Game Design Fanatic

Dominion Non-Aggressive variant – version 1

2011-07-06T12:30:00.001-07:00

Me and my wife like to play 2-player Dominion. But my wife does not like using Attack cards, and gets upset at me whenever I play one on her. So we don't use them. Which I don't mind too much, except that I never get to use tactics and strategies related to being attacked – such as using cards to trash Curses. So I decided to modify all of the forbidden cards so that they would be usable without actually attacking the opponent.

What I decided to do was to have the Attack cards become Consequence cards. Instead of attacking the opponent, they attack the person playing them. Of course, this doesn't make them very appealing to buy and play. So to compensate, I rewrote the cards to give them much stronger positive effects, better than cards without Consequences.

For version 1 of this concept, I tried to make the Consequence be as close to an actual attack as possible:

Consequence Rule: When you play a card with a Consequence, it acts like a duration card from Seaside. The part of the card that would normally affect you still happens when you play it. But the part of the card that would normally affect other Players becomes a Consequence and does not occur immediately. At the start of your next turn, before any other duration effects, you suffer the Consequence – the portion of the card that would normally affect other players, affects you instead. You can then respond with any Reaction cards in hand, as if you had been attacked. If there are multiple Consequence cards in play, they affect you in the order in which you played them.

This means that Consequence cards affect you at the same point in play as Attack cards – after you draw your hand but before you play it.

Here are the new rules for the cards that work in just this way – the exact same Attack that used to be applied to the enemy is now applied to you. I have listed the new, updated positive effect on each card – this replaces the previous non-attack effects of each card (for the first 5 listed, these were: put a Silver on top of your deck, +2 Coins, +2 Cards, +2 Coins, none, and +3 Cards, respectively). I decided to start with the Attack Cards from Dominion, Intrigue, and Seaside, just to keep the number manageable, even though as you will see I make use of the victory point tokens from Prosperity, as I think they are cool.

My general preference is to improve what each card already does, to invoke its feel more strongly. First I describe what I did to some of the more straightforward cards to modify:

Bureaucrat: Instead of putting a Silver on top of your library, put it into your hand. That didn't seem strong enough, so I had it give you a victory point token to balance it out.

Cutpurse: First I tried making it give you +3 Coins instead of +2 Coins. That didn't seem enough, so I tried +4 Coins. But that seemed too strong. So I compromised with +3 Coins, +1 Buy.

Ghost Ship: I tend to like Action cards, I think they make the game more fun than just getting Treasures, so I like to encourage them. I had an inspiration to give you +1 Action for every Action card you drew with the +2 Cards the Ghost Ship gives you. Since that is clearly not strong enough by itself, I added +2 Coins as well.

Militia: At first I gave this +4 Coins, +1 Buy. This seemed too strong, so I reduced it to +4 Coins.

Saboteur: This had no positive effect at all, so I had nothing to work from. Obviously I needed a really strong effect to compensate for losing a good card from your deck. So I decided to try having it grant an extra turn, as this effect is not especially common and is clearly very strong. Now, Outpost already does this, so Saboteur has to be much better than Outpost. I decided to have it give you a full extra turn with the normal 5 cards instead of the 3 that Outpost gives you. It is very hard to decide how powerful this is, but it seems to play OK.

Torturer: I added +2 Actions to make this card into a Super-Laboratory. This can be pretty cool for making your deck explode, but if you play more than 2 in the same round, next round you can be forced to take curses because you don't have enough cards to discard. I don't know if it is balanced, but it is fun to play with.

New Rules

Bureaucrat: Gain a Silver and put it into your hand. Gain a victory point token.

Cutpurse: +3 Coins, +1 Buy.

Ghost Ship: +2 Coins, +2 Cards.

Militia: +4 Coins.

Saboteur: Take an extra turn after this one. You can only take one extra turn in this fashion.

Torturer: +2 Actions, +3 Cards.

Next to consider is the cards which give Curses. The problem with these cards is that gaining a Curse is phenomenally bad, to the point that it is very difficult to compensate for since adding a Curse to your deck is likely to wipe out any benefit you might gain from adding any one other card to your deck. Rather than amp up the regular benefits of Curse-granting cards to the nth degree, I decided to just make a standard rule that when you gain a Curse, you gain a Gold as well. By my estimation, these should roughly cancel out to be of neither benefit nor harm to your deck. To give my reasoning, consider that a Curse and a Gold give you +3 Coins and -1 VP, so they are only slightly better than two cards each giving +1.5 Coins and -0.5 VP. Copper (+1 Coins) is generally a bad card you want to get out of your deck, while Silver (+2 Coins) is clearly a good card. +1.5 Coins and -0.5 VP is a lot worse than Silver and not much better than Copper, so I estimate it to be neutral, leaning towards a negative.

Sea Hag: Since this had no positive benefit it needed a lot of help, so I had it put the Gold right into your hand. That means it gives +3 Coins, which seems like a reasonable benefit. But the Curse goes on top of your deck, which is bad. So I added a victory point token (from Prosperity) to compensate.

Witch: +2 Cards is pretty far behind what you would want for a 5-cost card, so I added 2 victory points.

New Rules:

Sea Hag: Gain 1 victory point token. If there is at least one Curse in the supply, gain a Gold and put it into your hand.

Witch: +2 Cards. If there is at least one Curse in the supply, gain a Gold and 2 victory points tokens.

Finally, a number of Attack cards involved choices about how to carry out the attack, such that they would not actually be detrimental if you attacked yourself and made the choices. You could have an opponent make the choice, but that would break the spirit of the non-aggressive concept. So in most cases I decided to accept that the Consequence was, in fact, a positive rather than negative Consequence, and make custom modifications to each card accordingly.

Swindler: The card mostly seemed well suited to turning the Attack into a positive Consequence – the ability to trash a card and replace it with a card of equal cost is handy. One thing I missed, though, was the fact that this is normally a minor curse Card, since it turns Copper into Curses. So I decided to encourage turning Copper into a Curse by giving you a Gold if you do so.

Spy: Another case where turning the Attack into a positive Consequence works just fine; you get to look at your top card, and keep it or discard it, both this turn and the next turn.

Thief: Although the Thief gives you a choice about what to do with your Attack, normally you would want to steal Treasure greater than Copper, and leave Copper alone. So I had the Consequence be that you draw two cards and trash any Treasures you find other than Copper. However, the benefit obviously can't be to give you that card back – that would be pointless. It could give you that card back twice over, but I felt that would violate the spirit of what the Thief does to the game, to discourage players from purchasing expensive Treasures. So I figured I should have the Thief encourage Action Card decks. But how? I never actually figured this out in version 1, I kept fiddling around with different ideas. One idea was to reveal an Action card in your hand, then gain a card with a cost up to 1 greater than the revealed card. The idea was that a real Thief is more useful later in the game when the other players actually have valuable Treasure cards for you to steal; so this version of the Thief would be better later in the game when you have a supply of valuable cards to reveal. Since using an Action card which doesn’t grant an extra Action to reveal a separate Action card is very awkward, I added +2 Coins as well. Then I realized that letting you get Victory Cards would make this a powerful end game card in a way Thief isn't, so I forbid that. To counter, I let you reveal Victory cards. As mentioned, though, this is just one version of the idea, I never did zero in on the right balance.

Pirate Ship: While theoretically similar to the Thief, the Pirate Ship is weird. With the Pirate Ship you actually want to trash the opponents' Copper, even though that usually helps them, in order to gain Coin tokens for yourself. I don't really have a good grasp on exactly how the balance of this card really works out. I decided to make the Consequence work this same way – you draw two cards and trash any Treasure you find, Copper or not. Since this isn't that bad, I added only a small benefit of +1 Coin to playing the Consequence form of the Pirate Ship.

