Untitled LARP Project

Primary Focus of LARP Blog Project

Themes: Conflict, Betrayal, and Conflict
Mood: Desperation; the Fight for Survival; Rage

Opening Thoughts: The primary problem with LARPs is a lack of conflict. The primary systems at the center of the LARP should help facilitate conflict; and Court, the primary activity in a game of Vampire, ought to be made primarily of conflicts. Mechanisms that help support conflict are: territorial spats, family feuds, covenant ideologies, personal vulnerabilities, and mortal control. Court must encourage and help resolve these problems.

Territory: The Primary way to enforce territoriality is to a) ensure that Territory has an immediate and tangible impact on gameplay and b.) to ensure that it is socially enforced in an equally tangible way. In this way territory should have a noticeable and drastic effect on the mechanics – whether it determines starting blood pools or enforces the Haven merit or so forth is important. Furthermore the mechanics that undermine the importance of named territory must be removed. In the past it has been shown that trying to tie existing structures into another mechanical skeleton has been ineffective. For instance in Renn City, Haven Merits were limited by the surrounded territory. The relative weakness of the Haven merit made this untenable.

Court and it’s rules need to extend to territory. Vampires can beg the Prince for new domain, and can beg the Prince to punish interlopers in their domain. Major Boons can be exchanged in order to ensure this occurs without question. The push and pull of territorial struggle has to be encouraged in some fashion – without the players to push boundaries, there’s never any reason to break with the status quo. Other incentives, listed above, have to be used by Covenant elders and Clan leaders to push the boundaries of the game.

Feuds: Feuds, as defined in this philosophy, are long-standing (or potentially long-standing) disagreements between individuals or groups that are grounded in variable or personal matters. For example, the Crone wants to punish the Lance for killing one of their Priestesses. What differentiates Feuds from other kinds of disagreements are their inherently irrational and personal nature. Ironically since Feuds between groups tend to be generated by NPC actions, they can frequently be impersonal and do not resonate strongly with the PCs; or if they do, they resonate too strongly, and the two parties who are meant to fight actually agree that the NPC has overstepped their bounds.

In this way Feuds should never be forced, but instead should be generated by the actions of the PCs or through the use of backstory, which frequently stands outside the bounds of the highly rational actions that PCs tend to take.

Covenant Ideologies:  Covenants are the driving force behind conflict. All Covenants want to a.) See their own ideology enforced and b.) want to reduce the influence of their rivals. In this way all Covenants should have access to a means of influence that is onerous to one or more enemy factions. E.g., the Invictus have a slave market, the Carthians deal in stolen phone information, the Dragons work with blasphemous forces, etc. What is important is that these ideological differences must be fundamental, and they must be thoroughly entrenched. Removing the Invictus slave operation must be concealed behind several layers of territoriality and favor-mongering, so as to make the direct approach difficult and provide many games of enjoyable plot. Furthering the goals of the Covenant should be moulded towards an end that rejects compromise at every opportunity.

Personal Vulnerability: While the use of XP incentives has been shown time and again to be a terrible cesspool of argument, there can be no question that there is almost no other way to encourage PCs to act irrationally. Some players by nature favor drama; and so they tend to perform irrationally for the sake of drama. Most players do not do this. Most players are pragmatic (usually in a way justifiable to the character, if not transparently so) and will tend towards compromise, stasis, and non-confrontation whenever possible. This is obvious; it is human nature.

It’s boring for a LARP though. Player characters need to have prejudices, personal enemies, and take ideological stances that are not rational or which do not have a direct benefit. PCs need to believe in things that may not be real or which actively harm them. For this reason vulnerabilities need to be spelled out in detail, and muddling vulnerabilities (such as the laundry list of derangements) should be removed. In general something more specific than a Vice should be enforced (perhaps a specialized or derivative form of Vice). And maybe payers can gain bonus XP for voluntarily scoring a Dramatic Failure on an important roll. If XP proves to be too much of an incentive, or too unfair of an incentive, Willpower and hanging bonuses might prove to be sufficient.

Mortal Control: Both the most and least effective thing in a vampire game. Most, because mortals provide an endless cast of characters from which to push drama and motivate players. Least, because mortals under the control of vampires are represented in some of the dryest fashions possible: Retainers, Allies, and Contacts. The exact nature of these merits, what their powers are, how influential they are, etc, is often muddled. They should be spelled out in detail, preferably in brief detail. They should always, always have a mortal face – a person or group of people that the character associates with. And their effects should be unique. A character with a Police Retainer ought to feel like he has something someone else cannot.

To this end, characters should be forbidden (by Court Law) from buying Allies/Retainers in another vampire’s domain. This helps enforce territoriality and gives a reason for characters to keep interacting with the Prince long after they have established their hunting ground. Similar resources within a city should be condensed. Yes, in any decent sized city, there are going to be multiple media outlets and multiple police precincts. In a game sense though, they aren’t. How many fully realized media companies does a city need? One. Unless you’re telling a story of warring media organizations.

Ace of Spades Review

Ace of Spades is a terrible game.

If you don’t know what Ace of Spades is, it’s this quirky new Steam game that looks like Minecraft. It seems like it wants to take the superficial similarity to Minecraft a step further and integrate building/mining with a shooter to create a weird mishmash between the creative Lego genre and the Team-Fortress-genre. It is a colossal failure in that regard.

The game is certainly a team based shooter. You choose between one of four classes – the highly mobile Rocketeer, the gritty Commando, some kind of Sniper class, and the Miner, which is the class I wanted to try out right away. I lept into my work, trying to dig a tunnel under the enemy base. This is when I learned that the game’s maps are much too large for the purpose which they were designed. Digging across the whole land mass consumed well over five minutes in a fifteen minute game. At times the tunnel I was making became jagged, and the interface refused to let me mine fewer than three blocks a time, which made digging a straight tunnel occasionally impossible. When I finished it, I exploded. The game informed me I had committed suicide, which sounds about right.

Next I tried out the Commando. Above-world interaction is a little out of my league but I gave it a shot anyway. Getting from my team’s base to the enemy’s was painfully slow, particularly on the more popular maps that include huge canyons and gullies. I had hoped the Commando would be a bit more brass-balls, but instead I found a single shot in the right place was more than enough to send me back to the beginning of my long, painful trip across the map. I experimented with building bridges to my eventual goal but too often I just got shot in the face and died. And my bridge would explode. Or I’d just randomly die for no apparent reason.

