Dave Noonan's Blog - Nnnooner!

(A Little) More on the Scales of War finale

2010-02-17T07:47:00.000-08:00

Well, I've got a deadline for the day job, so I don't have much time today, but real quickly...

I wrote the last adventure in the Scales of War adventure path, and it came out today here. Some quick thoughts...

1) Kudos to whomever came up with the "Last Breath of Tiamat" title over at WotC. That's much better than my title.

2) Parts of it definitely play better than they read--like the preponderance of solo dragons throughout the adventure. There's an interesting table dynamic when tactics evolve (on both sides of the screen) through a half-dozen fights that are fundamentally similar in a lot of ways.

3) Yeah, there's a big deal world-shaking event at the end. I don't know whether it's worth it or not to keep this blog spoiler-free, but for now I'll say this: To my mind, "greed" is not synonymous with "want" or "desire." Eliminating greed doesn't create a world without want...just a world without evil, destructive, poisonous "acquisition for its own sake" and "reveling in obscene wealth."

Out of Context: How about slash-uncle?
Music: KEXP live feed.

Get these tumbleweeds outta here

2010-02-15T08:36:00.000-08:00

Been busy at the new MMO gig lately.

And I was a guest on the Power Source podcast again! (Further proof that I'll talk D&D for arbitrarily long periods of time.)

And I finished the last adventure in the Scales of War adventure path. I think it gets posted sometime this week or next.

And I contributed a bit to a Paizo product that'll be out soonish. How's that for vague?

And I promise to update this more frequently.

Out of Context: Four backpackers, six good knees.
Music: Silversun Pickups, Carnavas

Addendums...or "Addenda," I Suppose

2009-12-23T09:15:00.000-08:00

Just quick hits today:

• My guest co-hosting gig on the Power Source podcast is up. Click on the link to download.

• One thing I should have mentioned in yesterday's "Getting Better At D&D" post: The "make a bunch of characters, just so you feel the decision points" exercise is worth doing even if you're the Dungeon Master. If you're the DM, try doing the classes at your table at one of those benchmark levels: 5th or 11th (or 21st if you're in the deep end of the pool). You'll learn a lot of character nuances that have been obscured from your view (and you might catch some player shenanigans, too).

• I think I mentioned this when we were recording the Power Source podcast, but it's worth noting that in a cooperative game like D&D, getting "better" at doesn't directly improve your play experience. I've seen countless tables of noob D&D players--both casually and from behind the two-way mirrors at WotC--and they're extracting just as much enjoyment out of the game as an expert player...even though those junior-high noobs are doing it wrong.

Out of Context: Humbug, shoe kid! Humbug!

Music: The xx, xx

Getting "Better" at D&D: An Occasional Series, Part 1

2009-12-22T10:16:00.000-08:00

Making Characters, All the Way Up

One of the things I did at Wizards back in the day was create and then maintain what we called the "Pre-Fab Four:" Mialee the wizard, Jozan the cleric, Tordek the fighter, and Lidda the rogue. Each one lived in its own Excel spreadsheet, with one tab for each level. Whenever we needed a party for a playtest (or just for benchmarking), we'd print out the relevant level. It wasn't the prettiest character sheet, and it wasn't the smartest spreadsheet (though it did do basic calculations for you). It worked, though—we used the Pre-Fab Four year after year.

For 3.0 we actually had all of the "iconics"—Krusk, Vadania, etc.—statted up 1-20. I did first drafts on about half of those and second drafts on nearly of all 'em. Whew!

And along the way we killed a lot of trees. The spreadsheets had a bug we never could squash where the "Number of Copies" field always had an arbitrarily large number…19,000 or so. You had to remember to fix that each time you printed, or the printer would merrily empty itself of paper creating a huge stack of Liddas for you.

Anyway, this was before DDI and before the character builder. So making those PCs one at a time was a handcrafted effort. My mandate was to make straightforward but not suboptimal choices. Tordek, for example, was a sword-and-board (OK, sword and axe) fighter rather than some sort of spiked-chain wunderkind. I wanted any intermediate-level D&D player to be able to sit down and play a Pre-Fab Four character right away.

Make characters from level 1 to level 20 four times in a row—gear and all—and you get good at it, eventually. (Or at least you get more efficient.) But it still took hours…maybe a day for the nonspellcasters and more than that for Mialee and Jozan. Nowadays DDI and a less gear-centric game would make it a lot faster…except that there are 30 levels now.

Handcrafting the Pre-Fab Four made me a lot more aware of what each class was capable of, which items, feats, and spells were key…all sorts of stuff. And I'm pretty sure that a similar effort in 4e would make anyone a better D&D player.

Do It Yourself

So here's one way to get better at D&D: Take your favorite character class and build it one level at a time, gear and all, until you hit 30th level. Trust me: You will become an utter brainiac about your class.

Alternatively, pick a specific level—5th and 11th are solid choices—and make characters at that level for lots of classes. Try making a 5th-level character for the class of every other player at your table. You'll be amazed at how much you learn about your buddies' PCs. You will become Mr. Teamwork at your table.

I'd suggest that rather than going for esoteric builds, you stick with "straightforward and solid choices." Remember, you're doing this to learn, not to "win" at D&D with your extreme power-munchkin-sauce.

Don't stress out too much about the choices you make. That's not the point. The point is to put yourself in assessment mode—to feel the "this power or that power?" question at each level. If you do that, you learn about both the options you chose and the options you didn't choose.

And look at it this way: Your choices will certainly be better than the DDI Character Creator's Auto-Pick function! (Seriously, they should just turn that function off. No guidance is better than horrible, misleading guidance.)

Out of Context: Don't you dare call me toffee-nosed!

Music: Black Crowes, Amorica

Some quick business stuff

2009-12-21T09:11:00.001-08:00

I've been busy the last few weeks. Let's see...

• I'm the managing editor of the Internet Review of Science Fiction. Still getting up to speed there, but it's fascinating to take a more academic look at goings-on in the SF world. And as one of my first acts, I talked them into adding SF/Fantasy games to their repertoire. I even had a hand in setting the topic of the first few "Gamenivore" review columns. You'll see the reviewer's thoughts on Eclipse Phase over at IROSF. Hint: It's not as glowing a review as you saw here a few months back.

• I have a new job: Senior Writer at an MMO startup. Can't tell you the name of the company, but not for the usual nondisclosure reasons. Our desired company name (and various variations) is still going through the trademark process. So I work for a company with no name, basically. Love the startup vibe, though, and man are the other nine people who work here sharp.

• I was the guest co-host on the Power Source podcast over the weekend. It should "air" soon. It was fun to sit behind a microphone and just talk D&D for a while. I missed that more than I thought.

Out of Context: Where's that confounded bridge?

Music: Dire Straits, Brothers in Arms

When did we become "The Man?"

2009-11-23T10:23:00.001-08:00

Something I noticed when I was flipping through recent D&D adventures...how come our D&D characters are agents of "The Man" nowadays?

I don't have a complete collection of 4e adventures, so I can't claim to be comprehensive. But in nearly every adventure I flipped through, the PCs are either the agents of the authorities or they're acting congruent to those interests.

Where are the rebels? Where are the capers? Where are the heists?

Some of this is a natural consequence of the "Points of Light" proto-campaign. Back when we were designing it, we talked a lot about "dark points of light"--and yes, we were aware of how dumb that term sounds.

A "dark point of light" is a spot where local authority has coalesced, but it's tyrannical/pathological/evil/just-plain-mean authority. And the PCs need to go there and bust that shit up.

I don't see much evidence of PCs getting the chance to stick it to The Man in, what, a year and a half of adventures?!? So adventure writers, let's get on the case! We need to overthrow some dudes who are duly constituted authorities--but evil.

And we need some morally ambivalent stuff. Give me an Ocean's Eleven-style caper adventure where the quest isn't "Help The Man" so much as it's "Get...Paid..."

Set the wayback machine for the mid-'80s, and you'll an adventure landscape replete with plenty of "let's get rich!" adventures. Lots of moral ambivalence--why do you think there's a bank in the Keep on the Borderlands? So we can knock it over! And there's a fair amount of "stick it to the evil overlord" in there, too.

At some point, maybe we got too genteel. I don't know. But I'm tired of getting deputized by the proverbial sheriff to go and clear out a nest of bad guys. I shot the sheriff, all right? Maybe I did it just to rob the bank and burn the whole town down. Maybe the sheriff had it coming. But I'm tired of being the sheriff's monkey-boy, that's for sure.

Out of Context: Brains should be spelled with one "a." Or five.

Music: Jeff Buckley, Grace

Musings on the Nov. 17 D&D update

2009-11-20T08:52:00.000-08:00

Last week, my former colleagues at WotC published a big patch to the D&D rules. And this was a big one--not big in the sense that any single change is overwhelming, but the accumulation of mid-range changes is...big.

Big enough that the good folks over at the Character Optimization Board have a lot of revising to do on those terrific class guides.

Big enough that, thanks to a respec from a kindly DM, my githyanki orbizard became a warlock last night. (I'm pouring out the proverbial 40-oz. for my dead bloodclaw and orb of ultimate imposition homies.)

Big enough that even if I were strictly a "civilian" D&D gamer (and not a former D&D game designer and occasional adventure author), I'd definitely pay for D&D Insider and stop buying the actual books. There are enough changes this month, spread out over enough books, that I don't think I could trust what's on the written page anymore. Each discrete change wasn't huge, but they weren't just fixing typos, either. The bulk of the Nov. 17 changes matter. They would noticeably impact play at your table.

If you've got the Character Builder and the Compendium, you're good to go. Especially if you're using something like iplay4e.com. But so much has changed in the dead-tree versions of those books. The updated, electronic version of the game is substantively different now.

I'm glad I don't have to worry about the D&D business model anymore. (And to be clear, I have zero insight into what it looks like nowadays.) It's certainly conceivable that those DDI subscriptions make up for lost physical book sales among those of us who are going the all-electronic route. Given the way game stores are disappearing from the landscape and given the way book chains are getting hammered (will there be a Borders after April?), it's clear that WotC needs new ways to get their stuff out there.

But I do know this: Opting for DDI is definitely saving me money (some of which would have wound up in WotC's pocket), and it's delivering a better experience at the table. I wonder whether the bean-counters in Renton are as happy as I am, though. 'Cause I sure would be buying actual D&D books if DDI didn't exist.

Oh, and on a side note: I'm writing a 30th-level adventure right now. God, I love the deep end of the pool.

Out of Context: Four things greater than all things are/Women and Horses and Power and War.

