Tunnels of Doom

So I attended KublaCon over Memorial Day weekend. For a one-day visit I thought it was among my most successful cons in recent years. I got to play a role-playing game (Dungeon Crawl Classics), a long-and-involved con game (Arkham Horror), a round of my current favorite game (Netrunner), and a new game I’d never tried before (Seasons).

Briefly, here’s how the board games went down:

• Arkham Horror – We played with a couple (Josh and Shannon) we met in passing who had played more recently than we had so they saved us a lot of Rules Lookup Phases and really just sort of greased the wheels so we could bang out a full game. One observation I had was that I’m coming to believe that AH is really a game that is a lot easier the more players you have. I know the mechanics are set up to accommodate varying player counts, but the thing is, as you play you find your characters begin to settle into various roles: monster control, gate closers, magical support, etc. With fewer players, any time one person who fills one of those roles starts to struggle whether from a curse or through a tough fight that leaves them needing stamina and sanity refreshes, the others suddenly have to try to fill the gaps and it can lead to a downward spiral. With more players (like the five we had), even if one or two people are sort of stuck or unable to contribute much for a few rounds, it’s not the beginning of the end. Which may just be a long way of saying, we ended up winning quite handily.
• Netrunner – I played corp against Aaron and randomly selected a Jinteki identity from one of the expansions. I think it would have been a pretty close game except I made a severe tactical error about midway through when I tapped out all my credits. I don’t know what I was thinking, but let’s just say Aaron noticed the mistake and took full advantage of me not being able to rez any of my ice. I was struggling for credits quite a bit the whole game (sort of unusual for corp), but it was an unnecessary move and I paid for it. Still loving this game, and wishing I had a more regular opponent so I could dive into deckbuilding a bit more.
• Seasons – Aaron and I played this with Geoff and Lisa. It’s a drafted deck building game with a pretty clever timing mechanism. I think the game box (and Geoff) drastically, woefully underestimated how long it would take to play, but I really enjoyed it quite a bit. I’d love to have a chance to play it again, but I agreed with Geoff that there needs to be an alternate scoring sheet/mechanism than the tiny cube-track the game provides. It’s pretty miserable.

I race through those in an effort to get to the part where I talk about Dungeon Crawl Classics. I only know about this system through Thom, who is super into it right now and I can really see why.

Before I get too down into it, let me just say that I actually love the heavily themed and richly personal experience many, if not most, modern role-playing games provide. Or, at least, facilitate. At least, I love them in theory because frankly I almost never get to play them. The time investment required to develop not just the campaign or individual adventures but the character and party is, and has been for years now, too much for me. As such I’ve grudgingly accepted the occasional one-shot, pregen’d con adventure, and even tried a PBEM campaign which—also it turns out—required too much time to keep up with.

The missing part, the in-between, is the casual role-playing experience with a focus on the role-playing mechanic without the overhead of the storytelling function. And maybe this is weird because I’m someone who loves stories—loves them. Story is part of the reason I play games, it informs the kinds of games I most enjoy. What I think playing DCC at KublaCon this year revealed to me is that there is an implication behind the desire to tell stories with role-playing games that often overshadows the bare fact itself which is that we (or maybe just I) tend to want to tell epic stories through role-playing. We tend to look for the full arc of the hero’s journey and in doing so we can miss the small story told by a short one-off. In the former sense, we need to finely tune and craft every element of our character, create in them a sense of personhood so that we can inhabit them the way a method actor might. We plan their progression, we build in them their history through the shared experiences of the encounter, the adventure, the episode, the campaign.

As I said, this is good. This is fun. This is, however, a lot of work.

The way Thom ran DCC, we each rolled up three characters. DCC characters can be made, down to the race and class and starting equipment, with die rolls on a series of tables. Random character generation is, in my opinion, even better than pregen. It’s fun in and of itself. Let me say this right here and now: DCC is awesome because it remembers that simply rolling polyhedral dice in and of itself is a blast. And DCC uses some crazy, off-counter dice. D24s, D3s, D30s, D17s. Why? Who cares? Why not? Awesome dice are awesome, that’s why. Do you remember the first time you rolled a D20? How cool it was that it had so many more sides than your typical box dice? That’s the reason for using funky dice.