So I gave up trying to be creative and just decided to shoot things. Things heated up a little bit when I gave the sniper a whirl. I got a lot of kills, but getting close to the flag still proved mostly impossible. The one time I did get close enough to touch it I found the enemy had encased it in some kind of shell that looked like a Fortress of Solitude or something. Cracking through the eight layers of combined blue blocks turned out to be more than my character could take, and I spontaneously exploded.

Everything about the game is just off in some way that’s hard to explain. It’s reasonably polished, and the random explosions not-with-standing, it seems remarkably bug-free for a game of its ambition. The trouble is I don’t feel like the game was properly playtested. It feels like it might have been bug tested, certainly, but I don’t feel like the designers played it frequently enough. Everything about the game screams for creative, emergent play to develop its complexity. Instead the game’s mechanics seem to punish you for engaging with them. Building and digging take needlessly long. Shooting dudes is much more satisfying, not to mention productive – but then, this isn’t just supposed to be a shitty version of TF2. The maps size makes building access routes particularly time consuming and aggravating.

The shooting aspects have their problems too. While it would be a bit premature to accuse one class or another of being overpowered I do feel like some are certainly easier to play than others. All of them felt way too fragile. When engaging in a one-on-one fight with another player a single hit was often enough to kill me, or two if they were using a pea-shooter. Not only does the game make you sit out for a few seconds while you respawn but you have to run all the way back across the map once you die since there doesn’t seem to be any way to move up the spawn point for your team.

Overall I think the thing that should keep you from buying the game is its lack of direction. Giving us the tools to create a new way to fight would have been interesting but it feels like the designers have shot themselves in the foot at every possible turn. The maps are too large so you can’t really build your way to victory. The classes can trivialize barriers so they’re pretty useless because you rarely need to defend a single point – except the flag, which is covered in an impenetrable wall of stupid. Running and gunning is much more effective than building but the gunning mechanics are blocky, mediocre, and stilted due to the game’s Mojang aesthetic. Even the fully destructible terrain feels like an afterthought, a minor change in the battleground that ultimately changes very little in terms of actual gameplay. Skip it. It’s a gimmicky shooter that has neither a good gimmick nor is it a good shooter.

Why I Love Day-Z

Note: I figured I needed to post this somewhere; it might as well be here.

Before I talk about how great Day Z is, I wouldn’t mind mentioning why so many people don’t seem to enjoy it. As a game? It’s not very entertaining, particularly when your goal is to play it as a group game. First, the game spawns you in one of several randomly determined spots, ensuring that if you want to play with friends over Teamspeak or what have you, you will be welcomed by at least 20 minutes of mindless running over a bunch of mushy, brown-green terrain. In fact running aimlessly for kilometers at a time is sort of the game’s primary gameplay element, if you look at the numbers. Second, when you enter the game world you are armed with nothing but a flashlight and a spunky attitude. Sometimes zombies will be about 8 meters from where you spawn. Which, by the way, is more than the close enough for them to smell you and begin charging in your direction. Hell, a 100 meter gap is sometimes ‘close enough’ for them to run at you. Looting houses for whatever paltry item passes for a ‘weapon’ is a painful affair, sometimes easy and sometimes marked by the passage of glitchy, teleporting zombies that zero in on you no matter how stealthy you’re being. Finally, assuming you manage to survive long enough to get to one of the game’s few populated, loot-heavy cities, you will be almost instantly killed by a sniper you will never see who spends all day perched up on top of the highest building, killing people for reasons known only to him.

Wall of text finished, let me explain why it’s awesome. Rather than list its neat features, I’m going to tell you a story. The Story of ‘Hands’.

Drew and I have been playing the game for a while. Occasionally other players will be kind enough not to kill you. They may even have a friendly word or two to say before sidling along, eying you suspiciously. But most player interactions come out of the end of a gun. Completely by happenstance we came upon an unlikely ally last night in the form of a gentleman from London. Let’s call him “Hands”, since that’s close enough to his actual handle without marking him for death by hackers and griefers. We shared food with this man, talked about our experiences with the game, managed to strategically avoid getting sniped, and let down our guards a bit. We probably roamed around with Hands for something like 45 minutes before the Event. We found sweet medical supplies. We laughed.

About a quarter kilometer from one of the biggest cities in the game, we found a barn that we decided to loot quickly. This room is relatively small; it’s a barn, rectangular in shape, with doors on opposing sides. There are three levels connected by wooden stairs, and a bunch of crates along the bottom floor. The barn is nearly empty; there’s a shotgun and some shells above (mostly useless because ammo is rare and guns are much too loud), and an empty shotgun below. I grab the empty shotgun, thinking I’ll store it in my backpack. Hands idly mentions that he sees another player in a nearby building, being pursued by zombies, so we pick up the pace a bit.

5 shots are fired rapidly from one of the doors. I spin quickly; the player we spotted has fired into our barn. He has a handgun. Hands is on the ground, bleeding to death. Our assailant sees a shotgun in my hands (he doesn’t know its empty) and pulls back. I take refuge behind a bunch of crates, where I find Drew, already hiding. I know the man it still outside. I want to bandage Hands, but he’s dead in only a few moments. “Damnit,” he says, before the game silences him.

With the fresh kill on the ground I know it won’t be long before the murderer comes in to loot the corpse. I have no guns; Drew has no guns, just this empty shotgun, which I quickly discard. We each have a hatchet, but outside, we know our enemy will have the advantage. Inside, we stand a chance of cornering him in melee. For a time it isn’t clear if he’s still outside or not. So I try to engage in him chatter.

“I know you’re out there”, I say into the local mic channel. “You know I’m in here. Why not chat? You can kill me afterwards. Nothing to lose, right?” No response, just dead silence. “Come on,” I insist, again greeted with empty air. “Well, I’m going to log off then. Come in when you get bored.” The seeds planted, I go prone behind the boxes and hope he takes the bait.