Music: Miles Davis, Kind of Blue

Getting Started in EVE Online

2009-10-15T09:18:00.000-07:00

I have a couple buddies who are a week or two behind me in EVE Online. I figured I'd type out a couple tips here so they're in one convenient place. Most is wisdom gleaned from elsewhere, but I've thrown my own thoughts in there, too.

Almost all of this can be done on a trial account. And if an MMO hasn't hooked you by the end of the free trial, it doesn't deserve you, your time, or your money.

Take Time on Your Portrait and Name
You'll be staring at it as long you're playing EVE--and there's no way to change it. So get something you want to look at. One other thing to consider: Much of the time, you'll be looking at a small, icon-size version of your portrait. Make sure the three main elements (your head, your shoulders, and the background) aren't equally light or equally dark. Shoot for light/medium/dark, split up however you like.

Likewise, you're stuck with your name. So make sure it's cool.

(Note from the future: As I was typing this, Tycho from Penny Arcade was thinking in parallel. Check it, yo.)

Play Through the Tutorial
The "Crash Course" tutorial is pretty good. It takes a couple hours, depending on how much you explore the interface. When you're done, you should have some cash, a ship--and most importantly, you'll have a decent idea of whether EVE is for you. If you're intrigued, keep going. But if that wasn't interesting, move on to some other game.

Play Through the "Career Advancement" Missions
You'll get three dudes who each have an eight-part quest line. Play all three, all the way through. The order doesn't matter, probably--although I did the soldier one first and got a combat-worthy frigate that I used in the mining and trading mission strings. You'll get several ships and some new skill books with these missions. And more importantly, you'll get a taste of the different roles you can play in EVE.

Buy Skill Books
At this point, the gravy train of free stuff is largely over. Visit the market and buy whatever skill books you want/need. The certificates screen is a useful guide. Certificates don't do anything in and of themselves. It's a useful way to describe "skills you'll need if you want to fly that badass cruiser," though.

Learn to Learn
Your first priority should be to acquire skills that enable game activities. For example, if you want to outfit that new Tristan with a scout drone, go ahead and get the Drones skill and spend the minutes required to get level 1 in it. But early in the game, you don't need higher levels of the skills. The NPC ships you face early on...well, they aren't exactly ninjas.

Instead, train the Learning skill and the five Attribute-specific training skills (Iron Will, Eidetic Memory, and so on) up as high as you can, as soon as you can. Why? They reduce your training time for every subsequent skill you learn...including themselves!

When you visit the market, you'll also see five other Attribute-specific learning skills that are crazy expensive (from your vantage point as a noob, anyway). Those stack with the basic five learning skills, and you'll max those out when those prices aren't quite so daunting.

Don't Fly Anything You Can't Lose
Yes, get insurance, and yes, you should watch your accumulated skill points so you know when to upgrade your clone. But don't rely on clones and insurance payouts to get you back on your feet. Your hull may be insured, but you'll lose all those fittings and whatever's in your hold if somebody blows you up. And if they destroy your escape pod, your clone will wake up just fine, but you won't have any cyberware you bought. ('Cause it's a clone, see?)

My initial thought is to keep three-quarters of my wealth in my wallet and fly around with the remaining quarter. But that's just a rule of thumb to guide my newbie explorations. Once I'm established, a better metric would be something like, "Fly around in something that takes no more than x hours of foo to replace." I'm not sure what my tolerance for x is. And "foo" is an activity: mining, courier missions, Traveller-style trading, missions, "ratting" (beating up NPC pirates and taking their stuff), or whatever my chosen "pleasant and reasonably lucrative grind activity" is. Speaking of which...

Find a "Pleasant and Lucrative" Grind Activity
This task is where I am in the game right now. I'm spending an evening or two doing each of the following, keeping track of how much ISK I make. It's not the most scientific undertaking, and the "answer" doesn't have to hold for more than the medium term. It's as much an exploration of different roles as it is an exercise in finding economic efficiency.
* Mining, probably in a 0.6 or 0.5 system. I have neither the firepower nor the friends to go for the really lucrative stuff. But I'm a noob, so that's just fine.
* Missions. Telling my starmap to show me systems with available agents was a revelation. Lots to do there.
* Ratting. Gotta spend a little on salvage sensors, etc., but this might be right up my alley as a grinding activity.
* Trading. Again, I have neither the capacity nor the knowledge to make a killing on the market. But me and my freighter can probably make a "bruising."
* Contracts. The courier stuff is what I'm thinking here. You can't do this stuff on a trial account. This is a "can you read the contract and adequately assess the risk?" as much as anything else.

Out of Context: "Why do I have to be the salt shaker?"
Music: Jeff Buckley, Grace

More on Eclipse Phase

2009-10-14T08:48:00.000-07:00

When I'm not at my weekly D&D game, playing EVE Online on the PC, or playing Left 4 Dead on the XBox, I'm goofing around with Eclipse Phase. I'm thinking about starting a minicampaign--either with the supplied rules or after a wholesale conversion to something more like 4e. That's not a knock on the existing Eclipse Phase rules. It's just that my supply of available players tilts heavily toward expert-level 4e players (wonder why?), and they're mostly older guys who have an innate resistance to the timesink of learning a new rules set.

As I said last month, I'm intrigued by Eclipse Phase for two reasons. First, the game itself is simultaneously cyberpunk, postapocalyptic, and hard SF. But those elements don't seem stapled together. The backstory makes them cohere rather nicely. Second, the reusable body as an answer to the death question...that's fantastic.

There a few quibbles I struggle with, of course. Reasonable game designers differ on whether it's better to start a core rulebook with character generation and only a veneer of world detail, or really spread the world out in front of the reader, then get on with character generation after the game has established its context. I'm militantly in the former column, and the fact that I don't get even a whiff of the actual game until page 114 and no character creation until page 130...well, insert exasperated fist-shaking here.

Second, I have a problem taking uplifted animals seriously--and that says more about me than it does about the concept. I loved Startide Rising, to be sure, but I can't help but consider chimps and dolphins as comedy delivery devices, not menaces. Like I said, it's a problem that exists within the nest of vipers that is my head.

Out of Context: The life of this clean desk is perpetuated in righteousness.
Music: Pearl Jam, Backspacer

EVE Online is for Noobs (In a Good Way)

2009-10-13T09:16:00.000-07:00

I downshifted my World of Warcraft and Aion play this fall so I could survey a bunch of different MMOs--partly out of professional curiosity and partly because I'm ever hopeful of a transcendant game experience. (Yeah, yeah, every junkie's like a setting sun; I get it.)

I played some nifty games. In general, MMOs have their collective act together. But the one I'm continuing to play this fall is EVE Online. And frankly, no one's more surprised than me.

My expectations were low. I'd heard about how hardcore it was--how unforgiving. I've long had a fascination with the EVE community; it's great to observe as a spectator. And the game itself is an outlier by almost every measure. The game design, the UI, and even its player population curve all confound the MMO norm. So EVE is an interesting case study, and it's fun to read about all the warfare, espionage, and skullduggery. But is the game any good?

My answer is an emphatic yes! (But keep in mind I've been playing only a few weeks.)

Here are two key things that surprised me about EVE.

Hardcore, My Asteroid
Everyone says this about EVE--fans and critics alike. The EVE community wears EVE's "hardcore" nature like a badge of honor. But it's not hardcore in the sense that it's hard to learn or complex to play. In particular, if you're comfortable theorycrafting as an endgame raider in WoW or being a dungeonmaster in D&D (any edition), you're going to find EVE...well, not easy, but you'll be totally comfortable with its complexity. Really, if games are your chosen hobby, there's nothing in EVE that's crazy complicated. In some respects, it's easier. The game is less timing- and twitch-oriented than WoW or Aion (to pick two examples), and I'm basically a spaz, so that's good.

The other way people describe EVE as hardcore is that there are big swaths of the galaxy that are full-on PvP zones, and there's no expectation of fair play. Go there, and you'll get squashed like a bug. But really, it's not that bad. New players have tons to do in equally big "higher-security" swaths of the galaxy. If you follow one simple rule--don't fly around in a ship you can't afford to lose--you'll be just fine.

It's Terrific for Deep-Immersion Roleplay
(This space left blank for the obligatory "Wait, what?")

In EVE, your "character" is a head-and-shoulders shot on a viewscreen, and so is everyone else. You never walk around your ship or the space stations you visit, much less the moons and planets. When you interact with others (PCs or NPCs), you see them on a viewscreen or read an email from them (or maybe you'll voice-chat if it's another PC). You don't even have a crew on your ship, NPC or otherwise. Eighty percent of the time, you're looking at your ship flying in space, and the other 20% of the time you're looking at your ship floating in a hangar (or at least it's in the background while you work the stock market and get business done).

With your character at arm's length from you, how can this be a good roleplay environment?

I think the answer lies in EVE's interface, and in particular how it meshes with its genre.

When I'm playing EVE, I'm looking at a close exterior view of my ship. I have a window that shows my sensor array and lists what ships, asteroids, etc. are nearby. I have another window for communications, and a HUD near the bottom that shows the status of ship systems like weapons, shields, and thrusters. The game will superimpose friend-or-foe data on anything I can see on my viewscreen. And I have delightful contextual menus for things like "autopilot," "approach," "dock," and what have you. I'm not hitting a thruster button and doing manual roll/pitch/yaw for my ship. The computer does all that for me.

In other words, Dave-the-player's UI for his computer is almost exactly what Dave-the-character's UI for his ship would be. Play EVE in a dark room, and you're experiencing the game world almost exactly as your character is. And that's a recipe for immersion.

Contrast that with WoW, where I see things my character doesn't, like the minimap in the corner of my vision, the health bars of my adversaries, and their names and guild affiliations floating over their heads. With EVE, it's a freakin' computer, so of course you'd expect it to supply navigational data, battle damage reports, and ship IDs on mouseover. Your expectation is different because it's a hard SF game with a hard SF mindset.

So Are You Hooked, Noonan?
Not yet, but color me intrigued. I remember telling people all the time, "The thing about WoW is that the game changes at 60." (Now it changes at 80, I know.)

EVE will undoubtedly have those horizons, too--lines that change the game once you cross them. I have no earthly idea whether I'll like the game I find beyond those horizons. I still can't fathom that one PC game (WoW) fascinated me for four years, and I certainly don't expect other games to pull that off. But I can tell you this--the noob experience for EVE is a lot friendlier than I'd heard. And you can really immerse yourself in the mindset of a capsuleer.