Ambassador: As with the Thief, keeping this card unchanged would make it self-negating and thus pointless. I decided to go with the idea of making the positive effect unchanged and modifying the negative effect instead. So I decided to give you +1 victory point. This seemed weak compared to the Steward, so I changed it to +1 victory point for each card you return. Making this a delayed Consequence would just waste time, since I decided to give the benefit immediately and make this no longer a Consequence card.

New Rules:

Ambassador: Reveal a card in your hand. Return one or two copies of that card in your hand to the supply pile. For each card returned, gain one victory point token. This is not a Consequence card; ignore the old text about other players drawing cards from the supply.

Pirate Ship: Choose one: Gain a number of coins equal to the number of Coin tokens on your Pirate map. Or +1 Coin, gain a Coin token, and Consequence: Turn over the top two cards of your deck. Trash any Treasures you find and discard the rest. If you choose the second option, the Consequence takes place at the start of your next turn, as usual.

Spy: No changes. So at the start of the next turn, you look at the top card of your deck, then choose to put it back or discard it.

Swindler: No changes, except that if you trash a Copper and gain a Curse, you gain a Gold. So at the start of your next turn, you trash the top card of your deck, then gain a card of your choice with a cost no greater than that card.

Thief: +2 Coins. You may reveal a non-Treasure card in your hand. If you do, gain a non-Victory card with a cost up to 1 greater than the revealed card. Consequence: Draw two cards. Trash any non-Copper Treasures you draw, and discard the rest.

Finally, the Reaction cards. Because of the way the Consequence affect you, they should be able to work unchanged. The one exception is the Lighthouse. The predictability of the Lighthouse is normally a disadvantage against Attack cards, but it becomes an advantage against Consequence cards. So I decided to weaken it by having the Lighthouse only affect one attack against you, rather than all of them.

New Rules

Lighthouse: +1 Coin, +1 Action. At the start of your next turn, +1 Coin, and you may cancel one Consequence pending against you. Obviously, this effect kicks in before you suffer Consequences at the start of your next turn.

Rules Summary:

Consequence Rule: When you play a card with a Consequence, it acts like a duration card from Seaside and is not removed from play at the end of the turn you play it. The part of the card that would normally affect you still happens when you play it. But the part of the card that would normally affect other Players becomes a Consequence and does not occur immediately. At the start of your next turn, before any other duration effects, you suffer the Consequence – the portion of the card that would normally affect other players, affects you instead. You can then respond with any Reaction cards in hand, as if you had been attacked. If there are multiple Consequence cards in play, they affect you in the order in which you played them.

Bureaucrat: Gain a Silver and put it into your hand. Gain a victory point token.

Cutpurse: +3 Coins, +1 Buy.

Ghost Ship: +2 Coins, +2 Cards.

Militia: +4 Coins.

Saboteur: Take an extra turn after this one. You can only take one extra turn in this fashion.

Sea Hag: Gain 1 victory point token. If there is at least one Curse in the supply, gain a Gold and put it into your hand.

Spy: No changes. So at the start of the next turn, you look at the top card of your deck, then choose to put it back or discard it.

Torturer: +2 Actions, +3 Cards.

Witch: +2 Cards. If there is at least one Curse in the supply, gain a Gold and 2 victory points tokens.

Examination of the ICONS RPG

2011-01-05T06:47:00.001-08:00

Today I’m evaluating the ICONS RPG, a superhero RPG that is based on the FATE RPG system.

ICONS differs substantially from the FATE system. It is not, like the other FATE role-playing games I’ve looked at (Spirit of the Century and Starblazer Adventures), an expression of the FATE system adapted for a specific genre. Rather, the designer took the FATE system as inspiration and tinkered with it to create a new game system. My particular interest today is in calling out what changes the designer made.

First, what I found most entertaining about ICONS is that as I read the rules, I realized it was actually a merger between the FATE system and TSR’s old Marvel Superheroes RPG, and most of the variation from FATE can be explained in this context. I have a sentimental fondness for Marvel Superheroes, and I was very amused to see its old rules coming back again.

However, I should note that while there were certain aspects of Marvel Superheroes I thought were pretty cool, even when it first came out I was never too impressed by the way it played; I found it clunky and primitive compared to Champions. So being amused by the parallels doesn’t necessarily mean I think that they make the ICONS system good.

Pretty much all of the significant game rule variations from FATE which I want to call out are based on making it more like Marvel Superheroes. Here is my list:

The system for ranking skills and difficulties is a 1 to 10 scale instead of the –3 to +8 scale of FATE, and each ranking corresponds to an MSH rank from Feeble to Unearthly. I’ve always had a peculiar fondness for the MSH ranks and I’ve used them in my own games on occasion, so this really amuses me. I also like how ICONS improves on the system by matching each rank with a sensible number from 1 to 10, and how ICONS renames the top two ranks (I was never too fond of the naming of the rank “Monstrous” in MSH).

A big change from the FATE system is that ICONS is attribute-based rather than skill-based, and the attributes are based on the Marvel Superheroes FASERIP system, but with different names. Psyche has been replaced with Willpower, which incorporates the Presence statistic from Champions. Endurance has essentially been merged with Strength, and the new Stamina value replaces the old Health value.

If you look at what this change from FATE really means, it is that the medium-sized skill list from FATE has been merged into 6 uber-skills. You can then buy Specialties, which like Skills in MSH, increase your attribute by a fixed amount in one specific area, equivalent to a single FATE skill. But basically, the ICONS system is much more coarse-grained than FATE; the team genius is the unquestioned master of all intellectual skills, rather than splitting the skills more evenly among the party as you might expect in the other FATE games. I think the assumption is that your characters will be defined much more by their superpowers, and skills are streamlined and relegated to a secondary role.

The recommended character generation system is based on random rolls and has nothing to do with the skill pyramid system of FATE. I don’t recommend random character generation as a way to create balanced and personalized characters, but random character generation is fun to do and can give you interesting ideas.

The combat system is more traditional and less abstract than in the FATE system. Instead of just opposed rolls, you actually roll to hit on your turn and have separate accuracy and damage values. The most interesting part is that it pretty much exactly replicates the old MSH system of having 3 different success levels which mean different things for different damage types. It just does so by using the value of your roll rather than the silly color table of MSH. So, for instance, a bashing attack can slam or stun the opponent.

Mercifully, it does not imitate the MSH quirk that all characters are equally hard to hit. But it does imitate the annoying MSH feature that “body armor” type powers are incredibly effective and can make you nearly immune to normal damage.

I find the movement system confusing and I don’t understand how to use it. It appears to be abstract, like FATE, but it also has references which seem to refer to moving increments of distance, which is a tactical movement concept.

Fate points have been renamed Determination. You earn and spend them using Aspects, just like in FATE. But the way they work has been modified to match how Karma worked in MSH; you declare what you are trying to achieve before you roll, then the amount of Determination you spend is based on the discrepancy between your actual result and you desired target, with success guaranteed if you have enough Determination.

The way that Aspects work is mechanically identical to FATE, but the suggestions for how to choose them are significantly different. In the FATE systems I’ve looked at, it is pretty much up to you what kinds of Aspects you pick, the primary advice is to emphasize that every Aspect should have clear negative consequences – ideally both postive and negative consequences. In ICONS, the recommendation is that some of your Aspects are Qualities, which are mostly positive, and some are Challenges, which are purely negative. Challenges are equivalent to Disadvantages / Complications from Champions, as the list of examples makes clear. Qualities are divided into helpful categories with suggestions on how to pick them – you can pick a Motivation, and Identity, and Epithet, and so on. Seems nifty, I like the suggestion of thinking up an Epithet for your hero.

