premise and in fact the d20 system could be said to be weighted heavily in favor of the players. A heroic game tends to give the players a greater margin of error, early levels have training wheels and the game tends to focus on approximate escalation, the players will sometimes face things stronger than them but their collective abilities will almost always outmatch it, they will also have more escape hatches and panic buttons than their opponents can match. In these games death for a character ranges from impossible to easily recoverable. Some games are actually set up where the player characters cannot die, one of the versions of 7th sea is like that. Others have death, but death is fairly easy to get around, either offering ressurection or similar means to return the character to life and continue on.

Games that have more neutral weight are fairly rare admittedly, but they do exist. By and large these games are point based, in this setup everyone has the same abilities to pull from and similar rules on the points spread. Characters can die and probably will. However, the idea in this case is more that the game assumes roughly equal chance between everything. These games are also a bit more diverse, usually allocating build points based off of the genrea involved. A game where the party is meant to hide and survive in a wasteland ruled by powerful mutants will have far fewer points than a superhero game for example. The theoretical idea here is that this game might show more skill, but it can also be problematic. SOmeone with a greater level of system mastery can wipe out less skilled people, and synergy is more important. Neutrally weighted games also tend to be somewhat unfocused, the game doesn't necessarily 'care' what each side does, the goal is more to create a game that is generally workable and the focus of balance is more towards ensuring that nothing shattering comes in rather than defending one side of the screen or the other.

The games weighted in favor of the system are a bit more complex, most of them are games like Chaosims Call of Cthulhu or certain whitewolf games. In this regard the game is either actively set against the players or it is designed to make the game essentially an ordeal for them. The game is set heavily against the players, odds are that their opponents least soldiers are 50 times stronger than they could ever be, they need all their cunning, caution and luck just to get away let alone have any hope of harming the thing. In these games you don't slay great monsters and horrors, instead you usually fight tooth and nail, more than half the group dying, to stop a cultist from summoning a great horror. Your greatest victories are phyrric, and your successes only fleeting. But there is another type, in this game you might be reasonably powerful, perhaps even above average. The problem instead is that you face a goal, a challenge, that does not yield to power, to most wit, instead you play the role of a tragic hero, perhaps to find redemption but more likely to become a figure who is cheered on despite knowing they will not succeed. White Wolf has several games like this, one of them being Promethean. The game itself is hard to describe but the tale of sisyphus is probably the closest example, however in this regard someone is constantly throwing stones at him as well as trying to pour grease on the hill.

These game types can allow for a lot of different interesting stories, for those starting in a genre these games can help explain and set a tone and scene. For those more experienced they can even make a horror game using a game weighted towards the players or a heroic game with a system weighted against them.

First post

This blog is meant to serve as sort of a general discussion on RPGs, mostly tabletop games but occasionally video games and MMOs. My topics are likely not going to have a central focus to them in terms of what I cover, my big things are going to be discussing design theory, balance, different styles of gaming and how different types of games are. If anyone has something they'd want mentioned say so in the comments section and I will see what I can do. Hope this goes well, thanks.