It takes much too long. Several times we almost give up. Drew hears movement; I see his feet enter the building. We don’t rush, which is good, because the man begins cautiously searching and hiding; he thinks to do the same thing to us that we plan to do to him. I think he doesn’t know Drew is in the building yet. He thinks he’s alone with me. Thankfully he doesn’t discover our hiding place and begins looting the body.

It’s sort of a blur, what happens next. Drew goes in first, swinging, getting in at least 2 solid hits. The man fires 2, 3 times, and Drew falls down. Both men are bleeding. I rush out just as the fiend tries to escape. He falls to his knees, both of his legs broken, but he gets off one round into my toes before I finally kill him. As he dies, I hear a noise that sounds like a rage sound, like a 13-year-old’s shriek dying into the microphone just as he mashes his keyboard. My character is breathing heavily, but there’s no time to rest. I bandage Drew quickly, patch him up, and the two of us loot both bodies. Most of the supplies I need are on Hands’ corpse.

We hide the bodies, performing a  quick burial ceremony, and then depart, wary that the gunfire may have attracted other buzzards to our bloodbath.

What was Old is New Again: Nostalgia in Gaming

Nostalgia is a loaded word. I hesitated even using it in the article. When you say “nostalgia”, you’re picking a fight. “You don’t like this because it was good,” the argument goes. “You like it because you were six or ten or thirteen or sixteen when you first played it. You’re just blinded by your nostalgia, a sense of things being better when you were young.” So it was a tough decision to include it here. Understand this: When I say “nostalgia”, I’m not dismissing the games of bygone years as somehow only worthwhile in retrospect, or that people can’t like these things for their own sake. I’m talking about a movement – the Old School Movement – that seems to be grounded in a return to a world that was better, before now, a world where new things have “messed up” the sanctity of old ideas. And yes, of course I’m talking about edition wars.

Let’s face facts. RPGs are an increasingly marginalized industry. White Wolf and Wizards of the Coast were once considered the big dogs in that particular pound. Now, Wizards struggles to piece together a new edition, even as 4th had been around less than 5 years. White Wolf has been floundering for longer, and while their recent release schedule and Gen-Con announcements were encouraging (new books! more books! yay!), there is a tinge of marginalization there too. White Wolf – perhaps now more rightly referred to as Onyx Path – has decided that PDF, POD, and Kickstarter are the future of gaming. Their opinion on how to reach new players? Well, they’re working on that. They aren’t sure yet. Almost as a kind of afterthought.

What both Wizards and Onyx/WW are doing here is turning back the clock. D&D Next, the latest installment in Dungeons and Dragons, seeks to capture the simplicity of earlier days while winning over lapsed fans from the great 3rd edition/4th edition fallout. The playtest as of right now looks and plays like an odd duck, with bits of modern design and terminology dashed into a bowl of old ideas. The folks over at White Wolf have been resurrecting their old licenses over the last year, now writing new material for games that were retired almost a decade ago. So what gives? What’s going on here?

Anyone who has visited a forum dedicated to RPGs, probably ever, knows one of the core elements in any such community is the constant bickering over edition preferences. The great edition wars. “I like magic to work this way but not that way”, “this new edition totally ruined this idiosyncratic portion of the old edition”, and so forth. And I can’t blame them. RPGs are strange creatures. They aren’t videogames. You aren’t obligated to buy new ones if you want to stay on the cutting edge because, unlike videogames, there’s no measurable way to determine quality from one thing to the next. I can look at a videogame and say, “this came is prettier than this game. All things being equal, I’ll take the prettier game.” But the enjoyment of an RPG is pretty much only impacted by the play experience – the experience unique to each table, fueled by the books, props, and systems of each game. If I like a game I purchased in 1981, it will continue to be fun until I grow tired of it. And since all the content the game uses is user generated, and potentially infinite, it might take me a long, long time to get tired of it.

Which leads me to my next point. I am not an edition warrior, not really. I get sad when people won’t give new games a fair shake, but I don’t like to condemn old games either. Mostly, I feel like we have enough D&D. I feel like we have all the material we’ll ever need to run a Vampire game (Masquerade or Requiem). I don’t pine for a resurrection of that material because I like the material I have. “Give us more Masquerade!”, yell the fans. “Give us back 3rd edition/2nd edition/etc!” I have a pile of Masquerade books that [i]I don’t even use[/i]. I have more mechanical widgets that I would ever need and more setting elements than most comic book series will ever see. So why do publishers keep making this stuff? More succinctly, why do people keep asking for more?

Because people have found the game they want, they don’t ever want to leave that world they fell in love with, and because they are always willing to spend more money to feel like that world is still alive.

Here’s my proposal. It’s risky, so it’s bound to be unpopular. Instead of releasing and re-releasing the same basic ideas over and over again, do something truly new. Not just sorta new, something truly new. I can hear some of you out there. You say, “Indie game makers are doing this! Look to them!” And you’re right. I want to see new ideas presented by these big companies, and more importantly, I want to support them. They probably won’t have the runaway success of the old games, but that’s okay. They don’t have to stop publishing money-makers too. I have to ask myself: When D&D was first released, it was kind of a whacky idea. Would any gaming company around today take a risk on it if it wasn’t already established? Would anyone release Vampire today, or Mage, if it wasn’t already established?

As a final note: This lingering issue of new blood, new players. Everyone in the industry acknowledges that things are changing. As we move more towards PoD and PDF publishing models, we’re leaving behind the browser, the kid who finds the book in a bookstore, falls in love with the art, and becomes an RPG advocate for life. That kid isn’t an afterthought, he’s the key to the survival of the hobby. As we cater more and more to the demands of aging gamers – myself included – we are leaving behind an entire generation of potential gamers who have never pitched a stake in an edition war. And we have to accept that the game that those kids want may not even be published yet, never even thought of before.

The 24 Hour Game

Prologue: I’ve wanted to run an endurance match of D&D for a very long time. When I was younged, my best friend and I thought it would be a good idea to try and set a world record for longest game played. Like, consecutively. We had a lot of enthusiasm for the idea, but it never really got off the ground. Mostly because we had things like schoolwork, relationships, and life to maintain. Still it always sort of bothered me that I wasn’t able to channel that early-year enthusiasm into a workable plan.