Finally, the tone of some of the GM’ing advice is a little bit different. Something I’d call out is the note that, in ICONS, the concept of tagging Aspects to do things is really “just for fun”, to add a bit of color to the game; you only need to tag one Aspect to spend as much Determination as you need, and the GM should be lenient in allowing characters to match an Aspect to the action they want to perform. A bit different from FATE advice, which tends to stress Aspects as important mechanical elements, and emphasizes the importance of the GM adjudicating attempts to tag Aspects to make sure he or she considers them appropriate.

Hero System 6th Edition – Notable Ideas

2010-11-06T09:53:00.001-07:00

Continuing my analysis of the changes in Hero System 6^th edition, I'm writing down some of the notable "toolkitting" or rules suggestions I thought were interesting. Many of these aren't actually concrete rules, they are just comments that the GM might want to change the rules in a given situation, or invent new rules to solve a certain problem. Since these suggestions are optional, I didn't bother to analyze suggestions I didn't like.

Notable Ideas I was positive about:

You can now specialize a skill for half cost, or buy limitations on skills. Limitations on skills were technically allowed in 4^th Edition, but they required GM permission and I never saw anyone use them except for the most obvious cases. It occurs to me that you could use these changes to do a much better job of customizing your character's skills by purchasing bonuses in specific areas you specialize in, or using limitations on skills which would otherwise give you more than you need.

I like the "Skill Combinations" idea a lot. This is the idea that you could take a bunch of specialized skills and bundle them into one meta-skill. Note that this is only a suggestion, not a really formalized rule, but I like it. I don't know how far they intend to go with this in their sourcebooks, but I'm tempted to run pretty far with it. One of the problems of Hero System has been breaking down the skills into far too much detail for campaigns not based on those skills. For instance, Cryptography skill. In a game where everyone is an espionage agent, having this skill be separate allows one character to be the cryptography expert. But in a superhero game, this skill is just something the secret agent character ought to have but will rarely use. So you end up having to pay lots of points to give your secret agent a laundry list of rarely used skills that clutter up the character sheet, or you skip some of the skills but then you don't have them in the rare cases that you need them. Giving the option of breaking down espionage skills for espionage games, but then combining them into an overall "espionage" skill for superhero games, is great. The combination can cost less than the individual skills, so you can put a bunch of highly specialized skills into one skill combination for a reasonable price. This is like an extension of the rule that useless skills cost nothing; in this case skills of very limited use have a small cost and don't clutter up the character sheet.

There is a suggestion to the effect that you if you want a power to work a certain way that doesn't exactly fit within the rules, you just buy the closest power you can, then say it works that way. This sounds like a good suggestion to me. It is often a lot easier to match a complex character conception by designing powers with custom rules. But typically it is very difficult or impossible to assemble these powers by combinations of the standard powers, advantages, and limitations – it is either illegal or prohibitively expensive. This suggestion could be interpreted to let you just find an equally effective legal power, and redefine it to work the way you need. Also, this rule could really help when transferring complicated characters from one GM to another. In the past, you had to worry that the GM would rule that your power didn't work the way you wanted it to under his rules interpretation. Now you can just tell the GM how the power works, and he just has to decide that the power isn't unreasonable and that the point cost is appropriate. However, I have to point out that this suggestion is just a small one that I'm reading a lot into.

The absolute effect rule covers the problem that you can't purchase immunity to specific effects. It says that the GM can define a certain amount of defense against a certain special effect, and if you get it, you become totally immune to the effect. The only problems involve things like determining how you buy "immune to poison" when many different game powers can have the special effect of poison. And, of course, that the cost is likely rather high for some types of effects. But at least there is a rule to do it.

Cool idea – get rid of the points from complications and give out hero points whenever a complication appears in the story and is overcome. Actually, I'm thinking this could be simplified to "whenever a complication hinders the character". This is clever, I don't know if this comes from another game, but I really like this idea, it takes the onus of the GM to find ways to make a complication actually be worth its point cost. I really have to think about this, I've never thought of doing this before (at least not for Champions – Torg's Nile Empire sourcebook had a version of this rule, but the execution of the rule was quite awkward and didn't inspire me to transfer it to other games). I should point out, though, that this idea is presented as a throwaway concept, not something fleshed out into proper rules.

There is a helpful suggestion that the GM should only let PC's wake up from unconsciousness, not NPC's. This is one solution to the annoying problem that under Champions rules, after you knock someone out you have to hit them again to keep them out, a rather unheroic thing to do.

There is a suggestion that objects should be easier to break in superhero campaigns, and that the GM may want to have "real weapons" cause less damage in superheroic campaigns. This is exactly what I have done and always thought Champions should do. In 4^th edition the recommended power level of tanks and guns was reasonable for heroic campaigns in which you want big guns to be totally lethal, but way too strong for superheroic campaigns. I was always annoyed that tanks were far, far tougher and more damaging than any superhero, it just didn't fit the comics at all.

There is a nifty optional rule for critical hits and fumbles.

There is a section discussing the problems about how the Hero System rules cause minor opponents to be rather tough and hard to kill, and in particular how they all tend to be unconscious rather than dead at the end of a battle, forcing the players in heroic campaigns to break the dramatic conventions shoot all of the unconscious opponents to finish them off. I like the discussion of the problem, and they have some suggestions for how you might fix it that are sketchy and primitive, but probably workable.

There is a revival of the old 3^rd edition idea of a discount for multiple enhanced senses, in the form of an optional suggestion. This directly acknowledges that the high cost of many enhanced senses is based on their usefulness in avoiding sense-affecting attacks; once you have one, the rest have diminshing returns.

Notable Ideas I am positive about, with reservations:

The GM is advised that he may want to forbid use of martial arts to do other ridiculous things like break out of steel prison cells. This suggestion exemplifies what I feel about a lot of the little "toolkitting" type rules suggestions they have. On the one hand, it is a revealing and intelligent observation of a problem that can arise when you use the rules literally. On the other hand, this is pretty far from being a rule to fix the problem. I mean how do you decide what he can break, and what he can't, and what to do when things are on the edge? You would need to improvise, as this is basically a GM'ing suggestion.

Optional Healing rules has a nice preamble about how inconvenient it is for players to take BODY damage in a campaign that lacks magical healing, and all the problems this causes. The suggestions for fixing this seem weak, however – they are most effective at helping characters with heavy armor, which isn't very appropriate for many of the genres which have this problem.

Notable Ideas I am neutral about:

There is a "toolkitting" suggestion that you could have skill rolls be derived from your characteristics divided by 3, for instance, instead of by 5. This would solve the problem that there is very little "granularity" for statistics like intelligence – very few values that are actually different from one another, since the only really meaningful values to buy are 8, 13, 18, and 23. However, this is just a sidebar, it doesn't give actual rules for how to change point values to match. And it makes your skills tied even more closely to your stats, an effect I don't like. Although they have a contrary suggestion in the same section that the GM could untie all skills from statistics completely – they have a lot of interesting little ideas for how skills could work in a game.

One of the many ideas for skills presented is to base skill rolls off of different statistics depending on how you are using them (as is done, for instance, in the Storyteller system of Vampire). Interesting, but this adds to complexity and I would prefer to just purchase the amount of skill I want and stick with it.

Hero System 6th Edition – Key Changes

2010-10-08T21:27:00.001-07:00

Last article I described the major changes in Hero System 6th edition, changes that were general in nature. This article I'm describing changes which are specific, but which are likely to affect many characters or come into play in many adventures, or otherwise are pretty likely to be noticed.