The characters you generate this way are sketchy. It’s okay. They’re supposed to be. They have alignments and hit points and starting cash and a few saving throw modifiers, everything you need to execute during an adventure, but they don’t have much personality. It’s okay. Random zero levels are like cannon fodder. You run three of them because it lets you have a half a chance against low level monsters you may run up against. Two of mine died in the first fight our party of 12 got into. One died before the adventure even started because Aaron forgot and rolled up four. They give the game a computer RPG sensibility, and one that is exceptionally welcome in a cobbled-together environment like a convention game. Or a Saturday one-off.

The thing is, if your character lives, she goes to level one and then you can, if you want, form bonds with character, other PCs, NPCs and so on. If not, you’ve had a chance to play a collaborative, story-focused game that interacts with your imagination more than bits or chits, providing that unique experience only a tabletop RPG can provide.

I finished Dragon Age: Origins this week (next week’s Edition will cover it in greater detail) and while I enjoyed it for the most part I kept feeling like there were parts where it reverted back to standard fantasy provisions that we’ve seen over and over again and which, at this point, I think need to just be put to pasture for a while. Not all of these are specific to fantasy RPGs though I’m thinking of that subgenre specifically.

I would also be remiss if I didn’t mention The Grand List of Console Role Playing Game Clichés, which shows that in some ways we’re still basically playing Dragon Warrior I. Plus I have to point out this page for the BioWare RPG Cliché Chart which is fun but also includes (allegedly) a response from a BioWare rep who kind of takes the whole thing a little too personally.

1. The Arena
   To clarify, it isn’t that I don’t understand why these clichés persist in role-playing games, especially video game RPGs which are typically very combat oriented. In the case of the ubiquitous area battles you can showcase your combat engine and fill up a couple of hours of game time having players hack and slash with the barest of necessary plot development. But for the role-player that lack of context mostly serves to highlight the basic flaws in your combat system. I rarely—perhaps never—play RPGs for their dynamic fighting mechanics, rather I play them in spite of often awkward combat because I like the stories they tell. When you surgically excise the latter I tend to sit there grinding my teeth as I nitpick the former.
2. The Perfectly Balanced Attribute System
   I don’t want Intelligence to factor into how effective my brutish half-orc is at finding chinks in opponent’s armor. I don’t want Strength to determine how many spellbooks my mage can carry. I don’t want Charisma to factor into how good my thief is at sneaking. It should be okay to have a borderline mentally retarded barbarian and a physically frail wizard and an unremarkable, forgettable rogue. Trying to discourage min/maxing in single-player games makes no sense to me, so let me ignore stats that don’t matter for my character class and stop trying to make me well-rounded. Of course the corollary for this is that every game needs to accommodate each class: I should be able to be just as successful as a magic user as I can be as a warrior rather than having to always be some kind of spell-casting, sword-wielding hybrid assassin.
3. The Hero is the Guy Who Does the Most Damage
   Combat is an integral part in a vast majority of video games. Video role-playing games are no exception. But RPGs have for too long eschewed the potential drama of the non-combat resolution. It’s a tired truism that no matter what dialogue options you choose, no matter how high your Negotiation skill, no matter how many non-violent solutions you can come up with, ultimately 99% of your interactions result in either you giving someone cash or services in exchange for goods or information or you hit them with various sharp objects until they stop moving.
4. There is Only One Way to Do It
   There are few things more infuriating in games than having obvious solutions to developer-fabricated problems staring you in the face but having to jump through the sorts of mind-reading hoops that adventure games used to be famous for because some level designer deems it so. This applies to large set-piece puzzles (see the Resident Evil example from this GameSpy article) as well as simpler activities like, say, opening chests. Even the ASCII-based Nethack allows non-thieving characters to access chests via a brute force approach, although there is the potential for breakable items within to be, well, broken. But this is the tradeoff to the alternative which is having a particular skill (rogues) or performing some sort of elaborate series of steps to locate the correct key. Some games have allowed for alternate actions like forced locks but often these inexplicably rely on the same skill as bypassing them. In a way this is the counterpart to the unbalanced attribute system: Let characters be specialized but then allow them to approach every given obstacle from their own unique perspective.
5. The Stationary World
   Few things make a world feel less living and vibrant than one which never changes. Then again, like the Uncanny Valley, the closer you get toward a world that feels like it has its own pulse, the more noticeable it becomes when everything about an environment exists to accommodate the hero of some epic story. Games with no night/day cycle, shopkeepers who never sleep but stand in the same spot for infinity waiting for the hero to come by and give them a single moment of purpose, NPCs who only ever offer a single scrap of information and then simply repeat themselves like malfunctioning robots, all these things can be lovingly rendered in the most visually striking HD but they utterly ruin the spell of a game.