For my birthday this year, I decided to try and make the smallest discernible benchmark in my old dream that I could: 24 hours of game. I knew going into this whole thing that it wasn’t going to be easy. I invited my best gaming buds from all eras of my lives and made the goal clear: last 24 hours. In retrospect, 4th Edition D&D might not have been the best choice of systems. Something much less clunky might have done the job better, though damned if I wasn’t happy for long fights. When you’re running on fumes after 18 hours, the fact that a combat will reliably take close to an hour is kind of a godsend, since it means I won’t have to try to come up with more improv material.

I prepped for weeks prior to the event. I had an elaborate world map, pages of random encounter tables. I had a random loot generator, at least 12 pages or so of very dense notes on plot, dungeons, traps, and what have you. I knew ahead of time that it simply would not be possible to prep the whole day. Anyone who’s ever DMed knows that plans don’t survive contact with the players. I tried my best to instead have a variety of both canned and random experiences to throw at the PCs and keep them occupied over the course of the narrative. I know 4e doesn’t usually support things like random encounters or random treasure for long term play, but I knew that these guys wouldn’t be trying to plow all the way through Paragon Tier or whatever. There was very little danger of long-term imbalance.

Everybody made characters prior to the event to try and minimize the amount of time spent not actually playing the game. Because the design was decidedly more old-school, full-on party balance wasn’t really required. If the party had been more optimized than it was, I think the game probably would have been pretty boring with the exception of a couple of encounters. Most of the encounters I had prepared were at or below the party’s level, with a handful of really difficult monsters thrown into the random encounters for good measure. I’m glad I did. Some of the most memorable encounters were random.

[Early Game: Hours 0 through 11 or so]: The first six to eleven hours of game were a blast. The party fought there way to the center of an undead plague, destroyed a shrine of Orcus and murdered an evil necromancer while he slept. It included some of the richest character moments and not surprisingly resembled a pretty normal game of D&D in terms of tenor and mood. We ate way, way too much shit. Pizza rolls, chicken nuggets, onion rings. Cheese, mac and cheese, cheese puffs. Spirits remained high.

Favorite moments: While on first watch in an evil temple of Orcus, Silvixen [Crystal] and Trastor [Drew] were hiding in what basically amounted to a closet while the party took an extended rest. They heard a dozen or so zombies and/or ghouls shuffle by, accompanied by screams for help. They looked at each other and just shook their heads no. It was sort of awesome.

After this point, Jon had to go home. So the character he had been playing, a Minotaur ranger, simply exploded

[First Hurdle: Hours 12 through 16]: This is where things got difficult. In game, the players learned that an evil dragon was trying to find an artifact called the Dragonstone to usurp the gods. In an effort to find and stop her, they tracked her to her last known location in the center of an enormous frozen lake. They were attacked by a Shadow of the Colossus-sized giant who pulled himself up from beneath the ice, fast-talked their way past some War Forged amidst some ancient ruins, and destroyed the dragon’s clutch of unhatched eggs. They were then saved by negotiating with a passing [random encounter] White Dragon for help. It was a different dragon, btw, not the one whose eggs they destroyed.

Out of game, This is probably the last part of the game I would describe as “fun” in a traditional sense. We were mostly full but still grazing on snack foods. We were getting tired, and things started to get funny that probably shouldn’t have been funny. I distinctly remember an ongoing argument about whether or not they could fight the enormous ice-guy, and about whether or not they should scramble a bunch of unborn dragons, which as you can imagine is probably more cerebral debate than we were really capable of having.

[The Dark Times: Hours 16 through 20]: This is when the sickness set in. We were all really tired. We fluctuated between hilariously overtired and painfully exhausted. I started running out of canned plot around this point and ended up calling a 20 minute break towards to beginning to prep more stuff. When we reconvened the party left for the nearest civilized location [where they were also considered outlaws as per our backstory] in search of this evil dragon and the Dragonstone she was searching for.The Dragon’s eldest son had beat them there, and they had to fight there way past him to get to the thing he was after, which was kept in a crazy old man’s house. From there, they followed a lead to a Shadow Crossing to find the other places, where there were also some scantily clad vampire hotties. If this sounds confusing, it’s because it was.

I didn’t think we were going to make it at this point. The sun was coming up and my head was pounding. Unable to drink any more soda, we ended up going off to 711 for coffee, since it wasn’t just so much Mt. Dew. I remember Trastor [Drew] getting captured by elves this point, and then he casually convinced his guards that he wasn’t actually supposed to be in prison and walked out. There was also a great moment (leading up to his capture, in fact) where Silvixen was trying to pass herself off as a warforged, thanks to some kind of illusion potion. When the lie came apart, she dropped her Dark Elf Encounter that spat out a huge cloud of darkness. She stealthed, Drew didn’t, and that’s how he got arrested.

Also there was this mirror that could see into the future, and Khorvax[Tom] broke it, causing a series of potential futures to collapse. His character from an alternate universe fell out and the two of them were best buds until a stray arrow killed the copy in a random encounter later.

[Final Hours 22 through 24]: This is all kind of a blur, since I was making up a lot of it and because even things I had prepared started to seem like “dumb ideas” and “I have a better idea” and it wasn’t a better idea. They PCs retrieved another shard of the Dragonstone from it’s hiding place in the Shadowlands, but only after negotiating with some vampires, and getting attacked by a bunch of “ghost wolves”, which are just werewolves who are also ghosts. There was this room with a trap that they casually avoided, and that was sort of funny, and there was this fight…

See, an Avenger had tried to beat them to the Dragonstone shard, but he had proven unworthy, so the 20 ghostly dwarves who protected it had deemed he had to die. The players were really, really tired at this point, so I stated lavishly describing all of their attacks and encouraging them to do the same. Somehow, Crystal managed to create this whole romantic dialogue with the Avenger over the course of the encounter, and Bai [Eric] sort of grabbed the shard when nobody was looking and put it in his pocket. This was also the point at which I noticed Bai had like a +15 to attack when everybody was sporting like a +9 or +10, and that sort of floored me.

The final fight took place back in the world, where two red dragons tried to fight for the final shard. The PCs found the final shard first, assembled the artifact, and used it. Even with the help of every friendly NPC they had met along the way, and with the artifact, they still almost wiped, saved only by the power of friendship in the final moments of the game.