Out of Context: "We need to tell her she's a particle."
Music: Fitz and the Tantrums, Songs for a Break Up, Vol. 1

It Ain't Easy Being Broken

2009-10-12T16:33:00.000-07:00

I don't play D&D for a living anymore, but I still play D&D. And my half-orc rogue was recently petrified, so it was time to make up a new character. (We still have a rogue in the party, so I didn't lobby too hard for a "rescue the statue" effort.)

We didn't have a controller of any stripe, and I wanted to roleplay a sophisticate, so wizard was perfect. The party had been dealing with the githyanki all along, so my githyanki orb-of-imposition wizard was born.

I stacked all the save penalties I could find--and there are quite a few. Right now I can impose a -10 save penalty once a day. Give me another level, and I think I'll be up to -14. That's what I call a lockdown, and it makes simple stuff like the sleep spell pack quite a controllerish wallop.

I'm not the only one who's ever discovered this--I subsequently saw the Character Optimization board thread on the Orbizard. This character lets me scratch an itch I've had ever since I worked on the wizard, long before 4th edition saw print, and I wondered whether you could stack the save penalties high enough to make it a sure thing. (Answer: Yes!) Recent additions like Adventurer's Vault and an invoker paragon path make it potent from the early teens onward.

But it's interesting to actually play with a "sure thing" like that obscene save penalty. Playing the character becomes fraught with tension. Because I know I've got such a strong combo, I have to carefully assess each combat situation and really deploy it where it counts. That's often harder than it looks. Right now I have an "I probably win" button, but knowing when to press...that pushes some other skills pretty hard. So it's not as much of a gimme as it appears.

I'm reminded of my days as the managing editor of the Magic: The Gathering magazine, during the Urza block. Until the banhammer came down, there was an extraordinarily strong deck in Type II (Standard) constructed play called "Tolarian Blue" or "Academy" or something similar, depending on whom you were asking. The engine of the deck was pretty simple--throw out a bunch of no-cost or low-cost artifacts, use the Tolarian Academy card to get one mana for each artifact in play, then use Stroke of Genius to either draw a bunch of cards yourself (if you didn't have enough mana or cards to pull off the win yet) or force your opponent to draw so many cards that he ran out. Oh, and you'd use Mind Over Matter and discard a card to untap Tolarian Academy twice in a turn.

When you look at the pieces of the combo, it's not too hard to grasp. It wasn't until you actually built the deck and tried to play it that you realized how tricky it actually was. You had to know how many of the key combo cards were in your library and what your chances were of pulling them with a given Stroke of Genius. In the hands of a Magic Pro Tour regular, not a big deal. But you could beat a lot of ordinary civilians who'd assembled that deck, because it was bah-roken, but it wasn't easy mode.

So that's the feeling I'm getting with my orbizard right now. The question of threat assessment is keeping it interesting for me.

And since I'm crossing the streams anyway, I think there might be a powerful D&D build that uses Magic's concept of graveyard recursion. There are already some ways to get those per-encounter and per-day attacks back into your proverbial hand. Are there enough to be fully recursive? Probably not...yet. But I'll bet that build emerges in another year or two, as more parts of the combo see print.

Out of Context: Brains!
Music: Rodrigo y Gabriela, 11:11

Watch this video twice

2009-10-03T08:40:00.000-07:00

Dan Pink talks about how to motivate people. It's a 20-minute chunk of a lecture. Go watch it here. I'll wait.

(Pause for you to watch it. Really. Seriously.)

Cool stuff, huh? I'm usually not much for business-guru-of-the-week stuff, but I appreciate Pink's reverence for actual academic study, rather than just collecting a bunch of anecdotes and calling it "Succeed to Motivate, Motivate to Succeed" or something like that.

As a guy whose career has been firmly ensconced in the right brain, suffice it to say that the notion of a work setup with lots of autonomy, mastery, and purpose...yeah, I'd sign up for that.

But that's not what intrigued me the most about Pink's speech. Try this experiment: Watch the video again, but every time that Pink says the word "business," mentally bleep it out and dub in the word "games."

(Yeah, another pause. Really, dude, go watch it again.)

If you accept the conceit that games are motivation structures (they're more than that, but they certainly are that), then a lot of the lessons from all those studies Pink cites hold for game design, too.

In other words, unless your game is largely mechanical (like, say, Asteroids), you probably shouldn't be keeping score. As one of those studies said, as soon as you demand rudimentary cognition, the score is going to mess people up more than it's going to motivate them to keep playing.

And that's not such a radical notion, really. What's the best-selling computer game of all time? The Sims, right? It's a sandbox game--lots of autonomy there, reasonable amounts of purpose (even if it's self-directed), and mastery...hmm. Maybe not so much mastery there. But still--there's no score in the upper-right hand corner.

And what was the best-selling PC game of all time before that? Myst, I think. No score there either. Hell, that game (which I adored) barely has a visible UI.

The notion of designing an electronic game with lots of autonomy, mastery, and purpose--I'm not sure that's any harder than it is to design a sharply balanced, mechanically intense game. MMOs pull off the autonomy/mastery/purpose thing with greater or lesser degrees of success all the time.

And tabletop RPGs...this is where D&D players break their arms patting themselves on the back. "We've never kept score," they'll proudly say. "We're all about the autonomy, mastery, and purpose." And for at least some tables, that's largely true.

Here's what I wonder, though:

• Electronic games of all stripes are rife with achievement systems. Is this just traditional scorekeeping with a fake beard? And all the gamertags out there festooned with achievements, medals, etc....is that just a metascore? We assume that achievement structures motivate. It's true that they direct behavior, but do they truly motivate the way we think they do? I'm unconvinced. I think they might provide more direction than thrust.

• Tabletop RPGs are notoriously difficult to teach (and they aren't helped by traditional RPG intro products). I wonder whether that's because it's harder to "teach" a rules set with autonomy/mastery/purpose than it is to teach a rules set with contingent motivators.

Out of Context: "I seem to have a lot of nutty professors in me."

Music: Yo-Y0 Ma, Silk Road Journeys: Beyond the Horizon

New D&D adventure is up!

2009-09-15T08:14:00.000-07:00

I wrote another bit of the Scales of War adventure path: Betrayal at Monadhan. It's up on the Dungeon site right now (DDI subscription required). And it's worth noting that Daniel Marthaler really deserves a co-author credit--he came up with the Domain of Betrayal, Arantor, and the climax encounter. Thanks, Daniel!

Out of Context: "Actually, it's not just vertically."

Music: Stevie Ray Vaughan and Double Trouble, Couldn't Stand the Weather

It...lives!

2009-09-12T13:27:00.000-07:00

"It" being "me," that is.

I enjoyed PAX immensely--it had a terrific energy to it. I played a bunch of great games, met a lot of cool people, got a little business done, and did my bit explaining what's up with Aion.

But that was last week. Apparently our booth--along with pretty much every other booth--had a microscopic visitor: swine flu! I still love PAX, but it did a decent job of decimating the industry for a week. Lots of people are just now emerging from the worst of it.

But seriously! I still love PAX.

And I love my family, who gave me a cozy quarantine zone downstairs. I mostly slept, but I finished a playthrough of Mass Effect. (It's a great, great game, and I'm on a "play the seminal games I never got around to" kick right now.)

The other thing I did during my flu-time was read Eclipse Phase, which is also terrific. It scratches a Shadowrun/Cyberpunk itch that I've neglected too long. And the transhuman conceit does a key thing I wish more games would do: make the game world match up with anticipated gameplay.

Eclipse Phase assumes that your character is going to die every so often--heck, maybe a lot. But the conceit is that your consciousness remains intact and gets downloaded into a new body. You might have some "missing time" and be unsure what happened to your last body (hi there, Captain Plot Hook!), but you're still fundamentally "you" and thus you've got some continuity with the ongoing narrative and familiarity with the other PCs. The other PCs don't have to do that "You look trustworthy, stranger! Join us!" thing.

Throwing a bone to continuity isn't possible in every genre, of course. If your game takes place in a licensed setting or one strongly based in the real world, you're kind of stuck. But any game with a strong dose of either the supernatural or the science-fictional should have an answer for character death better than "roll up a new character." That messes with narrative continuity, and it creates the immediate problem of "what does Joe do for the next few hours while we're all still playing?"

I guess my broader point is that if you're making up the fictional world anyway, you might as well make it a world where there's some sort of explanation for character continuity after death. And that's true whether the game is powered by electrons (Aion makes its PCs overtly immortal, for example) or polyhedrals (Eclipse Phase's transhuman thing or D&D's prevalent resurrection magic).

One of the intriguing things about Eclipse Phase--and this isn't for everyone--is that the whole "download your self into a new body whenever you want" thing lets players experiment and dabble in different character builds. That's further than D&D is willing to go without significant DM assistance.

I'm playing a 9th-level half-orc rogue in a game right now. I love Shivaji's personality, backstory, etc., but I'm not enjoying the rogue part so much. So I've tentatively opened negotiations with my DM: "You know, if something really dramatic happened to Shivaji, like he became a revenant or his body was permanently possessed by a githyanki, I'd be totally OK with that." Because something like that would let me keep Shivaji's look and at least a twist on his personality and mannerisms, but I could rebuild the character into something else.

The weird thing about the whole "character continuity after death" issue is that the desire for continuity can pull you in opposite directions. Is it better for continuity at your table if PCs have the same bodies and minds each session, accepting the continuity break when a PC dies? Or is it better for continuity at your table if PCs can "resleeve" with new bodies when the old one dies or is found wanting, but keep the same personality and history regardless?

Out of Context: Somebody probably said, "We should do something new this time around." They fired that guy, and made another awesome version of the awesome thing they did last time.

Music: Maria Rita, Maria Rita

The last guy to get into DOTA...

2009-09-06T09:00:00.000-07:00

...is me, apparently.

DOTA was a big deal among the game designers at Wizards for a while, but I never got into it because its rise happened to coincide with the craziness of designing 4th edition D&D. But designers on the cardside were fascinated with it--and when those guys are fascinated with something, you pay attention.

Once the exhibit hall closed at PAX yesterday, my buddy Cam and I went to the freeplay areas. Eventually we decided to try Demigod, a commercial take on the genre that DOTA spawned. And man, did I get hooked. We played Demigod--badly, but still--until the wee hours of the morning.

My list of "games to try on Day 3 of PAX" now includes two games that bill themselves as spiritual successors to DOTA. I've been sampling a lot at this show, but so far, finally seeing what all the DOTA fuss was about is the highlight for me.