Key changes I feel improve the game:

Elemental Control is gone, replaced by the limitation "Unified Power". This is good, because Elemental Control was really just a random way to save points if you had certain specific powers and certain special effects, and clearly didn't belong within the logical Hero System framework, especially the 6th Edition view of that framework. The Unified Power limitation causes adjustment powers which affects one of your powers to affect all of your related powers. This seems like a very minor limitation (drains vs. specific powers are really rare), so Unified Power still looks like a random point break. But it is a much simpler, small rule, and is a more blatant point break, easily banned by the GM if necessary, so I think it is a great improvement. The one small advantage to Elemental Control was that it tended to give a point break to Energy Projectors, who were overpriced compared to Bricks and Martial Artists. But I think the other point cost changes in the system have already addressed this issue.

The rule that combat skill levels can be used to boost damage is now a general rule, not limited to hand-to-hand attacks in heroic campaigns. I've already been doing this for quite some time; it is more fun and not unbalancing.

The rules are clear that pushing can only be done in heroic situations, not just any time you have the extra END to spend. I've always used that rule in my games, I think this is was a fairly common interpretation. But the 4th Edition rules weren't really specific about this.

Sense-affecting powers (like Flash, Invisibility, and Darkness) are now much cheaper (usually half cost) when they only affect non-targeting senses (i.e. when they don't affect sight). This is great, making powers cheaper when they are less useful. Actually, the truth is that affecting non-targeting senses is usually far less than half as effective unless you have some sort of devious power combo; but half price is much better than full price!

There is a rule for untrained skill rolls! Previously, there was no real rule for what happens when you need to make a conversation check and you don't have the skill. This issue occurs in certain other game systems as well, and leads to a common problem. The general solution for the lack of a defined skill roll was that characteristic rolls be used. But characteristic rolls are quite high compared to the pitiful 8- roll for a familiarity in the skill. Unless the GM was really on top of this, it was all too easy for characters who were familiar with a skill to end up less capable than characters who were totally untrained, because the GM would say "make a driving roll" if the character had the skill, or "make a DEX roll" if he didn't. Even a DEX roll at -3 would be better than the 8- for a familiarity. With the new rules, an untrained character has 6-, fixing this problem. However, it does present a small trap for the unwary GM. Mathematically, the 6- roll works fine. But it means that whenever a character tries a skill roll which an untrained person should have a decent chance of succeeding in, the GM needs to give a huge bonus (like +5). Since Hero System skill rolls are presented as an "absolute" ("13-" instead of "+3"), GM's who don't know the mathematics well may have a tendency to ask for unmodified skill checks. This can result in situations in which ordinary characters are treated as comically incompetent because they routinely miss their skill checks by 5 or more.

The VPP rule explicitly allows you to buy a control cost for more active points than the real cost, so you can have a variable power pool with 30 real points that allows powers of 60 active points. This is something I have always allowed and used, it is mathematically logical (it is as if you bought a 60 point power pool and declared that 30 points of it are fixed in place). This is very useful in practice when you want to create a VPP of attack powers, something quite common. With attack powers, you usually only want one power in the pool at a time, and trying to create an interesting power with advantages and limitations didn't work because the limitations only saved you real points, and you couldn't do anything with these real points. Now you can buy up your active points and have more options for playing around with your VPP.

5th Edition merged Public/Secret ID into a new, more general complication called Social Complication. I like this idea, and the new symmetry of having physical, psychological, and social complications. There were definitely some complications that were hard to represent properly before. Most notably, "subject to orders" was previously represented as "watched by military", which isn't really the same thing.

Martial arts are now fully effective when used with weapons. In previous editions martial maneuvers gave only half the damage bonus when used with weapons, so a fencer would get the same combat penalties for performing an offensive strike as a hand-to-hand fighter, but would only get half the damage bonus, and thus fencers would avoid this maneuver most of the time. This change evens the playing field.

There is no more Package Bonus – you don't get a point break for basing a characer off of a standard template. I didn't particularly object to the package bonus, but this changes seems reasonable, why reward characters for being standardized and penalize creativity. The main justification for the package bonus was that you got a point break for having to buy useless skills, but 6th Edition has fixed this problem by specifying that useless skills no longer cost character points.

Find Weakness is gone. I didn't hate this power, but I never used it either. I found it way too extreme; one roll would determine whether you were devastating or impotent against the enemies. And the game mechanics for how the power worked were rather fiddly and didn't seem to match any power of any character in any genre I was familiar with. It was sort of a funny Hero System-specific gimmick, and I won't miss it.

Many powers and modifiers have been broken down into much more detail, allowing characters to be crafted more precisely. Examples include how you can now use invisible power effects to make something inobvious instead of fully invisible, or how the value of the Linked limitation depends in more detail on exactly how the linking works. These changes are individually small, but overall, I like the breakdowns and added power modifiers, they usually make a lot of sense, and they increase the richness of the character creation system, which is at the heart of the Hero System.

A lot of rules sections are much larger than the corresponding sections in 4th Edition, and in a good way. A lot of things which were unclear before are now explained. Examples of expanded rules sections, include perceivability of powers, constant powers, Adjustment Powers, and Mental Powers, but there are many others. I think a lot of work has gone in to making the rules more clear and comprehensive, and I found the expanded rules sections enlightening on many points.

Key Changes about which I am positive, with reservations:

There is a big new rule, the Multiple Attack rule. Finally, there is a way for a character to make multiple attacks simultaneously – to shoot a gun in each hand, or to trip a foe and headstomp him without letting him get up in between. The maneuver is quite powerful but requires a high OCV and gives you 1/2 DCV. I put the maneuver as a positive because it lets you do something that you just couldn't do before, and sometimes wanted to do. But I have reservations about whether I'd really want to use or allow this maneuver in a game. First, I feel like the characters who would thematically most want to use this would be highly skilled characters fighting minions – but these are exactly the kind of characters who would really hate being reduced to ½ DCV and wiped out by counterattacks from all the remaining minions. Second, it seems like a new way to beat on the poor fools who have been knocked prone or otherwise reduced to ½ DCV. It is bad enough getting auto-hit by normal attacks when you are on the ground, but potentially taking triple damage from a massive multi-attack seems just cruel.

Missile Deflection is gone, replaced by a rule that anyone can block ranged attacks based on special effects. And the rules for Block are nicely expanded. The key to my commentary here is to understand that I'm always thinking of Block as an alternative to Dodge. And the truth is that if your OCV and DCV are equal, Block is only slightly more effective at avoiding a single attack than Dodge, and has many more limitations. It does let you go first next round, but only in certain circumstances. So I feel that the ability to Block isn't worth that much, since you could have just dodged instead. So I am quite happy that Missile Deflection no longer costs a large number of points. And I think the new block rules are swell. My reservations are two. First, since I never really used Block much at all, I'm just not that excited by all the page space spent on it. Second, under the new rules, you can only block range attacks (i.e. Missile Deflect) if you have an appropriate special effect. My opinion is that if you think Block is useful enough to devote all that page space to, why isn't it useful enough to cost at least one point to be able to block ranged attacks? It seems tempting to say "Oh, my character carries around a trash can lid just so he is eligible for this extra combat maneuver".

The Grab rules are much more detailed and better described, and make a lot of sense. A character who is grabbing someone is now at ½ DCV; the -2 DCV penalty only applies if you miss. The grabbed characters have -3 OCV, which seems rough, but the grabber is still ½ DCV against their attacks. If you grab one target, you are ½ OCV against other targets. There are scary optional rules about letting super-strong grabbers really dominate weaker opponents. It is clarified that most martial maneuvers aren't allowed when grabbed. My only reservation is that some aspects of the new rules seem even more favorable to bricks and less favorable to martial artists, and I had already thought that grabs were too good for bricks and not that great for martial artists.