D&D-Next and Edition War III

…I’m not sure it actually is the third Great Edition War. I’m sure someone who much better nerd credentials than my own can recall when the first Nerd Nukes were dropped from orbit, ending some edition I’ve never heard of but which was totally the best edition ever of D&D.

The Fourth Edition of Dungeons and Dragons is drawing to a close and I find myself in a mixed emotional place about it. When I looked at the 4e PHB back in the day (a mere four years ago), I was appalled. The thing looked like a sterilized version of D&D. I had never cared for 3e as more of an idle past time, being more of an AD&D man myself, but this was a step too far. The iPod of D&D; all style, little substance. The powers were samey, relying on an All the Time/Sometimes/Once a Day model that smacked of ability cooldowns from video games such as World of Warcraft. Videogames! In my table top gaming! I told everyone – loudly – how awful the game was and how they should never ever play it.

Then I actually played it and I couldn’t shut up about it. The very first encounter I ran involved a Druid, who had shapeshifted into a wolf, bouncing heroically off a wall to flank an Orc, who he then pushed into his buddy. It was over in seconds, and the whole thing flowed brilliantly out of the mechanics. It was effortless to describe what I was seeing, though it required a little bit of imagination. From there, I went on to run a Castlevania game, which has been brilliant. Ironically, I even started taking crib notes from various MMOs to run my boss encounters, which I’m sure won’t do me a lot of favors in terms of my argument. But its true, and it has resulted in some truly cinematic fights.

I could write for pages about how 4e has been awesome and a lot of the criticisms that get locked into it are really just misapprehensions about features that never went anywhere, but I’m going to resist that urge. Mostly, I’m just disappointed that Wizards of the Coast has given up on a system that I think could have been vastly improved with supplements. It had easily the best combat system I’ve ever played; it could do with some streamlining for sure, but it purred like a well made engine and always kept all of my players engaged. A lot of people have said the game discourages roleplaying, mostly due to the exploitable nature of the in-game social skills such as Diplomacy and Bluff; but I’ve never found that to be the case. Acting in character, trying to feel your characters’ feelings, has nothing to do with rules or editions.

I’m sort of scared for the future of D&D. I want 5e to succeed, because I like WotC and I believe in the brand. But this seems like a bonehead business move. 4e sought to bring in new players to the game line, particularly with the Essentials products. New players are essential (heh) to the life of the brand. In many ways, 5e has been described as a back to basics move, an attempt to unify all fans of all editions. Boiling down D&D to its core and making that a part of every game experience. That’s great. I think it’s a great idea in theory. The problem is that older players are already playing games they want to play. When OD&D died, clones were invented to fill the void. Pathfinder emulates 3.x and so forth. Plus, those players are non-renewable. They aren’t an infinite cash cow. Attracting new players to the hobby is the only valid survival tactic.

“But it must not be working”, I hear you say, “or there’d be no fifth edition.” Well, I mean, that’s true. It isn’t working. Asking why it isn’t working is at least as important a question as noting the lack of working bits though. Is it not working because Essentials is a confusing entry point for new players despite being the designed entry point for new players? Is it not working because the marketing isn’t reaching beyond the already saturated nerd channels? Is it not working because the branding is off putting to female gamers, or computer gamers, or whatever? I’m not pretending I have the answers to these questions, or even that WotC hasn’t already reacted to them. But doing a 180 degree u-turn, trying to salvage a shrinking market, that’s fatalistic. It scares me.

4e was a fantastic system. Fans have had to put up with a lock of flack since its creation. More flack than I would say any fan of any other edition has had to put up with. Oh sure, people who enjoyed 3e had to put up with, “This isn’t D&D” from fans of AD&D. 4e fans have to listen to things like, “Oh 4e? That’s cool, I guess. It’s just that it isn’t a roleplaying game. It’s a boardgame.” And that’s a kind criticism. “Go back to WoW!” is a fairly common mantra. I’m not saying the 4e crowd hasn’t been equally disgusting with their mudslinging, but this should at least outline the current relationship between 4e and WotC. Fans have been fighting a never-ending edition war with the entrenched fans of older editions since day one. To suddenly see the lead of the game line compare the thing we’ve defended for four years as a “McDonalds” isn’t just discouraging. It says they don’t need our help; they don’t need our appreciation and in fact, think our appreciation was misplaced. WotC has a history of alienating the fans of the very game they’re supposed to be promoting and early indications are not hopeful.

I want to be wrong about this. I want 5e to herald the reunification of all elfgames everywhere. I just seriously doubt it’s going to work. Me? I think they should make the playest available in some form as quickly as possible if they’re really serious about this public playtest thing they keep talking about. Dumping the completed game all at once has certain PR advantages, but they don’t need to worry about PR; they need to worry about bridge mending and goodwill. And to be honest I would playtest the shit out of it doubts or no doubts.

Games I Want to Run, But Can’t: Volume One

Inspired by: A Game of Thrones
System: Reign

Premise: At the start of game, players devise a writeup for a character called “The Exile.” The Exile was a great (Leader/Adviser/Wizard/Scholar/Other) who has been exiled from the realm for (Treason[Actual]/Treason[False]/Lesser Crimes/Other). Players would determine what his greatest skillset was and what he was famous for, and how they felt about him.

The game starts with the characters on the run and deep in the wilderness. The Exile is dead. They are heir to whatever he had left, however meager that is – a few coins, maybe a handful of soldiers, and a magic (Item). The players must survive, make friends, and prosper.

Play is largely narrative, surrounding the dramas and drives of the PCs. The world is full of rich characters, and the players accomplish as much with dialogue as they do with swords, whether they choose to use their skills at court or on the battlefield. Large swaths of time divide gaming sessions. Characters feel a real pressure to marry or adopt – when a character dies, they play one of their heirs. Players can even devise base statistics for their heir ahead of time, though if they die while their children are still young, they suffer statistical penalties.

The game stresses slow statistical growth and a focus on narrative advancement, as opposed to mechanical advancement. Instead players are encouraged to master a single domain – a single skill set – that they excel at, and make it their own legacy. Any combat in which a character takes wounds can potentially be fatal, due to permanent injuries and infections.