Out of Context: "Look! We made him look like he's holding his breath!"
Music: The Electric Light Parade song, believe it or not

The Blank of Blanking

2009-09-05T11:48:00.000-07:00

Consider this a big footnote to all the "Appendix N" stuff I wrote about back in March.

D&D is a great game with a storied history--heck, it's a cultural touchstone even for those who can't tell you what the material component for stoneskin is. And probably the biggest linguistic signifier for that cultural touchstone is the blank of blanking.

The blank of blanking? Think of all the D&D magic items built with that construction: +2 sword of undead slaying, ring of jumping, boots of striding and springing (a double!)...you get the idea. There's nothing like that blank of blanking construction to put a big neon "This is D&D" arrow on whatever you're saying.

Watch any comedian for proof. When Stephen Colbert sets up a D&D joke, the delivery device is the blank of blanking. If he talks about his +3 sword of bear-killing or whatever, he's using the blank of blanking to say, "Hey, I speak the lingo, see?"

So Where Did Blank of Blanking Come From?
To figure out where D&D got the blank of blanking in the first place, let's turn again to Appendix N of the 1st edition Dungeon Master's Guide: Gary Gygax's reading list of inspirations for D&D. Look at the usual suspects--Tolkien, Howard, Moorcock, Vance, Leiber--and you come up dry. Not much blank of blanking in there at all.

Even Jack Vance, who certainly had a knack for naming magic items and magic spells, doesn't employ that particular construction very much. The "Blankerson's blanking blankament" construction (like Mordenkainen's magnificent mansion) is totally Vance, though.

To find the first blank of blanking, you need to search deeper into Appendix N. Specifically, to Poul Anderson's Three Hearts and Three Lions, where a dagger of burning figures prominently. I can't say for certain, but I can't find an earlier prominent blank of blanking. And for further evidence, the dagger of burning was always italicized--and you can't say that about Sting or Stormbringer.

As a side note, Three Hearts and Three Lions is also the likely source for D&D trolls. The notion of a troll that regenerated everything but fire damage...I can't find a folkoric origin for it. I think Gygax grabbed that from Anderson, too.

If you're a game designer in the fantasy genre, you're probably going to be inventing blank of blanking items for your whole career. And you've got Poul Anderson to thank for that.

Out of Context: "So what's in an Asmodian, anyway?" "Bitters, I'd imagine."
Music: None. Enjoying a quiet office before walking over to PAX.

PAX and Aion stuff

2009-09-03T09:41:00.000-07:00

Some PAX news of note. Well, of note to me, anyway:

• I'll be speaking about "Aion and the Evolution of the MMO Genre" at PAX at 1:30 Friday in Wolfman Theater. (Awrrrrooooooo!) Come by to listen, ask questions, or just collect giveaways.

• Also at PAX, we'll be giving away some copies of the Aion comic book, which I helped write. (And seeing how DC goes about its business? Fascinating.) Wired.com has the details here.

• You'll find me in the Aion booth Saturday afternoon and Sunday morning, if the current schedule holds.

I have my share of unfettered time at PAX this year, so I'm seeking advice. If you know of a game (any platform, any genre--I'm an omnivore) that's particularly cool, post a comment below and I'll check it out. Don't assume I've played a game already--there are certainly gaps in my gamer "life list."

Out of Context: Three hours of sleep is OK, if you get the one rare hour and the two uncommon hours.

Music: Sonia Dada, Barefoot Soul

Roles: Where Do We Go From Here?

2009-09-03T08:25:00.000-07:00

First, for the aid of those who don't like reading from the bottom, here are the previous posts in this little miniseries:

Part 1: The roles in D&D (defender, leader, striker, controller) and WoW (tank, healer, DPS, and a side order of crowd control) aren't inherent in player psychology.

Part 2: You can't find proto-roles in the fantasy literature that inspired D&D (and thus WoW) or in other relevant cultural touchstones like comic books or Star Wars.

Part 3: Tanks emerged in D&D because magic users could not survive low level gameplay, and in a cooperative game like D&D, everyone contributes to keeping that guy at your table happy.

Part 4: Healers emerged because magical healing was so important to keeping a D&D party active and engaged in the ongoing narrative, but that magical healing was available from only a handful of the original character classes (the cleric, mostly).

Second, some disclaimers:

• I wouldn't dream of arguing against the notion of roles in any game that involves small-group cooperative efforts. When I say, "there's nothing inevitable about the roles we got," that's very different than the (probably bogus) assertion that "there's nothing inevitable about roles."

• Other games are going to have other roles. A lot of the skillcentric tabletop RPGs of the 1990s had specific roles for the skills (flying a starship, computer hacking, etc.) that were crucial to the setting. The tabletop wargames I'm fond of certainly have broad "roles" you could assign to each of those cardboard chits. I'm mostly interested in roles in D&D and WoW because a) I've played them a lot; and b) they cast an awfully long shadow in their respective game genres.

OK, So Let's Talk Alternatives

If the roles we wound up with trace their origin to specific design decisions Gary Gygax made in the 1970s, then...can we do other things? (Assume a fantasy context here for the tabletop RPG or MMO in your head.)

Sure you can--but realize that you're heading to the deep end of the design pool. That basic tank-healer-DPS trilogy controls your overall pacing, it largely determines what the monsters are doing at a given point in time...it goes on and on. Those roles touch almost all the other mechanical elements of the game. The flavor of your classes (or however you define a discrete batch of character abilities) is rooted in those roles.

But you know what? If Gygax did it, you can too. My buddy Toby and I came up with the skeleton of a pretty good alternative over a lunch at a brewery a few weeks ago. (Someone might pay me for it, or I'd just lay it out here and now.) Look at how humble the roots are for tank-healer-DPS.

But Should You Come Up With Alternative Roles?

That, I think, is the real question. The role setup we've got is a double-edged sword--and I mean that in the truest sense of the word.

Say you're designing a new MMO intended for a niche within the existing MMO audience. Should you build your game with tanks, healers, and DPS?

Yes. You want people to grok your game quickly, and if new players can slide into roles they're already experienced with, they'll thrash around less during those critical first few hours. And those roles are a ready-made tool for assembling small groups of strangers. Converting thousands of strangers into a cohesive community is really what the first weeks and months of an MMO is all about. It's a readymade social convention that most people already know--even if they don't know anything else about your crazy new MMO.

No. The roles we've got are looking a little shopworn, and there's not infinite design space inside the tank-healer-DPS triangle. Especially outside the swords-and-sorcery genre, the roles don't speak to the source material.

Future Roles

A lot of MMOs (and tabletop RPGs for that matter) are going to launch in the next couple of years, many of them outside the fantasy genre. Here's what I hope: Those games that have crazy-mad innovations that are pervasive throughout the game--you guys stick to the roles we've got, just to provide a solid vantage point for us to see all those crazy-mad innovations you made.

The rest of 'em: Come up with new roles! Don't make me be a superhero healer or a "tank" for the rest of my infantry squad. (I'm willing to be a literal tank, however.) Make me something that's organic to the game I'm actually playing, not just something I've been for decades. Every time you force me into the same role structure without a damn good reason, I'm gonna shed a tear like the Indian who finds trash on the roadside.

And when you're playing a new game: Don't let us designers off the hook on the whole "role" thing! Demand roles that make sense mechanically and stay true to the source material.

Out of Context: Shugo Nom Nom Specialist--too silly?

Music: Fugazi, 13 Songs

A couple (OK, three) Aion things

2009-08-29T08:14:00.000-07:00

Like I said a couple days ago, I've been working on narrative/story stuff for the Aion MMO, which comes out Sept. 22. Since that's pretty close, the PR machine is cranking up. Specifically:

• You can download the Aion open beta client (directions here). The open beta itself starts on Sept. 6. So that means you can download it, but you can't actually do anything with it until then.

• The Escapist (and Warcry, which is related somehow) have a nice interview with Aion's creative writers, focusing mostly on the cross-language aspects of what we do, here. (I'll note for the record, though, that Robin's a guy.)

• I'll be at PAX. I'm part of a panel on "Evolution of the MMO Genre" or something like that on Friday afternoon. I'll probably pull a shift or two in the Aion booth--I want to see total strangers play this game for the first time. I've got a few top-secret meetings involving bidness. And oh yeah--I'm gonna play a ton of games!

Out of Context: There's an aquarium filter and a lab coat here. I don't need those within reach at all times.

Music: Cleveland Orchestra, Beethoven's Symphony No. 7.

Getting Back to the 'Roles' Thing

2009-08-27T12:04:00.000-07:00

OK, let's recap:

• There's nothing inevitable about Tank/Healer/DPS or Defender/Leader/Striker/Controller.

• You can't find good examples of those roles in the fantasy literature that inspired D&D (and thus MMOs). You can't find it in comic books or Star Wars, either.

• Tanks emerged because early D&D created a popular class (the magic user) that could not survive under ordinary circumstances.

Which brings us to...

Whither Healers?

I'll be brief here, because the healer role grows from the same root as the tank role, only more directly: Gary Gygax's simulationist streak.

The simulationist in Gary followed a very reasonable line of thinking: If you get stabbed nearly to death, it should take you days or weeks to recover.

What could be more reasonable than that? It makes perfect sense. But as anyone who has run a long-term campaign knows, long recuperation times can be hell on the ongoing narrative. It's no fun to clear out half a dungeon, then come back after a few weeks to find that the dungeon has realistically been reinforced.

It's worse if some players need to recuperate, but others don't; that's a recipe for splitting the party. And those long recuperation times wreak havoc with any sort of time deadline before the Great Evil Event happens. As a DM, you want that tool in your toolbox.

And it's just as bad on the NPC side. It's not exactly good drama for the PCs to nearly beat the Big Bad Evil Guy, then retreat, then come back a few days later and stab him as BBEG lies there in a hospital bed.

Gygax-the-simulationist wasn't going to allow unrealistic natural recuperation. But if magic is involved, then verisimilitude isn't threatened and all is well, right?

Thus, the cleric: A class that's mandatory not so much for in-battle healing as for its plot-saving fast recuperation. Even a single cure light wounds each day means vastly less time in the village and away from the action.

That's why for 35 years, having a cleric was pretty much mandatory (and even in 4th edition, having a leader makes life a lot easier). Without that healing (or a small fortune in consumables), you ran out of hit points, and then you ran out of fun. You had no other way of getting those hit points back quickly--in combat or between battles.