Mega-Scale is a new advantage that lets you create powers with immense area, range, or speed, at a cost that is large but not overwhelmingly huge. I like this idea, it makes it straightforward to buy certain powers that were awkward to buy before, such as the power to fly at the speed of light, or turn an entire city into zombies, or purchase a spaceship with guns that fire millions of kilometers. This acknowledges that in many cases, once you pass a certain amount of scale, increasing the scale of a power is largely for color and shouldn't cost an overwhelming number of points. After all, a sleep spell that covers an entire battlefield is enough for any combat use, increasing it to cover an entire county is probably just something you do when making some special magic ritual for storytelling purposes. However, while I think this is useful, I have reservations about the cost structure. I think the power is great improved over the 5th edition rules, in which it was absurdly cheap, but had annoying little limitations that often forced you to create a multipower for it. Now the cost is much more satisfying. But the cost system is still really weird. The first strangeness is that there were already ways to logarithmically increase the scale of powers, and megascale isn't integrated into the existing system. This is most obvious with area effect; you can get an area effect of 4m radius, or pay more for 8m or 16m; but once your power is 64m radius, you can just decide to make is 4000m radius for the same cost. This probably won't hurt the game balance if the GM is careful not to allow abusive megascale constructions, but it sure is weird. What is really odd is how megascale works with movement powers. Say you have 60m of teleport. It you buy megascale on top of it, you pay a staggering number of points to be able to teleport 60km. Or you can buy a small teleport with megascale in a multipower and be able to teleport anywhere on the planet for a handful of points. Megascale is a clear example of just how arbitrary the Hero System point costs really are; mega-scale is either very expensive or dirt cheap. And in particular, even if the GM and players are trying hard not to abuse the rules, it still isn't obvious which way is the "right" or "fair" cost. The planetary teleport multipower seems unfairly cheap, but if you use the megascale rules totally "straight up", then characters with large amounts of combat teleport pay far more points in order to have the same amount of noncombat teleport, and this seems pretty unfair the opposite way.

Key Changes I am neutral or conflicted about:

The ability to use EGO to defend against PRE attacks is now an optional rule. I don't have much opinion on this either way. In any case, if you really wanted your strong-willed but quiet character to resist PRE attacks, you could buy PRE with the limitation "only for defense".

Haymaker is substantially changed. First, it now gives a fixed damage boost of +4d6. I think this is good as it matches the way martial maneuvers work and reduces that massive benefit of haymakers to super-strong bricks, although my reservation is that it is weird and awkward that characters of ordinary human strength gets such an overwhelming benefit from the maneuver. The second change is a more of a clarification. A haymaker takes extra time between launching it and landing it, and if the foe moved out of range it would miss – but what if they just moved to a different place in your range? Now it is specified that if the foe moves at all, the haymaker misses, even if you have stretching or can otherwise still reach the target. I like this clarification. Third, and most importantly, any power can now be Haymakered, even if it is ranged! I like this because in the past, Bricks were much better at performing finishing blows or damaging inanimate objects than Energy Projectors, and now this evens the playing field. My big reservation is that I have never liked the Haymaker rule and never use it in my games, I don't like how it is far more effective than a regular attack unless the opponent has the correct meta-game knowledge of how to defend against it, in which case it is totally neutralized. So I'm not really thrilled that far more characters can now use it!

Flashes were changed in 5th edition to give you twice as many dice for the points, but the effect lasts for segments rather than phases. I can't decide if this change is good or bad. It means that 5 points of flash defense doesn't neutralize almost all flashes completely, and makes it more straightforward how long flash lowers your DCV and Perceptions, and makes flash slightly less devastating, and doesn't give as much penalty to low SPD characters. But what you really care about with Flash is how many phases you are affected for, and now that varies based upon arbitrary meta-game considerations: the segment your foe goes on compared to you. And the idea of a delaying your action when you are flashed to a later segment in which you are unflashed seems odd and slows the game down.

Breakfall lets you stand up as a zero phase action. Hmm, I foresee a lot of characters with breakfall skill. This rule isn't bad, it has the advantage of creating a way to ignore the prone effect, makes people with breakfall skill feel more distinctive, and gives breakfall a benefit even when you are knocked into obstacles. But in practical terms it makes me uneasy in two ways. First, I find the ability to delay people by knocking them prone feels appropriate, but don’t much care for the ability to reduce them to ½ DCV just long enough for your friends with reserved actions to annihilate them. The new breakfall rule takes away the first part without removing the second, I'd rather have it remove both or neither. Second, this is one of those rolls you have to make a lot but won't likely fail very often, and my experience with activation rolls is that such rolls can be somewhat of a nuisance.

The simulated sense group rule. When you buy an enhanced sense, you can say what sense group it is part of (such as sight or hearing) and it gains some of the benefits of the natural sense in that group, for free. The biggest effect of this rule is that enhanced senses which allow you to ignore sight-group flash, darkness, and invisibility cost more than those that don't, since senses based on sight get Targeting for free. This is good, because the ability to ignore sensory attacks is often the primary combat effect of an enhanced sense. On the other hand, the rest of the rule just seems awkward. You have to pay a bunch of points to make your mystic treasure sense ranged, but the ability to "smell" treasure is ranged for free, this just seems arbitrary to me. It seems like this whole rule would be more naturally replaced by limitations or advantages when you buy senses that are more more or less affected by sensory powers. Another point I should make is that it seems like it would be very common to imagine some sort of special vision that is affected by sight-based flashes but not affected by sight-based darkness or invisibility. The simulated senses rule doesn't cover this, it assumes flash and darkness/invisibility work the same way.

Dive for Cover makes you prone, and you suffer extra knockback if you try to dive for cover and fail. This makes sense if you think of the maneuver as literally diving to the ground to escape a grenade blast or an exploding car, and that sort of thing certainly happens in the movies. On the other hand, I'm somewhat skeptical of the literal interpretation. When you are diving from a grenade, you want to land prone because being prone inherently protects you. It seems a little odd that under the Dive for Cover rules, you run 8 meters, then decide to fall prone even though it doesn't protect you in any way under the Hero System rules. I liked the idea that Dive for Cover could be used to simulate the fact that it is difficult to hit fast-moving superheroes with area effect attacks. But the maneuver is rather difficult to use in superhero combat (they can just throw another area attack next phase), and the changes just make it even less effective. But perhaps I'm asking too much of the maneuver, and should just consider it to be designed to simulate characters trying to avoid single massive explosions by running away, leaping, and landing on the ground.

Key Changes I feel are detrimental:

The cost structure of combat skill levels has changed in a negative way. In 4th Edition is was noticeable that combat skill levels in highly limited areas were too cheap and versatile skill levels were too expensive. In 6th Edition, the cost of versatile skill levels was made even more expensive and the cost of limited levels stayed the same. Now a skill level in all combat costs 10 points! This means that the ability to gain +1 in OCV or DCV costs as much as buying both +1 OCV and +1 DCV! The combat level does allow you the option of increasing damage, but this is a small benefit compared to doubling the total combat bonus. Yet a level that applies to your 3 favorite maneuvers you use almost all the time is still a measly 3 points. Basically, 6th Edition increased the cost of levels in all combat or all h-to-h combat so that "1 level in martial arts" could now cost more than a level in 3 specific martial maneuvers and less than a level in all hand-to-hand combat. Inserting this new level is logical, but the specific way the costs were changed is not.

Also, the cost of mental combat levels was changed to work differently from physical combat levels, to match the fact that +1 OCMV is cheaper than +1 OCV. So gaining +1 in one mental attack is now half as expensive as +1 in one physical attack. This makes no sense. It isn't clear whether OMCV really should be cheaper than OCV, but if it should, it would be because it covers fewer powers. Once you are restricting your level to only a single power, +1 to hit is +1 to hit, it should cost the same to get +1 with a single mental power as it costs to get +1 with a single physical power, as they are both equally useful. Certainly it isn't like mental powers are weaker than physical powers – quite the opposite, at least for mental blasts.