Players of my last (experimental) Reign game might see some similarities, and that’s not by accident. However, where that game rushed towards a known conclusion (players will buy up their Company stats early and eventually be a powerhouse to be reconned with) this game’s growth is relatively slow. Company rules are modified to make individual challenges between Companies both more significant (in that an entire season worth of buildup isn’t wasted on mutual failure) and more tactical (the physical locality of your army is important, for instance, and skirmishes between a couple of Might 1 groups is more common than a King fielding his entire army at once.)

Combat Encounter Design and 4e

First, I wanted to thank everybody who commented on my last post! I didn’t expect so much of a response, so thanks to everybody for checking out my blog.

This week, I wanted to shift gears a little and talk about Dungeons and Dragons, specifically 4th edition. I had sat down to write an article and it was this huge, monstrous rant about my encounter design philosophy, but I sort of hated it, deleted, and started over. I realized that I didn’t want to sit here and rant about how people design their combats “wrong” or talk about how much of a genius I think I am, because let’s face it, nobody wants to read that. I don’t even want to read that. So instead, I want to describe some of my favorite combat encounters that I’ve run for my players, and some of the cooler ideas I’ve developed.

I like monsters with fun gimmicks. In a ice cavern (when is there not an ice cavern?) the PCs faced off against the giant frozen King Lud, a Large creature made out of ice. The room was fairly large, a platform built atop a series of icy columns. Around the outside of the platform were braziers, which granted free saving throws to characters starting next to them, against cold based effects. Lud was a brute, wielding a massive frozen hammer that dealt bonus damage to “frozen” (read: immobilized) targets. Lud had an aura that slowed targets, and a breath weapon that would either slow, or freeze (immobolize) targets who were already slowed. This created a one-two-three combo that kept the PCs on their toes and concerned with managing their conditions. Every time King Lud was hit, he would spawn a minion in an adjacent space: a Rime Crow. Rime Crows were a little bit of custom bastardry I designed. They were mostly annoying (low damage minions), but if they died, they would explode. This attack (called, perhaps blandly, “Rime Explosion”), if it hit a PC, would coat them in cold rime, granted them a cold vulnerability for their trouble. This meant that characters with low damage would devote their time to trying to manage the cluster of minions (since low-damage attacks would just spawn more minions with little reward) while the high-damage characters would focus on striking down the boss.  I think after they bloodied him, be broke down the platform and they had to fight around a cluster of spikes while he tried to throw pillars at them, but that’s not really the relevant part of the story.

In another encounter, the players had to fight a reaper over a large pit. The reaper was this little homebrewed guy with a bunch of strong, basic attacks. He had really high damage resist to all damage types, but if you could force him into one of the beams of light in the room, he would lose his resistance and gain vulnerability to all damage. On a hit, he would mark his attacker and teleport adjacent to them immediately, but the target got to choose the spot where they put him. To complicate things, there were several artillery monsters in the crypt with them. On the far side of the room were the controls that allowed one of the PCs to open skylights in the ceiling to let in light, so they couldn’t just nova-strike the reaper on turn one. It resulted in some really unorthadox strategy, with characters delying or putting themselves at risk to manipulate the reapers movement. It was a fun little experiment.

If it sounds like I’m borrowing from MMO’s like World of Warcraft, I am. Hell, in one encounter, an NPC ghost would occasionally interrupt the fight to tell the PCs to run into a small “safe zone” in the encounter room before the boss used a big, high-damage AOE attack on the whole chamber, which is a classic raiding trope at this point. And I mean, I want to stress that while I really enjoy fiddly fights, I don’t think they should detract from roleplaying opportunities between fights (see my previous article on Quests). One really cool way to bring roleplaying back into combat is to introduce non-standard encounter objectives – saving particular NPCs, trying to kill specific, well-protected monsters, disabling a device, or even just getting to the other side of a large room.

Another thing I love are terrain bonuses – terrain that helps, rather than hinders, the PCs. Hazards are great, and I use them a lot, but most of them follow the formula of, “This hazard sits here on the ground until someone gets pushed or pulled into it. Making a saving throw.” Most hazards can be easily avoided and don’t really add a lot of spice to the encounter. I did a multi-stage encounter once with a giant, hulking werewolf lord who was a bit more potent than the PCs were expecting. They beat him, and then he dragged them into another fight beneath the ground, in a cavern, and they had to take him from bloodied to zero again. When I designed it, I knew they’d be hurting for resources, so there were little ghostly power shrines throughout the room that would give them back powers or HP, depending. However, he could also use them, so they had to race to collect them while the Defender kept him busy. It was a really neat culmination to a long running plot, though it’s probably a little too high-stress to use all the time.

To me, the challenge of the DM isn’t beating the players. Beating the players is easy, if that’s something you want to do, but it’s neither fair nor interesting to do so. The trick is to upset their expectations of what an encounter is supposed to be like, and to do it in a proactive way. “You can’t use Encounter Powers” is an interesting ability for a monster to have, but it’s not especially fair or fun for the PCs to deal with. “I’m immune to all damage that isn’t fire” is also interesting, but again, not fair. However, offering both the restriction and a way around it can change the dynamic of a combat encounter. Combats tend to move towards stasis: the melees move up, away from the traps, and hop into flanking positions. Artillery on both sides fire at priority targets. Rinse, repeat.  The trick then becomes mixing up the formula, drawing inspiration from a variety of other tactical games, to keep things fresh and challenging for the players.

One final thing: I love gimmicks and weird things that lead to situational monster invulnerability or hyper-deadly, narrowly applicable attacks. But I always announce them, and I always offer a way out. An instant death trap is only interesting if the players can avoid it. If there is any possibility of them getting pushed into it on the first round, that’s boring as hell because there’s no strategy involved – they lose initiative, get hit, fail save, die. Likewise, letting players wail on a monster round after round without letting them know they aren’t hurting the monster at all – or better yet, giving them clues as to why their opponent might not be taking any damage – is lame. I try to give players clues with Passive Perception, because the challenge comes in navigating the available risk-reward choices, not in knowing that they exist.

What do you do to spice up encounters?