Gygax's desire for realistic natural healing yields a class (the cleric) that becomes mandatory because it keeps the plot from grinding to a halt for hospital time. MMOs pick up the healer role when they pick up D&D's role differentiation. And bingo! We have another role that seems like it's always been around, but really it's just rooted in a simple but profound design choice made back in the '70s. Had Gygax said, "Screw it--you get your hit points back after a turn (10 minutes) resting," you wouldn't have your leader role today.

Next: Alternatives.

Out of Context: It is indeed considered disrespectful to climb me.

Music: Ba Cissoko, Electric Griot Land

Tap...tap...is this mic still on?

2009-08-26T11:35:00.000-07:00

Shortly after that last post, I got very busy. I'm a content writer for the Aion MMORPG, which comes out in about a month.

Because Aion is a big-deal release (and it's been out in Korea for months), there's all sorts of info available about it. You know how to Google, I figure. But since this is my blog, I'll just link to some of the PR-type stuff I had a direct hand in:

• Aion Podcast #2: Classes and Customization (You'll see me briefly at the 1:30 mark).

• "5 Things" article at mmorpg.com

I'm not done with the game yet, but the end is in sight.

(And yes, I still play D&D, and I'm still writing for the tabletop, too.)

My next post will be a continuation of the "where do the roles come from" thread I started back in March. (Suffice it to say that the nature of PC roles in both tabletop games and MMOs is a trenchant concern for me.)

But what's a few months' gap among friends, eh?

Out of Context: "This is Shugo Tap."

Music: Joe Satriani, Professor Satchafunkilus and the Musterion of Rock.

So where did these roles come from, anyway: Part 3

2009-03-14T10:43:00.000-07:00

OK, so if you've been following along (or reading from the bottom, I suppose), here's where we are. I'm trying to figure out how we wound up with the class roles we wound up with in D&D and World of Warcraft. In other words, how come we wound up with defender/leader/striker/controller (D&D) or tank/healer/DPS (WoW) rather than some other scheme.

Do other schemes exist? Sure. The action-movie scheme is smart guy/big guy/face guy/wild card. (The A-Team! Exactly!) We could have wound up with something like that. There's nothing inevitable about tank/healer/DPS from player psychology or from the fantasy source material.

Here's my conclusion: We got the roles we got because Gary Gygax gave D&D magic-users d4s for Hit Dice.

In other words, the class role scheme emerged from the mechanics of D&D itself, not from the inclinations of the players or the source material. And the scheme was omnipresent when D&D-lovin' designers were working on the first MMORPGs, so they followed suit.

So You Wanna Be a Magic User

Let's look at original D&D and 1st edition D&D. This will be old hat for the D&D grognard, but if you weren't playing D&D in the late '70s and early '80s, you'll be amazed at how cruelly fragile the D&D wizard was.

The magic user class--what we'd call wizards nowadays--had four-sided dice for Hit Dice. Period. That means many of them should be running around at 1st level with 2 or 3 hit points. And this was back in the day when most players rolled dice (often 3d6 or 4d6-drop-the-lowest) for their ability scores. You had to have a really good Constitution to eke out another hit point or two; it wasn't like 3rd edition where a 12 Con is worth another hit point and a 14 Con is worth +2 hp.

Contrast those hit points--somewhere in the 2 hp to maaaaybe 5 hp range--with the damage from a single monster attack: 1d6 damage was typical, with some attacks greater or lower. Even the weakest pit trap dealt 1d6 damage. Get hit once, you might be dead. Get hit twice, you're almost certainly dead.

It gets worse. There was no negative hit points or unconscious state. Zero hit points means you're full-on dead. Monty-Python-parrot dead. Resurrection magic was a high-level affair, prone to failure, and you came back weaker each time.

But it's worse than that. No armor for you, either, Mr. Magic User. You had an Armor Class of 10 (the worst possible), and at 1st level you were unlikely to improve it with magic or a high Dexterity (because remember, you rolled those ability scores, and nothing short of a 16 Dex could get you an Armor Class improvement).

You know what? It gets still worse. Your saving throws--rolls to avoid various environmental and magical effects--weren't very good. You had few weapons to attack with, and your magic was the fantasy equivalent of a single hand grenade...if you were lucky and got a top-drawer offensive spell like sleep.

So go ahead, send that guy with 3 hp and AC 10 into the Caves of Chaos. He can't survive. Sooner or later, there's going to be an arrow with his name on it. It's the tyranny of math.

If you played a 1st-level magic user in the early 1980s, you could not survive enough encounters to reach 2nd level. The odds against are astronomical. If you did survive, here's why:

• Your table adopted house rules to be less cruel to magic-users specifically or less lethal in general. (Like positing a near-death state at 0 hp, giving magic-users more or better spell choices at the outset, and so on.)

• You were cheating.

• Your DM was cheating on your behalf. If he did a good job, you never noticed.

Now, the word "cheating," especially in the latter case, is more pejorative than I intend it to be. D&D is a cooperative game, after all, and whatever "cheating" occurs is often a victimless crime. Frankly, a DM fudging dice rolls to keep a 1st-level magic-user alive is an act of friendship.

The fragility of those magic-users, viewed through the lens of future D&D editions and computer games, seems to be an utterly baffling, counterproductive, and just plain bad design decision. Why on earth would Gygax set up an entire class to fail? I mean, anyone looking at 4 hp, AC 10 knows that it doesn't add up, right?

But Gygax was on the frontier of a whole new type of game, and so he was operating with a different mindset than most game designers. I believe that when he was building the magic-user, he was in simulation mode.

• Magic users had 1d4 hit points because they _should_ be scrawnier than thieves and clerics, and even scrawnier than a hobgoblin or an orc.

• Magic users had AC 10 because that's what ordinary peasants in tunics had, and there's no simulation reason for the game to treat magic users any better.

• You got one spell per day because Gygax figured that if Turjan (from the Dying Earth) could keep four spells in his head at once, then a beginner like you gets one spell in your head at a time.

Viewed through the simulation lens, all reasonable choices. It's only when you take those 3 hp into a dungeon that it falls apart.

Sherman, Set the Wayback Machine for 1982

Now imagine yourself in a basement starting your first AD&D campaign back in the early 1980s. Van Halen's Fair Warning is on the turntable and you've got your parachute pants on. Everyone is playing D&D by the book, and because 1st edition AD&D did a good job of obscuring the system numbers, nobody realizes that the magic user is doomed. The inevitable goblin arrow kills the magic user, and a pall falls over the table.

At this point, a couple of things probably happen. First, the guy playing the magic user probably rolls up another magic user or maybe an illusionist (same thing, pretty much). But the DM has better access to the game's underlying numbers, and it's probably dawning on him that the next magic user isn't going to be any more viable than the last one.

If the DM is really with it, he comes up with a house rule on the spot. But more likely, he starts cheating behind the screen to keep the new magic user from dying in the very next encounter. (Nothing wrong with that--if you're hanging out with your friends in the basement, you might as well have fun, right?) But the players don't know that the fix is in. Even the DM might not realize how far he's going to go to keep that magic user alive.

Independent of the DM, the players (probably subconsciously) change their tactics to keep the magic user alive. They're doing so not because doing so makes tactical sense. They're doing it just to keep their buddy Bob from getting bummed out because his D&D character died.

The other characters start standing in front of the magic user...and thus the traditional front-rank/back-rank tactic is born. More interestingly, the other characters start doing everything they can (attacks, verbal insults, silly/weird antics) to keep the monsters from focusing their attention on the magic user...and thus aggro management is born. If magic users were as durable as, say, the D&D thieves, I don't think either behavior would have become so pronounced.

So I think that's where our tanks came from. I need to make lunch for my kids, so expect part 3.1 soon, in which I'll explain that the healers came out of the same place--the early D&D game mechanics and Gary Gygax's urge to simulate.

Out of Context: "There's still more beautifulness!"

Music: Brad, Shame

The Mother of All Funk Chords

2009-03-13T11:57:00.000-07:00

Part 3 of the "Roles" thing will be up tonight. Truly, I am beset with good writing opportunities.

In the meantime, here's something mind-blowing I spotted on Jonathan Coulton's site. An Israeli guy has taken a bunch of disparate YouTube clips (mostly music instruction ones) and chopped and edited them so that all the YouTube musicians are playing the same song--a song completely unlike the one in each individual clip.

The amount of work that goes into this staggers me. But oh! The payoff!

Check it out here.

Out of Context: "Being a thug means never having to say you're sorry."

Music: Radiohead, The Bends

So where did these roles come from, anyway: Part 2

2009-03-11T10:29:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I made the contention that the character class roles...

• Tank/DPS/Healer for MMO character classes; and
• Defender/Striker/Controller/Leader for 4th edition D&D (and less overtly in previous editions)...

...came from somewhere, but they didn't inevitably emerge from player psychology. Players are all too happy to hop roles whenever they get the chance.

Stop! Sidebar time! It occurred to me that I should have explained something better yesterday. What I'm trying to get at the root of is why we wound up with the specific roles we wound up with. The fact that we wound up with roles at all...well, I regard that as inevitable, but it's interesting to ruminate on other role schemes we could have wound up with.

With that out of the way, let's get to it.

Another logical place to search for the root of the class roles is in the source material that inspired D&D and eventually Ultima Online, Everquest, World of Warcraft, and so on. Now, we aren't going to see lit characters called tanks, strikers, or whatever in the text. But we're looking for behaviors and attributes that match the character roles in D&D and MMOs. As we go on a role-seeking safari, here's what we're looking for:

• A really durable guy who occupies the attention of most of the opposition, yet provides only moderate "output" back at them.

• Conversely, someone who's more fragile but delivers most of the force applied against the opposition.

• Someone who heals other people. If that's insufficiently abstract, you can say "someone who rejuvenates others mid-battle," but really, if it's not actual healing, you're stretching.

For extra credit, you can look for examples of "crowd control," rendering the opposition temporarily unable to project its force (to borrow some good old maneuver warfare jargon). After all, that's (theoretically) an important distinction between strikers and controllers in 4th edition.

To start, let's go to one of my favorite places...

Hey, My Favorite Appendix! Appendix N!

Back when I was with Wizards, I wrote a bit about Appendix N of the 1st edition D&D Dungeon Master's Guide. You can find it here. Reread your beloved copy, or take it from me: You'll mostly search in vain for any sort of team-based exploits in those books. And you aren't going to see the roles except in contrast with each other. Elric and Conan just wade through entire hordes of enemy soldiers, but that doesn't make them tanks. Fafhrd is no less a striker (and no more a defender) than the Gray Mouser is. You'll see almost no battlefield healing--period--and precious little crowd control in the many fantastic battles in all those great Howard, Leiber, Vance, and Moorcock books.

