It’s that time of year again. Time for Hasbro to slough off its old skin as it lets go of yet another of the most experienced RPG designers in the world. Earlier this year Bill Slavicsek (a 20 year D&D veteran) left amid a rash of WotC layoffs. This time around in the annual Christmas firings another of D&D’s Old Guard, Rich Baker, has come under the axe.

Perhaps it’s just a sign of the times, as businesses struggle to stay afloat in the frigid economy, or is it evidence of the increasing board game-ification of the D&D franchise by its toy-manufacturing parent company. WotC has been releasing ever more D&D themed board games – a trend that I enthusiastically support so long as it doesn’t impact the continued development of D&D as a RPG. And there is no doubting that 4e is much more board game-esque than any of its predecessors.

No need to worry yet, though, as it might simply be a reorganization. I don’t think we have heard the last from Rich Baker, Bill Slavicsek, David Noonan or Steve Winter, as WotC often taps its laid-off talent for freelance work. Hopefully we will have years of quality D&D from these talented game designers.

Best of luck to all the employees let go this season, and Merry Christmas.

So I have been helplessly engrossed in Skyrim for the last week. It’s everything a great role-playing game should be. It has a vast open world with countless nooks and crannies to explore; it’s full of difficult moral decisions with logical repercussions. It is needlessly deep and thorough almost to the point of ridiculousness, all of which creates such a sense of verisimilitude, it is truly difficult to put the controller down and re-enter the real world.

I did manage to tear myself away long enough to record one of my adventures in comic form for your enjoyment.

It has been some time since I have talked about Dungeons & Dragons here so I figure I’m about due. My mini adventure, Something Sinister in Cespius, is coming along but isn’t ready for public yet, so I thought I would share another idea I’ve been cooking up for possible use in my home campaign: a battle mechanic to simulate large-scale conflicts.

One of the paradoxes of D&D is that it was born from tabletop tactical war-games, but when it comes to simulating large-scale conflicts, the 5 member adventuring party  model falls flat, especially if you’re trying to recreate a grand battle between armies of 10,000 soldiers. How can the players stand out in such a massive army? More importantly, how can 5 adventurers make a difference against an enemy 10,000 strong?

There are several very important things to remember.

1. The PCs don’t need to kill the entire enemy force single-handedly. It might seem obvious, but in a game built around balanced encounters, players and DM alike get used to the players vanquishing entire teams of monsters.
2. Large battles are fought by smaller teams with specialized jobs. Treat the adventuring party as an elite strike-force. This is what my battle mechanic is based on.
3. The PCs are heroes. Don’t forget that the PCs are probably the most powerful people on the battlefield. Let them feel that way. Make sure they feel like they’re having a significant impact on the course of the battle. One hero can change the course of history; the adventuring party has 5.

Keeping all this in mind, we can start to think about how the battle will look. The PCs will participate in 3 out of 5 possible battles. In the beginning they will be presented with 4 options of where to focus their attentions on the battlefield leading up to the climactic encounter with the enemy commander. Each scenario carries with it a possible bonus or penalty that will have an impact on the final encounter with the enemy commander. After completing two encounters on the field, the PCs come up against the leader of the enemy forces, aided by the choices they made or hindered by the battles left unfought.

I finished my first play-through of Dragon Age 2: Mark of the Assassin the other day and have been thinking a lot about the experience. I hadn’t picked up Dragon Age 2 in a long time and it was fun re-familiarizing myself with my old character. Combat was intuitive, but I had forgotten all my skills and combinations. It took a few minutes of playing around before I got reoriented but I soon found that my previous opinion of the game held true. Even still, it was great returning to the world and catching up with the old group.

But I’m not here to review Mark of the Assassin. It was a fun bit of DLC that kept me thoroughly entertained for an evening and it is worth the eight bucks I spent on it. But that isn’t what has kept me thinking about the game even days after completing it. What struck me about Mark of the Assassin was its star, Felicia Day, who takes on the role of Tallis, a Qunari assassin. The character is modeled to look remarkably like Felicia herself, which I’ll admit was a little strange for me at first. I’ve never been one for celebrity chasing and to actually be able to control one felt odd, like some strangely voyeuristic puppeteer. Needless to say, I stuck to playing Hawke and only possessed Tallis to force a potion down her throat (turns out Felicia Day has a poorly developed sense of self-preservation).