The killing attack STUN multipliers for hit locations were NOT changed, even though the general STUN multipliers for killing attacks were changed. This means that killing attacks do far more stun damage if you are using the hit location rules. I find this very puzzling, especially since a few pages later in the rules is a discussion of how it is a problem in heroic campaigns that killing attacks tend to knock foes out instead of killing them. It is as if the hit location rules (indeed, almost all of the optional combat rules) were simply copied verbatim from the previous editions without being re-edited.

Analyzing Hero System 6th Edition – Major Changes

2010-09-13T15:32:00.001-07:00

I've been hard at work reading and analyzing the rules for 6^thEdition Hero System. I've played Champions for a long time, and it has traditionally been what I consider to be my favorite roleplaying game, though I haven't played it a whole lot recently. I remember how pleased I was with the 4^th Edition, and I played that for a long time. I wasn't too pleased with the 5^th Edition; while it was not without its good points, it seemed "fiddly", and had twice as many pages without much improvement to the game. I played it a bit, but didn't really see it as supplanting the 4^th Edition rules. Now the 6^th Edition has come out, and I have to say I'm much more pleased. This seems like it really is an improvement to the game, something that could make me want to put away the old Big Blue Book of 4^th Edition.

It should be understood that while there are substantial changes, the game was not "recreated" in the sense of 4^th edition D&D, this is an evolutionary modification and most of the rules are still the same as 4^th edition Hero System. So I think I shall analyze it in terms of how the system has changed. Since I was not that impressed with 5^th Edition, never wrote an analysis of the 5^th Edition changes and have many friends who never played 5^th Edition, I shall compare the changes to 4^th Edition Hero System, with maybe a few mentions of 5^th Edition here and there.

For this article, I will be looking at the really broad changes to the game, those changes you would be likely to notice regardless of what powers or maneuvers your character uses.

First, since I will be using these terms later, I'll mention the major nomenclature changes.

Ego Combat Value is now called Mental Combat Value (MCV), and in general the word "Mental" replaces "Ego" when referring to mental combat, rather than your Ego characteristic. I think this change is great. I always felt that the use of the word "Ego" instead of "Mental" was a bit of Hero System-specific weirdness.
Disadvantages are now called Complications. I never had a problem with the old term, but agree that the new term is just as good or better.

Major changes I feel improve the game:

The pricing system for characteristics was changed to remove the concept of secondary characteristics from the game. This is a big change, and is just a good thing. A well-known strangeness of previous versions was that purchasing STR and CON actually gave you more points worth of figured characteristics that you paid for the primary characteristic. This meant that, in some sense, these characteristics had a negative cost – increasing them could make the character cheaper! To deal with this, it was necessary to put limits on how many figured characteristics you could buy down, artificially limiting your character design. There were other minor drawbacks as well related to the fact that the "active points" of these characteristics were not equal to their "real cost". The one minor advantage of the old system was that it gave you a nice simple way to compute default values for your REC, END, and STUN, so that you didn't have to think about them. But in my opinion, the new system is far superior.
OCV and DCV are now characteristics, rather than being calculated from DEX. I highly approve of this, and in fact, had been moving strongly in this direction in my Champions house rules. When designing how a character will work in combat, it was cumbersome that base OCV, base DCV, and base Dex roll were all inextricably linked together. Sometimes I would want to make a character who was very skilled in combat, but not necessarily a great acrobat. You could do this with levels in OCV and DCV, which was OK, but levels and base CV are not quite the same thing. Other times, I would want to make a character who had been gifted with superhuman reflexes but didn't really know how to fight. There was no elegant way to do this (you would have to simulate it with a complication), but now it is easy. Also, it is quite normal to want a character's combat "style" to be more defensive or more offensive, and as mentioned above, having this be represented by setting your base OCV or DCV directly is more natural than buying levels in OCV or DCV. There is one tiny downside to this – Adjustment powers that affect your "agility" are more cumbersome to purchase, as adjusting DEX no longer adjusts OCV and DCV. But this is a very minor drawback.
The separation of OCV and DCV from DEX also has another potential benefit. An old Champions tradition is that superhero characters have much higher dexterity than their conceptions would indicate. If you wanted to be a slow, clumsy brick, you would have DEX 18, and if you were just average, DEX 20. Yet these would be considered quite high values for normal people. And superhero characters had normal, conception-appropriate values for other characteristics like INT and STR, so the high DEX was an oddity. The high DEX was actually a good thing for balance purposes. Some superheroes really do have good reason to have superhuman DEX. But if some characters had DEX 30 and others DEX 10, this meant some characters would have CV 10, others CV 3. This is way too much difference in a combat system in which even a few points of CV have a huge effect. Also, the high DEX meant that superheroes had a much higher CV than normal people. This isn't essential, but was part of the game balance and had some nice effects, letting characters do some fancy things and really feel impressive against ordinary mooks. The problem with the boosted DEX was that it also meant that superheroes had very high DEX rolls regardless of real conception. It was just weird that a superhero of average intelligence and average dexterity would have 11- in his intelligence-based skills and 13- in his dex-based skills, for no really good reason. With this new change, it is finally practically to really fix this strangeness; you can give superheroes abnormally high DCV and OCV but give them DEX on the same scale as INT. They don't do this with their sample superheroes, but I plan to with my campaign.
OMCV and DMCV (the mental combat values) are also characteristics. Not only does this have the benefits listed above for OCV and DCV, it also has point benefits. DCV and ECV used to have the same cost when you factored out the points of SPD given to you by the DEX. Now MDCV costs less than DCV, which is appropriate as it is less often useful. And in the past, EGO was expensive because it was a key statistic for mentalists, so characters without mental powers were really charged a lot for it even though all they wanted was to be strong-willed to fit their conception. Now characters who don't have mental powers don't even have to pay for OMCV, only characters who actually gain benefits from OMCV have to pay for it. There is, however, a drawback to the new system; mentalists can refuse to buy OCV and actually end up cheaper than non-mentalists, which is peculiar because mentalists are usually more effective than OCV-based characters, not less. And it sort of puts a high price tag on characters whose multipowers include both mental attacks and normal attacks, and thus need both OCV and OMCV. But overall, I like the new system.
The Comeliness characteristic has been replaced with the Striking Appearance advantage. This is interesting because I'd been thinking for a long time that if I wanted to rewrite Hero System, I would do exactly this. Nobody really cared about Comeliness too much, so it shouldn't be a characteristic. And the numbers had little game meaning anyway. It makes a lot more sense to either say "my character has average appearance" and forget about it, or to say "my character has an extraordinary appearance" and actually describe what game benefit you want to get from that.
The way that the base points for characters is described has been changed. In previous editions, a standard "250 point" Champions character was described as having 100 base points plus up to 150 points of disadvantages. Now such a character would be described as a 250 point character with 150 points of matching Complications. This works the same way, but better matches the fact that Champions players have always described such a character as 250 points rather than 100 points. Also, all powers and abilities which refer to the point cost of a character (such as Followers or Multiform) refer to this total cost, 250 points, rather than making a hard-to-remember distinction between base cost and total cost.
A longstanding complaint of mine has been that Champions demands that you take enormous numbers of Disadvantages, more than most character conceptions would naturally want to take, and more than most players or GM's would really want to use in play. 6^th Edition has met this complaint straight on the nose! They directly acknowledge in the rules advice the problems of having to take too many Complications, and the recommended Complication points for a superhero has been halved, from 150 to 75.
There is now a rule that "background" powers and skills which don't really have any game effect, don't cost any points. I love this rule (just as I loved it where I first saw it, in 4^th edition D&D). I have often noted that background skills, like being a master violinist, are way overpriced because they very rarely come up in play, and thought they should be far cheaper. Making them free certainly simplifies the situation! I also like how they mention that even skills with clearly listed values, like Bugging, can cost few or no points if the GM doesn't expect them to come up in the game. This is exactly what happens in real games. You are making some superhero whose background is that he was a secret agent, and you figure he ought to have bugging. But if you buy the Bugging skill, it is a waste of points, because it never comes up in your superhero adventures. But if you don't buy it, then there just might be one point every 5 years that you actually need Bugging – perhaps in some minor way – and you won't have it, even though it would be so cool to finally use your spy skills. The new suggestions are entirely on point to fix this problem.
The frequency concept for Complications such as Hunted has been greatly improved. In previous versions, you were supposed to make a random roll every adventure to see if the disadvantage showed up. I never played with anyone who actually followed that rule. First, the randomness would screw up your ability to create properly planned, believable adventures. Second, the hunters would show up far too frequently; the "medium" freqency would have them show up in more than half of the adventures! 6^th Edition has done a great job addressing this. The random rolls are gone, and the recommended frequencies have been reduced. And the repetitive attacks by hunters are reduced even further by helpful advice that even when they do "show up", it doesn't have to mean they attack or directly interfere with the character, or even that they show up – it may just mean that the character's behavior is influenced by his knowledge of being hunted.
Another longstanding complaint of mine about Champions has been the ridiculous randomness of the stun damage caused by killing attacks. It meant they were just as good as normal attacks of the same point cost at causing stun damage – and better if the target's defenses were high. And they were certainly much more likely to stun the opponent. A rifle bullet could be more effective against a bulletproof superhero than an energy blast, directly contrary to the comics. This has been fixed in 6^th edition by making the stun multiplier for killing attacks 1d3 instead of 1d6-1. They are still very random, but they are now clearly inferior to normal attacks at causing stun damage, with their advantage being that they cause more body damage. I still find the killing attack rules awkward in various respects, but I think this is an improvement.
Also, there is no longer a rule that you have to have at least one point of resistant defense in order to use your non-resistant defense against the stun damage of a killing attack. Now you can always use it. It was silly that there was a "magic cutoff" between having one point of resistant defense and having none – characters who took zero resistant defense were hosing themselves and not getting any points back in return. Now, it must be said that the old rule seemed like a logical way to prevent totally unarmored characters from shrugging off the stun damage from small killing attacks. But the truth is that the rule that you always take at least one STUN for every point of BODY damage already prevents this – and with the new killing attack rules, you don't necessarily expect killing attacks to cause a whole lot of STUN damage anyway.
Heroic Action Points. Champions is a very old RPG, and it did not have any form of "hero points" to give the players some sort of narrative control over the luck of the dice, save their characters from disasters, and let them rise to heroic occasions outside of the rather limited-purpose pushing rules. This became a noticeable omission when newer games had hero points, and Hero System didn't, despite the fact that the core of the Hero System has always been the sort of dramatic, cinematic adventures in which hero points are most appropriate. Well, now the Hero System has hero points! They are called Heroic Action Points, and they let you do a variety of things, most notably to retroactively modify your dice rolls. The rule isn't too sophisticated, but I'm not inclined to critique it. It seems like a perfectly workable rule, and it has been added to a game system that never had it before!
4^th Edition suggested restricting characters using active point limits on their attacks, and 5^th Edition really took this to heart (their sample superteam, the Champions, seemed to have a 12d6 attack for every single character!). I was pleased to see that 6^th Edition makes an about face, and has a very realistic discussion of the disadvantages of this approach, how it encourages sameness and discourages creative powers, how not all advantages that increase active points really count as boosting the combat effectiveness, how powers may be more or less powerful than their points indicate, and how the GM may be better off evaluating the real effectiveness of powers.
The Hero System has a history of good GM suggestions, and 6^th edition definitely keeps up the fine work. Aside from the usual fine material about making campaigns and running games, I was impressed to find sections that explain how certain game mechanics really work and what they do to the game – just the sort of things I write about in my blog. There seems to be real understanding of the implications of various game mechanics, and even explanations of some of the weaknesses of the system and how you might work around them.