Nor are you going to find those class roles in the literary influence that Gary Gygax always downplayed: Tolkien. As I've said before, Tolkien's greatest gift to tabletop and online RPGs wasn't dwarves, elves, and orcs. It was team-based adventures. But flip through Lord of the Rings. Gimli isn't tanking so that Legolas can do unfettered DPS. The more capable members of the Fellowship are trying to occupy the bad guys and keep the hobbits safe, sure, but their output is top-notch. Gandalf is no glass cannon, and he's not running around with d4 Hit Dice per level. When he mixes it up in melee, he's hardly fragile.

This shouldn't be surprising. Tolkien wasn't worried that every member of the Fellowship contributed equally yet uniquely to a battle. He wasn't sweating the intraparty balance issues; he had a novel to write!

You can make up D&D or WoW characters that look and behave like Aragorn, Gimli, and Legolas. But their in-game behavior is going to map to their class roles and they'll feel constrained compared to their in-book counterparts. (And the game versions of those three guys are going to need a healer--the Houses of Healing in Minas Tirith aren't going to cut it.)

I really thought I'd find proto-tanks and proto-DPS lurking in the time-shrouded mists of 20th-century fantasy literature. But they're maddeningly elusive. You can find durable guys who like to stand in front of the bad guys and take punishment, sure, but they're usually swinging the biggest swords, too. Battlefield healing is almost nonexistent. And that's if you can find team-based battles at all; they're surprisingly scarce.

Let's Look Elsewhere

Some exploratory mining in other areas is probably warranted at this point.

• Superhero comics: The comic books of the 1970s, '80s, and '90s are a huge influence on D&D and gaming in general, mostly because gamers and game designers love 'em. And unlike most fantasy lit...hey! We've got teams! Lots of 'em!

Scratch the surface, though, and you don't get much evidence of tanks, DPS, and healers. All the pieces are right there for everyone to see (although healing is still hugely underrepresented), but the pieces aren't usually assembled into anything like gaming's class roles.

We've got lots of durable, armored, or otherwise invulnerable heroes, for example. They do an admirable job of attracting the attention of dozens of HYDRA mooks or whatever. Tanks, right? Nope--their output is usually top-drawer as well. It's just as accurate to call 'em freakishly durable DPS.

Try to apply the class role labels to superheroes, and you'll soon find yourself scratching your head. Some heroes are easy, but is Iron Man a tank or DPS? That's exactly the sort of question that'll launch a 20-page ENWorld thread. Take your pick among any of the invulnerable "tanks" in the Avengers: Hulk, Thor, Wonder Man. Same story--they're sitting at the top of the imaginary WWS meters. And where are all the healers?

(On the plus side, I'm giving myself ten points for working Secret Wars into this.)

It's worth noting that while I delved into my comic stacks to check this out, I can't claim to be comprehensive. But seriously, I found almost no consistent class-role behavior. Try it yourself! Take a two-year run of your favorite team comic and look at the big donnybrooks. Let me know whether you see a tank/DPS/healer strategy. Here's what I think you'll see instead. In a team-vs.-one fight, you'll see each good guy put in danger consecutively. A team-vs.-team fight will almost always evolve into a series of one-on-one or two-on-one matchups selected for dramatic reasons, not tactical ones. (Not that there's anything wrong with that!)

The City of Heroes MMORPG, where the players are superheroes, has class roles called archetypes, of course: Tanker, Blaster, Controller, Scrapper, Defender. (Sound familiar?) But that's a comic book game, not a comic book. More on how CoH fits into things tomorrow.

Star Wars: Another big influence on pretty much anything gamers or game designers did in the 1980s. Watch the movies, and you'll see the Jedi engaged in tanking and DPS duties (and a fair amount of crowd control) interchangeably. A Jedi will stand in harm's way and occupy dozens of those roger-roger guys. But that Jedi is also the output. It's hard to extract any sort of class-role prehistory out of Star Wars (and in any case, D&D is older than Star Wars).

Out of Context: Tron came out when I was twelve. So Chuck is 39? (Clearly his writer is.)

Music: Robert Plant/Alison Krauss, Raising Sand

So where did these roles come from, anyway: An Intro

2009-03-10T10:16:00.000-07:00

I've been thinking a lot about how two of my favorite games (D&D and WoW) and, by extension, two of my favorite pastimes (tabletop RPGs and MMORPGs) wound up with character roles: abstract "templates" that describe a character's essential function in the action part of the game (fighting, usually). WoW (like most MMOs) has the basic triangle of tank, DPS, and healer. D&D has always had similar roles, and in 4th edition we defined them as defender, striker, controller, and leader.

(If you aren't familiar with both genres, suffice it to say that tank = defender, healer = leader, and strikers and controllers are two flavors of DPS.)

But the weird thing? There's nothing inherent to either game in the abstract that leads you inexorably to the specific roles we wound up with. So how did we get here?

I'm going to take a shot at answering that question in the next few posts. So call this a little blog series: "So where did these roles come from, anyway?"

But I'm going to start in a circuitous way. I think you can learn something about the emergence of those essential roles by looking not only at what a player picks as the role for the character he's actually playing, but also by looking at what a player picks for his next character--or (for MMOs) the character he's playing "on the side" in his spare time.

So let's talk about alts: alternate characters.

First: Warcraft Alts

Some of my best friends are WoW altaholics (people with multiple active characters). Once they get a character to the level cap, they start one or two others, and pretty soon they have a stable of decently-geared, max-level characters. I've always been sort of envious. Maybe it's because my main character is a level 80 feral druid (one of the game's better hybrids, and just plain fun to play), but I've never been much of an alt guy. I always have plenty of things on my main character's to-do list.

I have alts, of course.

• There's the undead rogue who was my first level-capped character. I stopped playing him only because I wanted to challenge myself with a PvP server (and thus my druid was born). I pretty much never play him anymore; he's stalled at level 61.

• I have a level 65 mage that I soloed up mostly to learn the Inscription profession and because I was taking a sabbatical from guild leadership and wanted to make myself scarce temporarily. He stopped at level 65 (the minimum to max out Inscription) and appears in Azeroth only to grab herbs out of the mailbox, turn them into ink, and (hopefully) make Noble Darkmoon cards.

• I've got a few low-level "experiments," pretty much one of every class. They're all between level 20 and 30.

• I recently started a Draenei paladin on a different server, mostly so I could enjoy the leveling-up process with a different set of quests than I'm used to. He's level 38 now, and I play him more than anyone else.

• And like pretty much everyone, I've got a few characters that exist solely to run between the mailbox and the auction house.

That sounds like a lot. But when I compare my arsenal of alts to the folks in my guild (which for obvious reasons tends to match my overall play style and available time to play), I'm just a piker. At least half of my guildies have at least two level 80 characters. For example, Broteas (resto shaman) has a mage alt. Shieral (bounces between boomkin and resto druid) has an enhancement shaman and a warrior that used to be our main tank. Divona (shadow priest) has a DPS death knight, a hunter, a holy paladin...and those are just her Horde characters.

And here's the interesting thing: Almost none of them have two max-level characters in the same role (except for a few delightful but clinically insane friends who have five or six level 80 characters). On one level, that isn't surprising: people are looking for a change of pace when they select their alts. Vive la difference, right?

But on another level, it's interesting that those altaholics are throwing away all those man-hours spent learning the ins and outs of a specific role. As a guy who plays a hybrid (in my case, bouncing between DPS and tanking), I feel like I'm doing new content when I'm tanking for the first time--even if it's a dungeon I've run several times as DPS. There's no question that someone who picks a different role for their alt is volunteering to learn the game all over again. That brings with it some inefficiency (but to be clear, some fun, too).

And there's supposed to be differences in player psychology that would make you gravitate to a specific role. More on that in a second.

Second: D&D "Alts"

When you look at alternate characters for D&D players, it's important to realize an essential difference between the tabletop and the online experience: The moment of character creation is far more constrained at the tabletop. Of course you can sit there with a sharp pencil and a stack of blank character sheets and make up as many characters as you want (and unlike WoW, you can make 'em whatever level you want!). But to actually play the new character, you've got to "retire" (often through death) your existing character, or you've got to start a whole new campaign. You can't level up your ranger at 2 a.m. when you're alone in your dorm room--not really, anyway. The tabletop game exists as a consensual experience with your friends.

So look at the two times you get to make up a new D&D character: character "retirement" (oh heck, let's just call it "death") and campaign starts.

When your character dies, there's a strong incentive to roll up a new character in the same role as the old one. But where does that incentive come from? The other dudes at your table. It's an externality. Given your druthers, you might or might not choose the same role. But at the moment of character generation, you've got a table of buddies who are suddenly short a defender (or whatever). If you roll a leader instead, you hurt not only your new character's viability, but that of the whole table. The tendency toward "role persistence" is a function of the group's needs at the moment, not necessarily the individual's natural inclination.

In my long-running Thursday night game (spanning eight years and multiple campaigns, with long breaks when I was a new dad), the best example of this "role persistence" was my buddy Cameron, who was famous for a long line of "brave but lightly armored" characters. He played a lot of rogues and rangers, and, well, he died a lot. Cam plays aggressively and is a natural "instigator" in a good way; his characters actively seek out stuff to do, rather than waiting for NPCs to do stuff to him. Every DM wants a guy like that at the table. But the consequence is that Cameron's characters tended to be shishkabobbed, drowned, and/or stung to death by unusually venomous bees.

When Cam showed up with his next brave-but-lightly-armored character, it was a natural thing to think that he liked that striker role. But really, Cam was looking around the table, saying: "Leader? Check. Defender? Check..." and so on. Put Cam in the other character-creation circumstance--the start of a new campaign--and bingo! Role persistence evaporates. When the whole party died in late 2007 (due in no small part to Cameron's rogue pulling a lever that should have been left alone), everyone made up new characters and we fast-forwarded a thousand years. Unfettered by the needs of the table, Cam made a dwarf fighter that was the very essence of a defender.

I spent ten years at Wizards of the Coast, so I always had plenty of campaign-start opportunities, and I was lucky enough to play in multiple campaigns simultaneously. As I think back, almost everyone in those games--professional game designer or not--bounced around from role to role when a new campaign started and their role choice was unfettered. Rich plays a paladin in one campaign, then a sorcerer with delusions of godhood in the next. Toby replaces his warforged fighter (rest in peace, Hammer) with a wizard. And come to think of it, my barbarian gets replaced with a wizard, and in the campaign after that I'm a melee cleric, and in the 50 Fathoms campaign after that I'm functionally a defender. (Miss ya, Roo!)