It wasn’t the writing, or the voice acting or even the Felicia-shaped Tallis that impressed me most about Felicia’s appearance in Mark of the Assassin. It was that she was in it at all, and more importantly, that we gamers actually care. We care more than if Tallis were instead voiced by some A-list actress like Jennifer Connolly or (shudder) Angelina Jolie. We care because, while Felicia Day is an actress, she was a gamer first, and when we play Mark of the Assassins we see Felicia and say, “Look, she’s one of us and she made it!”

She stands as inspiration to us gamers with a bit of talent and the ambition to take our passion beyond the pastime. She is proof that it can be done. Sure, it takes hard work, but so does anything worth doing. Felicia didn’t get the Guild produced on her first attempt. She had to work hard to turn her passion into a profession. The single greatest achievement Mark of the Assassin unlocked in me was the desire to put down the controller and get to work.

In my last post I talked about my recent trip to Turkey and my penchant for a good old-fashioned ruin. They invigorate me, inspire me, fuel my imagination. They make me want to write about their glory days so I can spend time walking their streets, if only in my mind and on the page. As my wife and I walked the broken marble streets of these ancient cities, I swear I could hear the crowd swarm about me. Touts shouted their wares, and officials congregated in the bouleuterion. The entire experience was quite visceral and compelling.

At first I attributed it to a past life, echos from that time I was a pleb in Rome filtering through the ages like I’d spent too much time in Assassin’s Creed’s Animus.  Or maybe it was just my own over-active imagination. Then I read an interesting observation by Penny Arcade’s Tycho Brahe on how video games might alter our own sense memories.

His post led me to view my intense experience in the ruins in an entirely different light. Is it possible that my sense memories didn’t come from a past life at all, but were instead implanted firmly into my subconscious by hours of playing Caesar III during my formative years? It makes sense. Video games are immersive, and as technology and game design advances it becomes easier and easier to lose yourself in them, similar to how Assassin’s Creed caused me to view a walk downtown as an obstacle course. Who need’s Abstergo when your XBox is creating real memories of events that only happened in a binary universe.

I can hear the masses railing against this brainwash from in front of their TVs as their waistlines expand. Even my parental superego raises an eyebrow at the possibility that experiences might be injected directly into my temporal lobe. But, if true, is this really such a bad thing? Some might argue that the realism of first person shooters is desensitizing us to violence and lay the atrocities of the mentally disturbed on the shoulders of recreational games. But even as I accept that my perceptions of real life events might have been altered by my time with video games, I refuse to believe that they can control us. If anything, my experience at the ruins was only heightened by these digital memories. While immersed in Assassin’s Creed, an everyday walk on the town becomes an adventure, and life gets a little bit more interesting, even if it isn’t entirely real. Is that such a bad thing?

Every board game I can remember playing as a kid was competitive. Most were simply a race to get to a space on the board, like Shoots and Ladders or Sorry (I fondly refer to it as “Sorry I made you play this game”), other games, like Monopoly,  were epic quests to slowly torture your friends and make them never want to see a polyhedron again. Playing these games as a kid, I learned how to win and lose gracefully. More importantly, I learned that winning’s no fun against a sore loser, and sore winners make losing even more excruciating than it already is.

Psychology of Winning and Losing

I’m no psychologist, but I’ve played a lot of games in my day. I know that it feels good to win, I know that it sucks to lose, and I know that people react very differently (often badly) in either outcome. In my experience, it’s much more difficult to lose to another human that it is to lose to a system. Not that losing is ever fun, but it’s easier to die in a video game, for example, than it is to be slowly and inexorably driven into abject poverty by your “friends” over the course of 5 hours. In a video game we usually just shrug it off and hit continue.

Interestingly, the feeling of accomplishment and success from beating a video game isn’t diminished compared to winning against your friends. In many ways it feels better because the video game usually won’t bitch about that cheat code you entered back at the title screen or complain about how it never wins.

This combination of satisfaction in victory and perseverance in defeat makes video games an appealing alternative to board games, especially for those who don’t handle losing gracefully. If only we could find some way to capitalize on this quirk of the human psyche in the board gaming industry… But wait! We can!

Enter the cooperative board game. Making a board game with satisfying wins and soft losses isn’t easy and games approach cooperative play in different ways. In the following section I look closely at several cooperative board games and see what works and what doesn’t.

