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.

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

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.

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.

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?

The Build-Up

From the beginning, my wife, Dassance, and I knew we wanted a non-traditional wedding. We wanted a celebration, not a ceremony. We also knew that we would be preparing, planning and executing the entire thing ourselves — no room for a wedding planner or professional catering in our budget or our vision. Shortly after the proposal, we had it all figured out. Six months before the wedding we were ready. Food? Taco truck. Decorations? Decided. Cake? Mom’s on it. Music? Kick ass iPod playlists. Drinks? Homebrew and mojitos. There wasn’t a question about our wedding that we couldn’t answer.

We spent the months leading up to the wedding becoming less and less prepared. If you haven’t experienced it, it is difficult to explain, but the time leading up to the wedding, all the way up to the second you begin to walk down the aisle, is an epic crescendo of entropy. Long before the wedding, when the event is still abstract and unreal, it seems so easy. Saying “we will have thousands of origami butterflies and Japanese paper lanterns” solves the problem of decoration. But it doesn’t make the butterflies or hang the lanterns. As the day, hour and even minute of the wedding approaches, the sheer amount of work that needs doing in order to realize your vision comes into increasingly sharp focus, to the point that you find yourself running in circles shouting for decorative thumbtacks.

Mercifully, the moment of the wedding arrives and the frenzied preparation comes to a silent halt as people begin to walk down the aisle. What’s done is done and what couldn’t be finished is left undone and life goes on. Those decorative thumbtacks that seemed so important ten minutes ago evaporate when you see the love of your life, radiant, coming down the aisle to join you for the rest of your life.

The Big Day

Our wedding was the most fun I’ve ever had. After the short eight minute ceremony, my new wife and I emerged onto the most amazing scene of merriment. There was juggling, hula-hooping, piñatas, confetti and of course copious amounts of alcohol. Most importantly, there were 120 close friends and family from across the country, all gathered to wish my wife and me a joyous life.

The celebration after the ceremony is all a bit of a blur. The food was great, the company unmatched, and the wine flowed like a river (maybe explaining the blur…). Despite efforts to speak with everyone and thank them for coming, it quickly became apparent that it was a losing battle and before we knew it, dusk had settled on the reception and it was time to dance.

The great irony of weddings is that they are rituals to bring two people together, but those two people inevitably spend the entire night apart. Dassance and I spent very little time together after the ceremony, but the dancing was a welcome chance for us to escape the chains of conversations and relax in each other’s arms for a few short minutes before being whisked away into another game of “Ninjas” or a conversation with a long-lost friend. But it was all okay because the next day you get to wake up with your wife, while that long-lost friend is back on an airplane and who knows when you will get to see him again. The next day you realize that it’s not just a celebration for the bride and groom, but for everyone who came because they love you and want to share in your new life.

Together At Last

We had a quick turn-around between wedding and honeymoon. Our team of generous helpers got the wedding site all cleaned up, leaving us the opportunity to relax and get ready for Turkey. We decided on Turkey because we wanted to go somewhere neither of us had been before, that had amazing history, as well as beaches for the obligatory post-wedding relaxation. Dassance and I are both annoyingly well-traveled and we worked our way through all of Western Europe and much of the Americas before we found a place that fit our criteria.

Turkey had been on my radar since my brother came back from a tour of Europe with stories of amazing food and better Greek ruins than Greece. I’m a sucker for ruins. Show me a tumbled down pile of marble and I become invigorated, gaining an almost superhuman ability to trek through blazing sun as the wrecked city comes to life in my mind. I hear the bustle of citizens as I walk down two thousand-year old roads, feel the roar of crowd wash over me as I sit in the seats of an ancient amphitheater.  Sadly, ruins seem to have the opposite effect on my new wife. More like kryptonite to her Superman,  Dassance trudged on, amazed and awed by what we were witnessing, but drained by the experience, and as the days of ruin-watching wore on, she became weaker and weaker.

It was time for a break, and we found it on Bozcaada, a tiny island that has been producing wine for Dionysus worship for the last four thousand years. And it had beaches. Beautiful, clean Aegean beaches. A day and a half on Bozcaada and Dassance was ready for Troy. Not the movie, Troy – that put us both to sleep… on three consecutive nights. No, after relaxing on the beach we made our way to the real Troy. Not much to look at anymore, but the weight of history that is packed into that tiny archeological site is stunning. We had experienced ruins far grander, but Troy felt both familiar and momentous. Visiting the ancient city that spawned both the city of Rome (according to legend) and some of the greatest tales ever told fulfilled a lifelong dream.

But it was by far not the only dream of mine to be fulfilled of late. I have married the love of my life, celebrated in grand fashion with a party that far exceeded our expectations, and added another amazing country to the list! So forgive me for not posting sooner. It’s been a busy month.

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.

For the event, I donned the fetid guise of Zombie Temp Worker and shambled around a garden for the afternoon. Turns out, Zombie doesn’t have a green thumb… well, he does, but the only way it’s going to grow any plants is as compost because Zombie demonstrated he doesn’t know the business end of a rake. It was refreshing working with a group of such talented people who get the job done well but know how to have fun while doing it.

To cap off the whole day, we got a group of PopCappers together to play test Ismia. It was the first time that I had the chance to step aside and watch people play the game and the experience was enlightening. Everyone provided great feedback, and I look forward to working in all the great suggestions.

If you’re interested in seeing more adventures of Zombie Temp Worker, check the PopCap blog regularly. There should be some great undead PopCappery coming your way soon!

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!

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.