I read The Alexandrian’s series on Dissociated Rules in D&D 4th Edition with interest. Among the points discussed in the longish series, Justin Alexander speaks about the mechanics of storytelling vs. role-playing in the context of 4th Edition. As a counter-example to what Wizards of the Coast is doing with the D&D franchise, he points to a storytelling system called Wushu.

Having never heard of Wushu before this, I read its description carefully and felt my imagination beginning to spin. I, too, feel that D&D 4th is primarily a tactical miniatures game although perhaps unlike Mr. Alexander I don’t really take it as some affront to the D&D brand. I happen to like tactical miniatures games and grafting a light narrative mechanic on top of them isn’t directly offensive to me. However, I also appreciate the story-heavy mechanics of the kinds of role-playing he and other 4th Edition detractors crave and reading about the far-afield Wushu principles was exciting.

(more…)

I took some time today to look at the aftermath of the D&D Fourth Edition release, mostly because I finally broke down and ordered the Player’s Handbook (after much hand-wringing) from Amazon. Dude, it was like $15 off the cover price.

Some of this greatly intrigues me, especially since a lot of what I read sounds like Wizards stepped directly into my head and picked out some of the stuff I was asking for. Tougher low-level characters. A more fluid approach to combat. Online tabletop role-playing. I can’t actually speak about the rules themselves yet since my book hasn’t arrived, but I’d be a liar if I said the things I was hearing weren’t stirring a bit of excitement in me for the chance to dive into an adventure.

I like the RPGnet review of the game as a good place to get a broad sense of the changes. Random Average lays out the influences behind some of the adjustments to core mechanics and sirtayls on Dragon Avenue rolls his eyes at the flamewars that erupt as people dissect the new edition. And then Dork Tower’s John Kovalic notes some strange decisions made in the Monster Manual, and decides to run with it.

Part of this intrigue is because, now that tabletop gaming is back in my forebrain, I’m interested in finding not necessarily a steady campaign to participate in but some willing folk to join for a run through a session or two. I also have some ideas for one-shots bubbling in the back of my mind, so goes my fascination with clattering dice (at the moment). In pursuit of this thought I did some digging on other settings and systems and found the free quickstart guide to Call of Cthulu. It was almost enough to make me regret my decision to buy D&D4e instead of the CoC core book. Which suggests there was some sort of internal debate between the two that didn’t exist. It just turns out that buying D&D prohibited me budget-wise from also picking up COC.

But man do I love the base system mapped out in the overview. It’s percentile-based for the most part, but the game also uses other polyhedral dice (bonus) and most delightful to me is the character advancement system which has skills improving as they get used. It’s elegantly handled and very attractive to someone like me who has always, like most role-players, loved advancing a character but personally I’ve always felt the abstraction was pretty hokey.

Some people collect role-playing games mostly to reverse engineer their mechanics and evaluate their strengths and weaknesses. I’m not really that kind of guy, though I’ve toyed with plenty of different systems from Palladium’s d20-based concepts to the strict percentiles of DC Heroes through various D&D incarnations, Hero’s low-roll mechanics and more. I enjoy comparing them but my attraction to a particular game is either strictly mechanical (like GURPS) or, more frequently, primarily based on setting (Shadowrun). Which may be why I’m so fascinated by CoC’s impressively intuitive mechanics, because I was drawn to the game because of the setting and I found myself unexpectedly surprised by the rules.

Which brings me back to D&D and I wonder for a minute why I’m intrigued at all with the game. Part of it is the culture of games, it’s kind of like my day-one purchases of Halo sequels. I’m not a huge Halo fan but it matters to gamers so it matters to me. D&D is that way; if you want to guarantee you’ll find a game you can dive right into at a convention or with an impromptu gathering of gamer nerds, you better learn D&D. And like it or not, D&D is a force in the community so it merits attention.

It’s just good they keep making changes or I don’t know what we’d all have to fight about.