Let's Talk Psychographics

Based on my personal experience (the best data I have), there isn't much role persistence among either WoW or D&D players, once you subtract out the "we need a _______" factor that happens a lot at D&D tables and sometimes in WoW guilds.

Yeah, my evidence is anectodal, but it's the best I have. I suspect that maybe WotC could tease better data out of the RPGA database (although organized, RPGA-style gaming is still something of a different beast than traditional "basement" gaming). And there's no question that Blizzard could extract more definitive data about how likely it is that a player prefers a specific role.

But here's the thing: Wizards R&D certainly believes that there are differences in player psychology that manifest themselves in role choice. In other words, some players are naturally drawn to play a leader, others a defender, and so on. I'm pretty sure that the Blizzard devs believe the same thing. And certainly some players are convinced that "you know, healing is really what I'm good at."

But given the proclivity of players in both games to happily change roles, I don't think the psych differences are that meaningful. And those psych differences are tenuous enough that I don't think you can say that roles emerged out of the psych differences in tabletop or online RPG players.

So the specific roles we wound up with--where did they emerge from? Maaaaybe from the source material: the broader fantasy genre. More on that tomorrow; I've got some offline writing to tackle first.

Out of Context: If it snows a lot, can we go saucing, Daddy?

Music: Red Hot Chili Peppers, Mother's Milk

Starting over in Warcraft, and three optimistic things.

2009-03-05T17:32:00.001-08:00

I've been playing a ton of World of Warcraft lately. So--fair warning--expect a lot of posts about Warcraft in the next couple of days. (I've got a list, ya see.)

And some D&D stuff, too. When you've been a professional writer (of sorts) for years, you can kinda feel when you've got a productivity spurt coming. Expect me to type a lot this weekend and next week.

In the meantime, here are three things that let me connect with my inner optimist.

1) I think one of the smart dudes at wizards shared this essay with me several months ago. Gin carts! On the streets! And I've seen my own three-year-old and six-year-old behave like the little girl in this essay.

2) Chairs in the sky, man. Chairs...in the sky!

3) This youtube video. It's kinda plodding (though I like Jeff Lynne's voice), but hang in there until the dude in the red hat shows up about three and a half minutes in.

Out of Context: From Spencer Hall of the Sporting News: "You probably like your airline pilots and heart surgeons sober, too, you pack of tiptoeing nervous nellies. Hate on, safety freaks. Rex is leaving town, and he's doing it on a flaming train of bikini-clad hotties with the devil's breath at his back, and he's not using the brakes until he hits something full of money and victory."

Music: Saga, "On the Loose"

D&D Portals at Your Table

2009-02-17T12:45:00.000-08:00

If you have an ongoing paragon- or epic-level D&D game going, you're probably get a lot of mileage (both literal and figurative) out of the linked portal ritual and its higher-level alternatives. They're bread-and-butter transportation for any sort of world-spanning campaign.

Some tips to make your portal rituals work better at the D&D table:

Sigil Forensics

The rules are silent on this issue, but if you're the DM, you should decide for yourself what people who observe the linked portal ritual learn about the destination of the teleport. Whether it's PCs chasing the Big Bad Evil Guy who portals away or NPC bounty hunters trying to track down the PCs, your table will eventually confront the "Do we know where they went?" question.

The rules specify that the sigils in the temporary circle at the origin point (or the modifications to the permanent circle at the origin) disappear at the end of the ritual. But that's usually a few rounds after the portal users step through, so anyone close enough (how close? I'd say six squares or cobble up a quick Perception-based answer) can see the sigils, and thus be able to duplicate the ritual and arrive at the same place.

More interestingly, I'd also rule that anyone who listens to the ritual being performed hears the sigil combination and thus can duplicate the destination. (But you have to know the linked portal ritual yourself, or all those words are just a bunch of gibberish to you.) Off the top of my head, I'd say that the sigil combination is repeated roughly every minute during the 10-minute ritual. If you make it fairly easy for people to follow each other with teleports, you open up more interesting plots than you close off.

The rules are also silent on the reverse engineering point, but I'd rule that you can't learn where a destination is by merely knowing the sigil combination. In other words, you can't determine that the sigil combination "aluk-tam-yesh-quor-tahn-tahn-galli-prao" will send you to a jungle ziggurat in southern Qbarra. It's probably more fun and more adventure-enabling to make the PCs perform the ritual and check it out firsthand. At my table, you could probably talk me into an arbitarily high Arcana check, but unless you're scraping the top of the epic tier, your odds won't be good.

Use "Real" Sigils!

One way you can really make the portal rituals come to life at your D&D table is by making your players keep an "address book" of the sigil combinations they know. Rather than just saying, "you discover the sigil combination for Castle Scarypants," tell your players, "You discover that maur-yao-kuru-trehn-plau-ganou-rikh-shen is the sigil combination for Castle Scarypants." Keep a record for yourself, of course. You'll know the effort pays off when one player says to another, "What are the sigils for Castle Scarypants? We can go there!" and someone else says, "Just a sec...it's maur-yao-kuru-trehn-plau-panou-rikh-shen."

I used a variation of this myself in my epic-level post-apocalyptic Eberron game. I used the English alphabet for the sigils, though, which in retrospect didn't really seem fantasy enough. But my players dutifully kept track of where "M-Y-K-T-P-P-R-S" would take them, and whenever they found a bad-guy library, one of the first things they'd do is ransack the place looking for sigil combinations.

So there's potential there. But to really come to life, the portal sigils deserve a fantasy alphabet of their very own--and it needs to be different from the existing D&D alphabets because presumably everyone uses the same sigil "language." Twenty or thirty characters is plenty, and each sigil combination should be six to eight letters long.

Wizards R&D is a busy place, but wouldn't it be great if they'd come up with a portal-sigil alphabet and release it as a font? Then we could all make cool handouts for our players.

Languages and Rituals

More broadly, the Player's Handbook is silent on what language a ritual is performed in. The language doesn't matter in most cases, although it would be a little weird if assistants to the ritual don't share a language with the lead ritualist. We imagine rituals are complicated things, and it probably bends suspension of disbelief to imagine that you can pantomime ritual instructions effectively. You ain't that good at charades, Baron E'Ville. And language matters also in the fairly common case when PCs come across an in-progress ritual and want to know what the ritual is before they (inevitably) interrupt it.

My answer is that rituals have no language per se--they use a specific vocabulary from the relevant skill (Arcana, Religion, etc.). You can't conjugate a sentence in Arcana-speak, but you can evoke a great deal of magical power if you say the right Arcana words and throw around the right alchemical reagents. That answer is a bit of a reach, but easy overhearing of rituals is probably more adventure-enabling than it is adventure-thwarting.

Things I'd Do Differently

If I had another chance to make changes to the linked portal ritual, here's what I'd do:

• I'd make the default diameter of the portal circles 15 feet. That lets five PCs use it at the same time, and it's a lot friendlier to monsters. And I'd explicitly make it clear that big dudes can make even bigger portal circles so they don't have to squeeze through the little ones. (If the Huge titan arrives at a smaller portal circle in a constrained space, he takes his lumps, of course.)

• I'd have the portal sigils remain for, say, 1d6 x 5 minutes after the portal closes. (They'd be visible, but powerless at that point.) That makes it even easier for the pursuer to keep the chase alive. Keeping the chase alive good for business, most of the time.

Out of Context: The Ice Stone has melted!

Music: Radiohead, Kid A

Random Country Music Thoughts

2009-02-06T11:53:00.000-08:00

I've been messing around with country music for a just-for-fun game project (long story). Two insights:

• The devil totally wins in "Devil Went Down To Georgia." His solo is waaaay better than Johnny's.

• The world needs more steel guitar. All genres, everywhere. Robert Randolph aside, we need more great musicians to take a Hendrix approach to this instrument. Country has had steel guitar all to themselves for too long.

• Special bonus insight: Imagine how cool the steel guitar controller would be on the (imaginary) Country Hero videogame. See what I mean

Out of Context: "It is a section of fencepost that is used as a poor man's plunger.

Music: The Word, The Word.

Monster Manual Comics

2009-01-23T10:17:00.000-08:00

Just a quick one; feelin' the writing urge today.

Check out Lore's Monster Manual comics. Especially if you're of a certain age, you'll find them hilarious. But be warned: They might ruin your ability to take some classic D&D monsters seriously. Or take the Allman Brothers seriously, for that matter.

Just hit the back button to flip through all of the Monster Manual ones. (His other stuff is good, too. Lore is one-half of the Brunching Shuttlecocks team. Remember them?)

--Dave.

A Great Freakin' Book

2009-01-22T09:06:00.000-08:00

If you like Conan...

If you like Elric...

If you like Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser...

...get yourself a copy of Gentlemen of the Road by Michael Chabon. Pay off those library fines if you have to. Sell your plasma if you must.

This book is rollicking adventure in that classic style--and almost no one writes like that anymore. (Heck, not even Moorcock, and he's still around.) It's got a big guy and a little guy, so the obvious parallel is with Leiber's Fafhrd and Grey Mouser. But Chabon is a better writer, and the fantasy dial is set very low--low like in Howard's later Conan work. I very much got a "People of the Black Circle" (my favorite Conan story) vibe from this.

Yes, it's that Michael Chabon: The Wonder Boys guy, the Kavalier and Klay guy, etc. Chabon is always quick to defend "genre" fiction, and I think given his druthers, he'd write a bunch of good, pulpy stuff. It's clear that he's using his Wonder Boys fame and the glow of that Pulitzer Prize to satisfy some of his creative urges. And what a happy day when his creative urges happen to match something I crave to read!

Chabon is a wordsmith, and you'll savor the way he strings together a sentence. But all his fancy wordsmithin' doesn't get in the way of the rollicking. You will burn through this book and wish it was twice as long.

And that's my only regret. He's Michael Chabon, dammit. He's not chained to his typewriter cranking more Gentlemen of the Road stories to sell to Weird Tales for three cents a word. This is probably the only one we get.

But--bright side time--we do get this really, really excellent book.

P.S. Wikipedia informs me that Gentlemen of the Road was originally serialized in the New York Times Magazine in 2007. See, serialized! It doesn't get any pulpier than that.

Out of Context: "Are you the angel of death?"

"Even worse, fatty," the pale stranger said. "I'm the angel of fools."

