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.

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.

I’ve been visiting my best friend up in Seattle who’s a motion video artist with PopCap Games, and I had the opportunity to help his team out with a video shoot yesterday. Without divulging any information that hasn’t already been divulged, it was an afternoon of mischief and shenanigans and yes, even a little bit of hijinks stirred into the mix– a cocktail of fun I like to think of as PopCappery (a term that may already exist, but I am re-coining now).

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!

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.

I’ve been on vacation in upstate New York for a friend’s wedding which is the main reason for my lackadaisity in updating this site. At the SF airport on the way out of town I picked up a copy of “A Feast for Crows,” book 4 in George R.R. Martin’s “A Song of Fire and Ice” series. I powered through the first three books several years ago. “A Game of Thrones” was one of the most intriguing and gritty fantasy novels I had ever read. I petered out around the middle of book 4 when my friend asked me to return his copy and didn’t pick it up again for 3 years. Now, I find myself lost in a net of intrigues and alliances as I try to pick up the dimly remembered threads of plot and piece out the tapestry that Martin wove in the first 3 books. I am supremely jealous of all you with HBO or onDemand cable and the ability to watch the much-lauded live-action miniseries staring Borimir (that’s his name, right?) as I’m sure that would help me get a better grasp on what is happening three books later.

The Round-Up

Here are some things that have been distracting me from work lately.

Peter Jackson has been slowly releasing pictures of the 12 dwarves in full costume and makeup. The producers of the Hobbit are playing their cards pretty close to the vest so any little scrap thrown to the hungry masses makes a bit of a stir. And this is a pretty big scrap… One of everyone’s main concerns with the production of the Hobbit has been how to make the 12 dwarves distinct and recognizable without having the epic movie degrade into some CG extravaganza of Snow White.

These pictures show that they’ve done a great job keeping the production from looking like a garden gnome infestation. But hey, did we expect anything else from the gurus at WETA? Thanks to theOneRing.net for bringing us the pics and all the latest Hobbit news!

There are shenanigans over at everyone’s favorite casual gaming company. Congratulations to all our friends at PopCap games which was recently acquired by EA. Here’s to keeping it real. Also, they have a fun new blog, written mostly by the always entertaining Jeff Green. Check it out for a good laugh.

I spent a good 3 hours playing Tower Defense games on kongregate.com last night when I could have been doing something productive. My fiance accused me of wasting my time on one silly TD clone after another (“They’re different, I swear! In this one I use monkeys to pop balloons and in this one I use gems to smash little bug things…”) while railing against formulaic writing in novels and T.V. programming. Touché my dear. But Tower Defense still rocks and the butler did it.

Don’t think that my silence has been out of idleness! One of the many things that has kept me busy of late is my plan to add an entire new section to this site dedicated to reviews of board games (and maybe video games but there are plenty of video game review sites that will be hit up before this humble blog). Partially inspired by the delivery of Mansions of Madness, Dassance and my first wedding present, I’ve decided to create a page on this site where I can discuss different board games and maybe get some recommendations from you in the comments!

But board games and website redesigns are hardly the main thing keeping me busy lately.  As many of you may know, I’ve been learning AS3.0 and game design in Flash. I’m most of the way through my first Beginner programming book, and the next one is in the mail. I also found a nifty little WordPress plugin that allows me to easily insert SWF (Flash movie) files into a post for all of you to waste some time on! So here are a couple of projects I’ve been working on. Neither is a proper game. Instead they are studies in techniques that will be invaluable when it comes to designing and developing a real game.

First is one of the earliest projects from the book, Foundation Flash for Beginners. It has a couple of flaws and could benefit from a restart button. The only way to restart the “game” is by refreshing the entire page. But go ahead! Use the buttons to explore the cute kitty’s (modeled after our own Domino) little world and even meet a new friend!

It’s a far stretch to call this next one a game, but you do get to play the part of a space-faring pig exploring Phobos which you must admit is pretty cool! Again, there are a couple of problems with this one, but the main purpose of the project was not to create a perfect game but to get the player to move across the stage, then once it reaches a certain point on the stage, have the background move to create a sense of continued motion. Anyone who has played a video game knows that these two aspects are fundamental to 95% of games out there. You will need to click on the game before the arrow keys will control the game file.

I’m still having a blast learning how to program and while these are just baby program with very simple code, it’s not too shabby considering I didn’t know what a method or an argument or even a class was two weeks ago.

In my next post I’ll share my first true game, a tiny little thing, but playable from start to finish with defined objectives and the ability to win or lose. What is it? You’ll have to wait until next time. For now, enjoy Phobos and the cat-infested pastures of my Flash projects!

Just a quick post tonight about some of the games I’ve been playing lately. I’ve been so busy I haven’t had much time for gaming. My Gamefly queue is stagnant, and Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood remains unbeaten in my Xbox tray. Between designing Ismia and learning Flash game design, I’ve been eeking in precious minutes of gaming and I’ve found myself drawn back to the wonderful world of PopCap. In particular, I’ve been hovering around Zuma Blitz, PopCap’s frenetic facebook version of the classic Zuma. It never ceases to amaze me that the simplest of game mechanics can yield the most addictive of games, a trait of gamer psychology that PopCap has mastered. In both Bejeweled and Zuma, two of their most addictive games, the central mechanic is simply “match the colors,” and it keeps the user enthralled for hours on end.

Zuma Blitz is, dare I say, nearly a perfect game for me right now for a couple of reasons. First and foremost, it is time limited. It won’t allow you to play for more than a few minutes at a time, before having to wait for your turns to refresh, giving me plenty of time to return to the things I should be doing. But even better, it incorporates a system of character advancement, making your little colored-ball-spitting frog more and more powerful the more you play. I read a study of game psychology that showed people play games not because they are fun, but because of the sense of accomplishment they feel when rewarded for completing objectives. The system of leveling up in Zuma Blitz taps right into that part of my brain. If you haven’t tried it on facebook yet, give it a shot. It’s a blast. See if you can beat my top score. Or better yet, see if you can beat my best friend (and PopCap employee) Joey Trimmer’s top score. Good luck with that.

Another game I just started dabbling with today is the newly released XBLA game Daggerdale, the first Dungeons & Dragons 4e video game. I’ve been looking forward to this release for a while because video games provide one of my few opportunities to experience DnD as I usually end up being the DM in any campaign I’m involved in. I haven’t gotten far into the game but so far it’s been enjoyable. I look forward to playing co-op with some of my XBL friends to see how the multiplayer game differs from the solo campaign. There are some unfortunate aspects of the game, though. The gameplay is fun and intuitive, but it’s a bit buggy. At times the cut scenes don’t display properly and often the enemies don’t fall to the ground when they die. Unfortunately, these flaws in minor details detract from an otherwise well made game, but hey, what do you expect for a $15 game on XBLA. It is far and above better than most other XBLA games I’ve downloaded at a similar price point.

Well, I’ve been writing for a while now, and I’m sure some of my turns have refreshed on Zuma Blitz, so it’s time to try to take Joey down!