In Defense of Vampire: the Requiem

As it becomes increasingly obvious, I’m starting to think White-Wolf has more interest in roping their lapsed Masquerade fans back into the fold than in making Requiem a complete gameline. The writing is certainly on the walls. Their upcoming MMO (assuming it doesn’t remain in a permanent state of vapor-ware) is based on the older Masquerade license; they’ve recently released the 20th anniversary edition book of Vampire: the Masquerade, and they are starting (restarting?) a game line called ‘Onyx Path’, which is previously unreleased Old World o f Darkness material.  No, no, that doesn’t prove anything. Yes, I’m doomsaying, which everyone has been doing since the White-Wolf slipped over to an exclusive PoD/PDF sales model. But the resulting internet buzz got me to thinking.

See, all I keep hearing is all this weird nostalgic stuff about Masquerade, because you know, people are thinking back on the line and what they liked about it. What comes along with that are criticisms – direct and indirect – of Requiem. And I wanted to address that. So in no particular order, here are some of my defenses of what I consider to be the best horror game out there:

1.) “I’ve always felt like Requiem is too dry. Masquerade had a much more engaging backstory.”

This is the most polite way I have heard, to comment on WW’s decision to include no metaplot in Requiem. I have always felt – still feel – that Masquerade was as much a comic book as it was an RPG. Each book progressed the story. There were people, many people, who were more interested in that story than in game, ferreting around in the books in an attempt to put together some grand riddle, like it’s an ARG or something. I think that Requiem, being a toolbox game, was always supposed to approach Masquerade in terms of its rich plot – but only with the help of individual Storytellers, not from the gameline. Here’s what I mean. In Masquerade, you knew each sect’s territory, had at least two dozen NPCs perfectly capable of handling every threat the PCs would ever care to tackle themselves. You had the vampire origin question more or less settled, an end of the world scenario, vast-world-wide conspiracies, and milennia old mysteries.

Why can’t Requiem do that?

Simple answer: It can. That’s the thing. Most STs don’t do the work required to build a universe around their game, but all the tools are there to decide on your own vampire origin story, what world-wide conspiracies are happening, and so forth. Requiem was always intended to be more flexible, and allow each ST to custom-build their own setting, with very little in the way of assumed constants in that setting. One ST builds a global game. One ST builds a local game. One ST decides Judas was the first vampire, and another decides it was Gilgamesh. If the book is dry, it’s because it’s an instruction book, not a serial novel that also happens to be a game, if you’re into that kind of thing.

2.) “I just don’t feel very strongly about the clans as they are presented in the core book.”

This one has some validity to it, particularly when you consider that most of this camp is coming from Masquerade. In that game, you almost automatically know what you’re getting into just flipping through the book. Gangrel – animalistic types, gut instinct. All Gangrel deal with the animal side of vampirism, full stop, or else they have good reason for being contrary, but either way they interact with the stereotype. If you play a Brujah, you rebel against something. If you play a Malkavian, you’re crazy and use crazy to solve mysteries, and so forth. The character archetype is baked right into the Clan, such that flipping through the book is almost like looking at a catalog of personalities. That’s not to say everyone played a Toreador the same way (although, there are plenty of you out there), but rather that it was easy for a new player to pick a character off a page, make that character, and immediately know how to play her and what her goals are.

In contrast, Clans in Requiem have never represented that. They don’t really represent how to play or what kind of personality you might have or what your goals are. Clans in Requiem are a unique, mystical expression of the Curse, and much more closely model what tools a character has available. Mekhet are sneaky, but not because they are the “sneaky clan” (see: Assamites), but rather, because their tools (Obfuscate, Auspex) are good at gathering information and maintaining concealment. There is so much wiggle room within that context that there is almost no guideline whatsoever as to what to do. And moreover, there is no Mekhet Clan structure (at least, by default) to tell you what to do or what your personality is like. Covenants go some of the way towards resolving this, but Covenants only tell you what your ideology looks like, not what your personality is like. If you’re a Mekhet Sanctified, it means you’re a believer (probably) and you have access to information gathering powers. It doesn’t immediately tell you as much as say, playing a Malkavian might.

This means the whole game was just less accessible to new players; less accessible means less impressive formative experiences, and that means poor comparisons for people who played both. I found the freedom of Requiem incredibly refreshing; I liked being able to make a personality first and pick a Clan second, which was sort of rare in Masquerade. Anecdotal stories about Tremere or Ventrue chastised, OOC and IC, for “playing their Clan wrong” is about all I need to hear to know that distinction exists. A number of times, I would see new players flip through the book and stare at the Clans for an hour or more and still not feel immediately drawn to any of them, largely because Requiem asks you to do a lot of work with regards to coming up with your own goals and personality first. Character concepts that, in Masquerade, would immediately fit one Clan very naturally (“I want to play a Crazy Seer”, for instance, or “I want to play a Rich Businessman”) could fit 2, 3, or even all 5 in Requiem, which further muddied the waters.

3.) “Vampires are weaker in Requiem/Elders are weaker in Requiem.”

This one I can’t argue with, because mechanically there’s no question about it. Vampires are closer to mortals in Requiem than they are in Masquerade. It’s an objective fact. The trick is, I don’t especially care. Vampire to me has never been a game about self-empowerment. Vampires are not magicians, or superheroes, by default. They are mortals, changed, given a shot at eternal life and faced with the difficulty of survival and moral despair. Their perks – Disciplines, inherent benefits, etc – should operate to help reinforce those ideas, and give them the ability to enact some degree of change in the world. I do not consider it a failing that a modestly well statted mortal can kill a starting vampire with a baseball bat under the correct circumstances.

See, Vampires are supposed to be secretive and manipulative, and that’s not something I ever felt Masquerade really encouraged. If some 7th generation Prince has all his Disciplines at 5 and such, there’s really no reason for him to rule from the shadows, particularly if there aren’t any other 7th generation vampires in town. Sure, if the whole city decides to kill him, they might be able to, but let’s not kid ourselves – this guy can probably kill a couple of starting characters without a second thought. Why on Earth would he ever need such characters? It’s immediately deprotagonizing. Vampires in Requiem, particularly Elders, survive by making friends, because while they are personally more powerful than most given individual neonates, they aren’t stronger than all of them. Further, there are probably a dozen things a Requiem Elder can’t do himself, unlike the Masquerade Elder, who can do just about anything. Making an Elder vampire “unbetable” in Requiem takes thousands of experience. Considering the chart for giving XP to advanced characters stops at around 400, that seems untenable.