Levels of Cooperative Play

Straight-Up Coop: Arkham Horror is a prime example of this type of coop board game. It’s the players versus the rules and the luck of the draw. Can the players coordinate their actions and utilize the skills and tools provided to overcome the obstacles created by the board? This style of coop play is satisfying with the least potential for conflict because in the end, everybody  at the table is a winner or a loser and all players are united in a common goal. Any conflict between players is cause by different ideas of the best way to achieve the same goal.

Straight-Up Coop (Or Is It?): This is Straight-Up Coop with a mechanic that creates the possibility of an adversary amongst the players. Shadows Over Camelot uses this method. It’s a good style for players who enjoy surprises and munchkining in their games but, in the case of Shadows Over Camelot, once the traitor is revealed, it’s pretty much game over for the traitor. If I were to make a game with this mechanic, I would create a more satisfying play experience for the traitor after being discovered. Part of the reason for the unsatisfying options for the traitor post-revelation might be simply incentive to keep your treacherous nature concealed. Still, if the traitor is discovered early in the game, it’s an hour and a half of not much fun for one of the players at the table…

You Scratch My Back, I’ll Stab Yours: Games like Munchkin and Risk allow the players to cooperate if and when they want to. In my experience, this sort of coop is exciting, creating some very entertaining table-talk and player interaction, but inevitably leading to betrayal and in some cases hurt feelings. This type of game is still competitive at its core and there can be only one winner, so cooperation is ephemeral and alliances are strictly on an “until it serves me better to stab you in the back” basis.

It’s Us Against You!: Mansions of Madness, the sequel to Arkham Horror, is only semi-cooperative. Instead of players against the game, it’s players against the “Keeper,” a kind of referee and storyteller somewhat analogous to the Dungeon Master in D&D. While this model works well in D&D, where the DM can’t actually “win” the game, in Mansions of Madness, things can get a little touchy. The fact that the Keeper is actually trying to win the game crates a fair amount of conflict between players and keeper. Add that to the fact that the odds are very stacked against the players and you have a recipe for frustration and a tough loss. With this game, it is best that players who don’t lose well play the keeper.

The Referee: The obvious example of this type of cooperative game is D&D and other table top RPGs. While not exactly a board game, D&D has evolved more and more towards the genre with game pieces (miniatures) and a game board (dungeon tiles). In this type of cooperative game, one person at the table plays the referee (DM in D&D) who acts as an arbiter and storyteller. Their job is to make sure the story progresses and that the players are having fun and playing by the rules. Many DMs don’t understand this, but the referee is not an adversarial presence, even though they control the forces of evil. The players, however, are usually united in the common goal of fighting the DM’s monsters and destroying his carefully laid out plans. Conflicts at the table are similar to straight-up coop in that players have the same goal, but often disagree on the best way of achieving it.

Cooperative Gameplay in the Games of Ismia

So what does all of this mean for the games of Ismia? Readers know that I have been working on implementing some cooperative elements into Heroes of Ismia with the new party quests. The party quests in Heroes could be described as straight-up coop, but I’d like to work in some more munchkining opportunities. Or perhaps I could come up with a version of the game that requires all the players to work together against a single epic quest, instead of having each player working on their own. In the end, though, I think Heroes will always be a largely solitary journey, despite my efforts to remedy that.

What’s the answer?  How ’bout a new game! It’s quite premature, but I have been working on the next game in the Ismia franchise. Siege of Ismia will be a straight-up coop game from start to finish. It’s been set aside while I work Heroes into a presentable prototype, but once developed, Siege will be a 1-6 player game where each player has a defined role and multiple paths to victory or defeat based on how well they play against the random elements put forth by the normal progression of a turn. I also have some interesting new battle mechanics worked out that I look forward to sharing once Heroes is closer to completion.

For now, I will continue to work on incorporating some more cooperation into Heroes of Ismia through party quests or some other mechanic I haven’t yet devised. If you have any ideas I’d love to hear them. Drop a line in the comments section.