Music: CSS, Cansei De Ser Sexy

The Fantasy Language Barrier, Part II

2009-01-21T12:49:00.000-08:00

World of Warcraft has languages, too. And if D&D’s languages sometimes impose unfortunate barriers to communication, WoW’s language system imposes exactly one barrier. Horde PCs and Alliance PCs can’t talk to each other. Period.

How It Works: Each faction has its own common tongue, and there’s no way (absolutely no way, period, end of discussion) for a Horde PC to learn Common or an Alliance PC to learn Orcish. That was a fantastic decision that I don’t think Blizzard gets enough credit for. That language barrier prevents the tidal wave of trash-talking that would drown out everything else whenever the Horde and Alliance are in proximity—including key places like battlegrounds and main cities like Dalaran and Shattrath.

Maybe I’m old, and maybe I have delicate sensibilities, but I shudder to think at what the shouting in Dalaran would sound like. Remember, WoW is a big place. The player population is almost six million strong (and another six million play Alliance characters!), and even spread across multiple servers, that's a lot of shouting.

When a Warcraft character of the opposite faction yells something, the game translates it into gibberish with a consistent letter- and syllable-replacement system. Back in 2005 or so, some enterprising WoW players made some rudimentary efforts at reverse-engineering that gibberish translation, enabling some awkward two-letter communication between Horde and Alliance. Predictably, it was used for trash talking, and Blizzard changed the translation algorithm to confound the effort.

If you aren’t a human or an orc, you get a racial language. But the vast majority of Warcraft players never, ever use Zandali, Taurahi, Gutterspeak, Thalassian, Darnassian, Dwarvish, Gnomish, or Draenei. The game has unlimited person-to-person whispering and unfettered ability to create chat channels (to say nothing of actual voice chatting), so there’s no need for a “secret language” to facilitate PC-to-PC communication. Those languages exist only because Blizzard was contemplating a broader language system fairly late in the design. For very good reasons (the trash-talking thing above), bilingual WoW PCs never happened, and they never will happen.

I Must Have Missed Looting That Babelfish: Just saying “no…period” to cross-faction communication was a gutsy call on Blizzard’s part. Beyond that, though, WoW seems content to blithely ignore language. When my Horde druid stealths his way through Stormwind and Ironforge, I can often overhear when the NPCs are saying—and I doubt they’re speaking Orcish or Taurahe. In quests and instances where I meet major NPCs like Thrall and Jaina Proudmoore, I can understand what everyone’s saying perfectly. If a monster speaks, I understand it. And when a demon or a dragon or another big, bad NPC addresses the Horde and the Alliance together (like in the cinematic you see after you get the “Veteran of the Wrathgate” achievement), everyone understands everyone else. My character has met Arthas maybe a half-dozen times so far. What language does he speak? And what language do all those death knights in the Ebon Hold speak, anyway?

So Who Does Languages Right? D&D strives for a realistic treatment of languages, but that realism often gets in the way of communication that everyone at the table wants to happen. Warcraft blows off realism almost completely, but it’s left one singular, key language barrier in place where it’s needed most.

I suppose maybe that leads to the following principle: only erect language barriers where you want there to be an actual barrier. Once you know the barriers you want, then let everyone else talk to each other—especially in a game like D&D which relies almost exclusively on the spoken word for communication among the players.

But justify your language setup! Don’t just blow it off like WoW did. Especially in a fantasy world, you have the ammunition to believably justify as many or as few languages as you want. And think big! Have a player-discoverable reason for your language setup. You won’t be the first to have an earth-shattering event that changes the nature of language. If you want more languages, pull off something at your campaign table like the Tower of Babel (Genesis 11:1-9). And if you want everyone talking to everyone else, you could do a lot worse than cloven tongues of fire…like in Pentacost (Acts 2:1-12). Like I said, you won’t be the first.

Out of Context: “That one’s Snow White. That one’s Cinder-gorilla.”
Music: Blur, Think Tank

The Fantasy Language Barrier, Part I

2009-01-19T10:41:00.000-08:00

Two of my favorite games handle the issue of language—what the heck it sounds like when the PCs and NPCs are talking—very differently. Today…Dungeons and Dragons!

More Barriers Than You Think: In 4th Edition D&D, there’s a lingua franca: a language called “Common.” But it’s not truly universal. In fact, it isn’t even particularly widespread. Sure, a lot of creatures—including all the PCs—speak Common. But many key creatures don’t, including entire categories like angels, archons, beholders, most demons, most devils, driders (curious given that they used to be Common-speaking drow, huh?), efreets, elementals, giants, lizardfolk, salamanders, slaads, treants, troglodytes, trolls…and those are just the heavy hitters.

Some of the above speak Supernal, of course, but Supernal doesn’t enable universal communication. If you speak Supernal, everyone understands you. You don’t necessarily understand their non-Supernal replies.

Why Do Languages At All? The conventional wisdom is that it’s sometimes fun to try to play through a language barrier, resorting to pantomime and gesture to communicate with a monster. And there’s a long D&D tradition of PCs collectively learning an obscure language and using it to talk among themselves when NPCs might overhear them.

I think the first part of that conventional wisdom is largely bogus; the pantomime encounter is fun once or twice, but it becomes tiresome after that. And you can still have the occasional pantomime encounter without hard-coding so many language barriers into the game. Make those language-barrier situations what they truly are: the exception, not the rule.

I’m more sympathetic to the second use of the language barrier: a PC-only language. It has a nice side effect: It provides a degree of story-legitimacy to the table-talk that happens among the PCs anyway. But again, the many language barriers seem to be forcing the issue a bit.

I guess there's a third reason for the existing system: The game designers' natural inclination to reward PCs who expended the effort to learn the languages in the first place. But in 4th edition, those language choices (if indeed your character gets any choices at all) are almost entirely made at character generation. And if you quiz the third floor at Wizards, I doubt you'll get many designers who say they want lots of players picking up the Linguist feat. That reason, though well-intentioned, is the most bogus of all. Rewarding someone for being an elf is the same as punishing someone for not being an elf.

It's All About Monster Dialogue: The real point where the rubber meets the road is with NPCs talking to other NPCs, however. The D&D language system has created a world where monsters can’t talk to other monsters--not as easily as I'd like, anyway. And in a game that stresses heterogenous monster mixes in a given encounter—and monsters with identifiable roles in combat—that’s a problem.

It’s better for the game if the leader monster can shout out to the skirmishers “Stop the one with the crystal!” or tell the artillery, “Cover me while I retreat to the Sanctum of Skulls!” As a DM, I usually want the PCs to overhear stuff like that. It adds some exposition, some verisimilitude, and a tactical hint—and it gives me a way to provide some color and characterization for the monsters. Even if the PCs don’t understand the language the monsters are using, they’ll get a different vibe from a harshly whispered “Ruthek kaura naaa…ruthek kaura naaa…” or a hysterical, screaming “Ruthek kaura naaa! Ruthek kaura naaa!”

But a lot of monsters can’t talk to each other. I once flipped through the Monster Manual and looked for language barriers in the sample encounters. I don’t remember the exact figure (and I’m not about to duplicate the effort), but somewhere in the neighborhood of 30 percent of the sample encounters include a language barrier. And that doesn’t count sample encounters where one of the monsters is a hyena or something that doesn’t speak at all. No one at the table is going to bat an eyelid at that. But the number of “intelligent speakers that can’t talk to the rest of the intelligent speakers the Monster Manual groups them with” is way too high.

And the language barriers strewn throughout the game can jump up and bite a DM when no one’s expecting it. All it takes is one curious player to say, “Hey, what language is the fire titan ordering the fire archon around in?” At the very least, that creates a needless “um…” moment for the DM.

Quit Throwing Bricks, Dude: So what should you do? Well, you can play it as it lies, of course. Embrace those language barriers. Show the fire titan gesturing wildly at the fire archon. Have the red dragon wing-slap the salamanders into position. There are too many language barriers for my table, but there might not be too many for your table. And that’s what really matters, huh?

Alternatively, you can make a really expansive interpretation of DMG 171: “intelligent creatures [the PCs] encounter speak at least a little Common.” You can decide for your table that “a little Common” is enough to engage in light conversation, give and receive tactical commands, taunt the PCs, beg for mercy, and deliver key clues. You’re pushing the envelope of that rule’s intent—heck, you’re probably outside the envelope. But I think the payoff at the table is pretty good. You don’t get stuck with monsters that can’t talk to each other. Their choice of language is the spice, not the stew. And that's the way I think it ought to be.

Out of Context: "It's an RP realm. You're supposed to say, 'Weep more, novice.'"

Music: Joe Satriani, Engines of Creation

How I spent my Christmas vacation

2009-01-16T10:46:00.000-08:00

I took a nice vacation to visit family down in Southern California. Took the kids to the beach, Disneyland, that sort of thing.

And I happened across something from my adolescence: Megaforce! Check it out. It's the dune buggy! The dune buggy...that shoots LASERS!

Believe it or not, this thing--apparently a prop left over from the movie--is parked in front of an Army/Navy surplus store in Newport Beach, right on Pacific Coast Highway. And a close-up inspection revealed that it hasn't moved in years.

Now, the movie Megaforce...well, it hasn't exactly aged well. But man, when you're 13 years old, the notion of an elite team equipped with laser-shooting dune buggies and flying motorcycles that shoot missiles is completely awesome.

You can see the last few minutes of the film--a pretty accurate sampling of the movie as a whole--here. And here's the opening few minutes.

Yeah, it's terrible, Still, it would be difficult to exaggerate what a charge I got out of seeing the dune buggy on a parking lot on PCH. The actual quality of the movie in no way diminishes my fondness for it. I guess a lot of the things we're fond of are like that, huh?

Out of Context: "I was being the wild card!"

Music: Nouvelle Vague, Nouvelle Vague

So this is the new year...

2009-01-16T10:25:00.000-08:00

I find I miss blogging, and thus this little spot. On an every-other-day-or-so basis, I'll blog about games (especially D&D, World of Warcraft, and various German board games), stuff that inspires games and game design, and (like any blog) whatever fuels my sense of caprice and whimsy.

I used to work for Wizards of the Coast as a game designer, and while there I was among their more prolific bloggers. (You can see all that stuff here.) I imagine this blog will have the same general tenor as that one. I am by no means a super-blogger, but I'm reasonably regular. When I worked at Wizards, I'd often crank out a blog post first thing in the morning as a writer's warm-up before digging in on the design tasks for the day.

And writing is what I do, so once again my blogging will probably serve as some light calisthenics before I get to work on other things.

Out of Context: "I guess I'm a magnet for floods now."

Music: Jeff Buckley, Grace