Vulnerable Elders – indeed, vulnerable vampires – help enforce the theme of political distrust. Vampires don’t trust each other, but they have to make friends to survive. No one of them is personally powerful enough, physically, to survive in a vacuum. I like that, I find it to be incredibly interesting.  9 levels up of untouchable NPCs who are both more interesting and more powerful than the PCs? Not so much.

To conclude: I know full well White Wolf probably isn’t closing the door on Requiem, and I hope that they do something great with the license. And I mean, I like Masquerade! I think it has some great perks, I played the game for years. But I love Requiem; I really feel it is a superior games for writing compelling stories about vampires. If I want to read a great story about vampires, or if I want to play in a game where the power scale trends towards the apocalyptic, or if I want to ease players into a game where they might not immediately know what they want to play, maybe Masquerade is a better choice. To me, Requiem is just perfect, and I guess even if the line were to end tomorrow, I would feel like the collection I have is pretty comprehensive. I only wish more die-hards had given it an honest shot, instead of reading through it in PDF or at the gamestore and thinking, “There’s no plot in this! I’m uninterested!” That’s never been the point. We make our own worlds, our own stories, our own grand mysteries, vampire origins, and our own end of the world, sometimes.

Tell me what you think in the comments!

Thoughts on Running 4e D&D

To be perfectly clear, I really don’t foresee myself running a D&D game any time in the immediate future. And the ideas here are meant to address very specific issues with running 4e, which I hope I can elaborate upon. I started with a basic idea: How do you get 4e off rails? It’s a question that raises hackles, certainly. Every DM who thinks they’re any good will insist that their game is not on rails and that players can do whatever they want. Indeed, I’m sure most of them are telling the truth to a certain extent, and probably use some of the ideas here in some form or other. 4e is hard to write for. The reason it’s hard to write for is because of the number of moving parts. A challenging encounter (notice I didn’t say a “deadly” encounter, because you can make a deadly encounter that isn’t challenging and vice versa) can take multiple hours to write. And that’s only supposed to be 1/4 of the game or so. Not getting to use a prepared encounter is a huge waste of time. Which leaves you to either shoehorn in an encounter the PCs have basically sidestepped, or you get to abandon a beloved idea that took a lot of your time to write. Not satisfying either way.

The new item system exacerbates things still more. Players can only expect to get Uncommon or Rare items through adventuring – never as part of an Enchant Item ritual and never from a vendor. DMs using this system have a few choices. They can curb the very fabric of their world to ensure that wanted items fall into player hands. They can force epic adventures for items that, before, were probably considered little more than a modest stat-boost. Or they can enforce random-item drops, taking the responsibility of itemizing their game out of their own hands. I suggest an alternative.

First, imagine a world where the game isn’t measured in Encounters, but in Quests. Quests are modest affairs spanning 3-5 encounters, and so maybe 1 or 2 sessions. Major quests might span somewhat more – maybe 5-8 quests, or 2-3 sessions. When players finish a quest, their session is over, so it behooves the DM to pace the game in such a way that they always end a session at the mid-way or at the completion of a Quest. Quests have XP awards that might be based upon the combat encounters and skill challenges within them, but do not depend on the successful completion of specific encounters. This means you get to avoid one of my biggest pet peeves with 4e. I hate that PCs are encouraged to hunt down all the combat encounters because they’re generally worth more XP than their Skill Challenge counterparts. I also hate that failed Skill Challenges do not net XP consistently; the consequences for a failed Skill Challenge should be clear, but they shouldn’t result in lost XP. Why do I hate that? Because XP is a huge motivator in D&D, and players shouldn’t be ushered towards actions their character wouldn’t take because of the lure of XP. It creates the perception that talking to NPCs or sneaking around a problem are not considered the “right choice” by the game system itself, which can be embittering.

Okay, so now you’re thinking with quests. At the end of a quest, players return to a central quest hub, where they can talk to NPCs, shop, and most importantly, pick their next Quest. Quests are represented by index cards, which list the name of the quest, the known objectives of that quest, a rough idea of the level, difficulty, and rewards for that quest, and so on. This model has a ton of potential. You could put alignment restrictions on quests. You could make certain quests prerequisites for other quests. You could even make it so doing a quest for faction A makes it impossible to do a quest for faction B. Players can introduce their own ideas for quests that are linked to NPCs they care about or items that they want. Since players k now that a given quest will only take one or two sessions, they are less apt to shy away from specifically seeking an item they want as part of their build. I might not want to take 5 sessions out of the game to go hunt down a Frost Longsword +2, but one game? Sign me the hell up.

Give the players an option to do two quests simultaneously, but only if they meet specific narrow parameters during their encounters. Maybe they have to travel to the lost city of Hobo and there is a merchant who just happens to need an escort there – but they have to direct and defend him during combat encounters and survive his interference during skill challenges, and maybe they’ll even grow to like and care about him. If they do both, maybe he gives them a special item. Or hell, maybe they opt to just kill him and take the item, but that doesn’t explicitly need to be spelled out – since they know the quest objective, and its not an evil quest, they don’t get the XP for killing him, they get the XP for fulfilling the objective.

Objections are obvious. Loot generated by quests would have to break with the treasure-parcel model, at least in the specifics. Suddenly players have more say in what loot they receive, and that loot is not always a surprise. I rebut that idea by saying my proposal isn’t a straightjacket. You can still have random loot drops. You can still have gold, unexpected (and unlisted) treasure, you can still have plot twists and a central story arc. The trick here is that you are agreeing to let players have more control over the story. If you try to screw them over with “gotcha” plot twists, it’s not going to work in this model. At least, not more than once. You have to let the players choose the direction of their epic quest, and let go of the reins a little, but the results would be highly pleasing. Dms don’t have to waste time writing encounters that never get used or have to be resort to railroads to make players hit all the correct points; players no longer feel like bystanders getting caught up in whatever plots are available.

My theory about PCs in D&D especially is this: Most players want to play the game the DM has prepared. They don’t want to jump off on some wild tangent, but often times, since what the DM wants isn’t always clear, they stumble around looking for what they THINK they’re supposed to do. Now, they know they get to make choices about where to go next, can cleave to a specific goal with a high degree of focus, and can have faith that if they pick a direction, the DM will lead them down the right path.

This has been my crazy D&D fever dream.