Major Changes about which I am positive, with reservations:

The characteristic costs were changed around. Some of the old primary characteristics had to be changed due to the removal of the figured characteristic concept, but it is interesting how they changed. STR was not made cheaper at all, despite the fact that it used to give you enormous numbers of figured characteristics. DEX had its cost adjusted appropriately to 2 for the removal of the SPD benefit, but got no discount at all for losing its most important function, providing CV. CON was reduced appropriately reduced to cost 1 after losing its figured characteristics. BODY was adjusted to 1 for losing its Stun benefit. EGO now costs the same amount if you want only the Ego roll and DMCV benefit, but costs more if you also want OMCV. Finally, the cost of REC, END, and Stun was just flat out chopped in half. Why I think this is positive: While it may be odd that no-range STR is as expensive as ranged Blast, Bricks get all sorts of combat maneuvers and benefits that energy projectors don't have, so this seems plausible. DEX is a skill stat just like INT, and also gives you some extra combat benefits, so it is reasonable that it costs more than INT. Mentalists are really, really effective, so charging them more for their EGO is not a bad idea. People rarely bought up REC, END, and Stun very much, and they were a bit pricey compared to Def. That isn't the case anymore! My reservations: Ego rolls are fairly rare, and I always felt EGO was too expensive for non-mentalists, so I think EGO should be cheaper. STR is now more fairly priced for bricks and fantasy warriors, but is now overpriced for characters who don't use it for their combat attacks. Stun was a bit pricey compared to super-efficient point expenditures like increasing your PD, Dex, or STR, but it was actually quite reasonably priced compared to most expenditures, like buying skills or life support, so I'm not all that excited by making it just as dirt cheap as the other optimum ways of increasing your raw combat power.
The minimum cost rules are gone, or rather are relegated to a note that the GM can optionally impose whatever minimum costs he thinks are appropriate. This is good because there are many perfectly valid power constructions which require less than the minimum points from a power, and the minimum points rule was just getting in the way. My only reservation is that there are a few cases in which having a power at all gives you some fixed benefit, and now that benefit can be had for really cheap. For instance, 1" of flight lets you walk on air, and 1" of teleport lets you escape from grabs automatically. But the minimum cost rule wasn't the mathematically correct solution to this problem anyway, so this really isn't much of a reservation.
The new rules have a number of sidebars about "Toolkitting". These are suggestions for how you might want to change the game to create house rules to address certain problems that might crop up with the regular rules. I think it is great that the game openly admits that its rules may have imperfections or need to be changed based on the situation, and encourages the use of house rules. I'm certainly a big fan of house rules! And I like the suggestions for what to do, many of them are fairly sensible. My only "reservation" is to note that many of the suggestions are pretty vague, and suggesting that you might want to solve a problem is not the same as actually having rules to fix the problem.

Major Changes I am neutral about:

The entire system for measuring distance has been changed from "game inches" to meters. Actually, I quite like getting rid of "game inches", that was confusing. But the change could have been to use the term "hexes", and instead they switched totally to "meters". I view this as a stylistic change, neither good and bad. Measuring in hexes is better for tactical combat, measuring in meters is better when you are playing without a map. It is more pleasing to read everything being described in meters, but the tactical rules are still the same underneath and are easier to play with hexes. As a side note, I find it interesting that D&D 4^th edition made the exact opposite change – from feet to squares.