It’s been several play tests since the last revision of Heroes of Ismia, in which classes were completely reworked and character movement was increased amongst other changes, and I’m ready to give another update on the state of the game. I’m in the middle of hurried revisions because next week I’m going to be play testing with a group of professional game designers and I’d rather not embarrass myself. On the one hand, I feel like the game is really beginning to take shape, with fairly well-balanced combats thanks to the tier system, and quicker quest completion from the 2d6 movement, but there’s still a long way to go and the bulk of the game feels largely repetitive. Here are a few changes I’m working on to shake things up:

Wandering Monsters

A long-time problem with the game is that combat didn’t feel incredibly integrated. I tried adding more combat based quests and greater incentives to go monster hunting, but we still found it possible to go most of the game without having a single combat. Enter the wandering monster. I changed one of the wild card sides of each resource die to a wild/monster. During a gather action, if you roll 2 or more wild/monsters, you must immediately have a combat and defeat the monster before you can collect your resources. This rule proved a little problematic early in the last play test when my fiance got trapped in a catch 22. She needed to complete quests to be powerful enough to survive a combat, and she needed to gather to complete quests, resulting in two character deaths; an issue that may need to be addressed.

Non-Combat Powers

After all the changes I made to character powers, when actually play testing, they seemed a bit overwhelming. Players often forgot about powers because of the abundance of options. Also, most powers were combat based, and players rarely used their stamina or magic resources for anything other than drawing an action card. To fix this, I am working on gathering and movement powers for each class; powers that will require stamina or magic and enhance actions other than combat. Hopefully this will force players to more carefully monitor their resources.

Party Quests

This is the most exciting change: quests that require players to work together and coordinate their turns, an idea suggested by my friend Jeff, a partner in many a board game adventure. Party quests represent global events that require the attention of every player. Failure to complete a party quest results in a permanent penalty or alteration to the game board, but success yields incredible rewards for all players.

The hope with the addition of party quests is that player interaction will be stressed even more. A drawback to many board games is that players spend much of their time focussed on their own goals. They are only reminded that there are other players involved when their actions are thwarted or when they are offered another beer. The PvP powers and cards I put into effect in the previous iteration helped, providing some of the highlights of the last few play tests, and this is a chance to add even more.

More to come after the next round of play tests!

As Dungeons & Dragons expands its playership and branches out into new genres, I found myself wondering how I could take these new games, specifically the D&D board games, and use them as a tool to enhance my home campaign. Today I’d like to share a few ideas about how to integrate the Castle Ravenloft board game into your home DnD campaign to create a dynamic encounter.

The Background:

My players had been investigating the nefarious dealings of Ramander the Wise and his attempts to undermine the Lady of Pain in the planner hub of Sigil. Ultimately, they needed to gain the Lady’s favor to be granted permission to use a closely guarded portal to the Planner Weavers where they hope to acquire a patch of space-time fabric. After defeating Ramander on his own demi-plane and upsetting his plans, they found that the plane they were on was being held together by Ramander’s will alone, and was quickly falling apart. They passed through a portal and found themselves on a levitating platform of rough stone. Debris drifted everywhere and in the distance the party could see several other floating platforms, one of which bore a gateway back to Sigil, the other two held chests guarded by four pillars of crackling electricity.

The Setup:

I selected several Castle Ravenloft Dungeon Tiles from the board game and stuck them to a flip mat (the flip mat was used simply for determining range of attacks). I used the “Start” tile as the party’s goal and placed the “Arcane Circle” tile at the opposite end of the flip mat as the entrance. Between these two tiles I placed two tiles with no walls and put a d4 on each corner to represent the energy pillars that guard the loot.

I then picked an assortment of 4 white triangle dungeon tiles and 7 black triangle dungeon tiles, shuffled them and placed the stack face-down near the board.

The Monsters:

For the encounter I used the following monsters but changed their descriptions and attack types to physical or electrical.

The Pillars – Lich Remnant (level 16 minion); I only used the Orb of Obliteration power from one pillar, with the other pillars “charging” it using the Obliteration Empowerment effect.  The pillars can fire once, then require a turn to recharge, thus this powerful attack can only happen once every 2 turns. Alternately, you could assign a recharge 5 or 6 to the firing pillar

Black Triangle Tile Defenders (Minions)- Lich Remnants described as crackling lightning beings. Change damage types to lightning – or – Angel of Valor Veteran. I took away their fly speed.

White Triangle Tile Defenders – Angel of Battle described as an animated heap of the drifting debris, held together by crackling energy. Again, no fly speed and their devastating Storm of Blades attack reduced their move speed to 2. – or - Drider Shadowspinner. Throwing nets of clinging energy and shooting bolts of electricity.

The Encounter:

To move across the game board, a player must stand at the edge of a tile and make either an Arcana, Wisdom or Charisma check (moderate DC) to exert their will on the drifting debris and form another platform. The player draws the top tile from the stack and places it with the arrow facing their character, just as in the Ravenloft board game. Depending on the color of the triangle, the DM determines which monster to place on the new tile’s bone pile. The first time this occurred, I had players roll initiative, then kept them acting in initiative order for the rest of the encounter, even when no monsters were present.

Like the board game, this method of tile placement creates a random dungeon with often inconvenient turns or dead ends. More often than not, as players work their way toward the exit, their path will be forced to meander. They can intentionally reset a tile either by making an Arcana, Wisdom or Charisma check (difficult DC) while adjacent to a tile to discard it, or by moving away from it. If there are no monsters or players on a tile or on an adjacent tile, that tile is discarded and shuffled back into the draw stack.

This setup created a dynamic, but lengthy encounter with 5 standard monsters and about 14 minions. The experience reward was significant, but they deserved it for defeating the climactic battle of the adventure.

The Rewards:

Of course the party’s actions were appreciated. So much so that the Lady of Pain made a rare appearance, accompanied by her Dabus minions, to grant the players their wish: a blade from her headpiece that functions as a single-use key to the Planner Weavers. Once used, the key converts to a powerful magical dagger.

At one point, not too long ago, I was a voracious (if painfully slow) reader. Sadly, a string of not-quite-interesting books and a slew of distractions all but killed my reading for the last year or so. It’s a sad turn of events that I decided to resolve with some good high fantasy. Being removed from my favorite genre for so long made the towering fantasy aisles of a bookstore and the vast untamed Amazon into treacherous places of unfamiliar names and covers. Luckily, I found a reliable guide in the gentlemen over at Penny Arcade, whose always insightful blog and comic pointed me in the right direction. Tycho’s endorsement eventually led me to pick up a copy of Patrick Rothfuss’s  ”The Name of the Wind” and I haven’t put it down since.

I figured any novel (the author’s first I should note) to garner the unabashed praise of such storied fantacists as Ursula K. Le Guin and Terry Brooks deserves a good try and I was not disappointed. From the beginning I have been captivated by the tone and pace of the story. I was first struck by how real it feels, a difficult thing to achieve in fantasy. It is easy for me to get lost in a fantasy novel, but there is usually a part of me that remembers that what I’m reading is a fictional story in a fantastical world. “The Name of the Wind” reads more like a history than a fantasy, due in large part to the unique frame the author has created for his narrative.  The tale itself is a story within a story, told by the protagonist, Kvothe. At times another story is told within this frame, creating a rich historical background in which the story unfolds like a great play. I find myself living alongside Kvothe, through his worst times and his triumphs. It is a true testament to Rothfuss’s mastery of language and pacing that, in a scene when Kvothe was to perform before an audience, I felt myself grow clammy and light-chested, the exact sensation I used to feel before going onstage with my bass. I won’t speak too much more about “The Name of the Wind” for fear of spoilers, but if you haven’t already read it, do so. Now.

It is my great fortune that, while enraptured by Kvothe’s  tale, Gamefly delivered a game that I can play without playing, thus allowing me to revive my old hobby of reading insatiably, while continuing to play video games. Gran Tourismo 5 arrived the other day, and while I’m not a huge fan of racing games, it is lots of fun to purchase an old clunker, supe it up and blow away the competition. There is a mode in Gran Tourismo 5 that allows you to create an AI driver and issue commands to him while he races in your car. There is supposed to be some strategy to the orders, but put the driver in a hot enough car and the machine does all the work. Sit back, read your book, and wait for the prize money to roll in. The mode is a blessing for people who love video games but don’t want to play them, which means it will be perfect for me, at least until I finish “The Name of the Wind” and the recently released book 2 in the series, “The Wise Man’s Fear.”

On Monday I shared some of the Flash projects I developed in my effort to learn AS3.0. They were not so much games as studies of code that will be integral to almost every game I make on my own. Today, I’d like to share my first true game; a game with a defined objective and win/loss conditions. Again, this game was written from a tutorial in the book Foundation Game Design with Flash, by Rex van der Spuy , so I can’t take full credit, but I am happy to say that I made a few improvements on the game as presented in the book, including the hangman graphics and a few minor functionality details to make the game play more smoothly.

The game should be pretty self-explanatory. Just try to guess a random number between 1 and 100. You have ten tries, which should be plenty!