There are no major, sweeping changes which I dislike. They seem to have done a pretty good job with 6^th Edition!

Cooperative Games – Solitaire Games?

2010-08-16T12:26:00.001-07:00

I'm very fond of the new style of cooperative board games. I have Pandemic, Lord of the Rings, Ghost Stories, and Vanished Planet. These are games in which the players work together against a nemesis controlled by automatic game rules. A complaint I've sometimes heard from players who aren't fond of this type of game is that they are "just solitaire games". I started analyzing this claim to see what it means, and whether it is true.

A classic solitaire game involves one player against a nemesis controlled by automatic game rules. Sounds pretty similar to a cooperative game so far. Imagine, as a thought experiment, playing an old solitaire game, but instead of one player deciding the moves, having a group of 3 players discuss among themselves what moves to make. I think that if this situation is truly equivalent to a modern cooperative game, that would be the essence of saying a cooperative game is actually a solitaire game. So is a modern cooperative game simply a solitaire game where the moves are decided by committee? If not, what are the differences?

First of all, I have to say that a lot of games really do have a strong "committee solitaire" element, in that the players tend to get together and debate what everyone should be doing. This isn't necessarily a bad thing – it can be fun to have a big discussion about what the best move is for the group as a whole. But it does create a certain sense that you don't control your own character.

Here are some potential differences I can see between a modern cooperative game, and a solitaire game where the moves are decided by committee:

1. The sense that each player identifies with and executes the actions of his or her own character. When playing cooperative games, even when the everyone mutually agrees on what moves everyone else is doing, each person's character has a turn, and the player moves the pawn, draws cards or tiles, rolls dice, or does whatever else is necessary to execute the actions of his or her own character. I think this is sort of the minimum step for making a game seem cooperative instead of solitaire. I tend to remember better the actions of my own character and put together a mental narrative of what happened to my own character during the game, rejoicing in my successful moves, even when I wasn't the person who came up with the idea for the move.

2. A second step beyond this is the degree to which each player personally controls his or her own character. In most cooperative games I've played in, even when there is a lot of group discussion and very strong teamwork, each player ends up with more control over his or her own character than over the other characters. One reason is that the owning player ends up "breaking ties" – if the group can't decide between two reasonable strategies, it isn't actually put to a vote, but rather the owning player decides. Indeed, this isn't a formal decision, but rather the basic process of making group decisions is that each player kibitzes on the other players' turns, and the owning player then chooses what to do. Another aspect of individual control is that some decisions are too minor to bring up for group consensus – it would waste time. So the owning player just makes the decision.

3. This individual control goes further when the game complexity is such that it is hard for each player to totally keep track of the situation of every other player, so the group "delegates" responsibility for controlling each player's character to the owner of that character. I'm thinking of how a government might delegate control of specific jobs to specific people, even when the government retains the right to override any decision. In a cooperative game, even when everyone is mutually agreeing on the best group strategy, each player may be expected to champion his own character, examining his own character's unique situtation in the game, and making his specific tactical needs and capabilities known to the other players. For instance, a player says "I need this resource" or says "Hey, I see a situation here to use the special action card I drew."

4. Players may have different information that they cannot share with each other. When this is true in the game, we reach the point at which the game is clearly no longer identical to a solitaire game, as it can no longer be properly played solitaire. Many cooperative games specify that you cannot show each other your hands, you can only talk about them, or possibly you can only hint about what you have. Although this would make the game non-solitaire, I have to say that in my gaming groups, we don't find this rule appealing and generally throw it out. Apparently we aren't all that concerned about whether we are playing a "solitaire" game, we would much rather work tightly together and not have to worry about self-limiting ourselves by trying to conceal our hands instead of just trying to win the game.

5. Characters having differing side goals, as well as a common goal. This element isn't really present very much in the kind of cooperative games I listed, the purely cooperative games I'm thinking of. There is a different type of cooperative game, in which one or more persons are traitors, but I think of that as a rather different type of game than what I am discussing here. However, in all of the purely cooperative game I listed earlier except Pandemic, there is one personal goal of each character – to stay alive until the end of the game. The players aren't required to try to do this, and you can certainly play a game where everyone ignores such considerations. But it isn't much fun to have your character knocked out of the game early, and everyone playing is aware of that. So each player tries to stay alive, and also to keep the other players alive. This makes the game play a little bit differently than it would if a single player were controlling all the pieces and had no qualms about sacrificing them.

The extent to which the "soft" elements 1-3 have an effect really depends a lot on the social dynamics of the players. If one player is totally dominant and the others all passive, one player can end up analyzing the situation and telling everyone else exactly what to do, and it really becomes a solitaire game. If the players don't communicate much with each other and just do their own thing, it will play very differently from a solitaire game except insofar as everyone has the same goal. I'm envisioning that most gaming groups fall in the middle. Actually, for purposes of my analysis I was ignoring the possibility that players would simply refuse to follow the group consensus, as I don't think the complaint that "cooperative games are just solitaire games" is meant to apply to that play style.

It is interesting to compare the modern cooperative board game with an older type of cooperative game, the roleplaying game. If you ignore the fact that the gamemaster is live rather than controlled by automatic rules, there is a lot of similarity – the players in an RPG are totally cooperating in the style of a cooperative game, at least in roleplaying styles emphasizing heavy teamwork rather than inter-player conflict. Thinking of this style of RPG gaming – where the players are totally focussed on working together to succeed in the mission – what makes it not feel like a solitaire game?

Actually, in the most degenerate case, a roleplaying game really can have a lot of the feel of a solitaire game. This happens when one player is really dominant over the others (and usually expert in the rules), and ends up telling everyone else exactly what to do in order to maximize the chances of party success. But I think this happens to a lesser extent in roleplaying games than cooperative board games because classic RPG's are strong in the points I listed earlier. You certainly identify strongly with your own character in a classic RPG, especially after going through a length character creation process and following your character's progression throughout numerous adventures. And RPG characters can be pretty complex, and what is happening in the game can be pretty complex and involving, so that it is not easy to try to figure out exactly what other people's characters should be doing, even when you are inclined to do so. And once the game starts to involve even a small amount of actual roleplaying, it becomes clear that individual characters have individual motivations which can only be interpreted by the owning player, not by a committee.

D&D4 Updates Overview – Specific Powers

2010-07-18T06:51:00.001-07:00

This is a followup to my previous article, where I gave some overview of general changes made to D&D4 via online updates. Here I'm going over the more specific changes. A number of changes have been made to game balance specific, abusive powers. The number of changes to individual is pretty large, so I'm not going to read and understand them all; I'll just mention those I'd actually noticed myself, or seen or participated in forum discussions about. I was impressed that I could recognize so many of the fixes to powers I'd discussed in the forums, as if they had actually been looking at the feedback and fixing the problems discussed.

Changes to at-will powers are particularly interesting, because they are used so often, and thus may need even better balance than other powers. The cleric's Righteous Brand scaled faster than your level, and became very potent at high level, despite being at at-will power, allowing another person to practically auto-hit; now it has an effect that is equally good at all levels. The tempest fighter's Dual Strike made him seem awfully good compared to a ranger; this was weakened by making it two attacks that must hit different targets, which is a pretty substantial limitation for a melee fighter. The ranger's Careful Strike, which was useless, was made better. That would seem like a good idea, but I'm still not sure it as good as Twin Strike. In any case, it seems to me that Careful Strike just isn't very interesting; when rangers already have Twin Strike to make themselves better at generic damage output, it doesn't seem that interesting to have a second at-will power that just generically increases damage output.

A number of encounter and daily powers have received straightforward balance adjustments. The amazingly good Rain of Blows fighter power was weakened. Stunning Steel was made less strong, so it didn't get two opportunities to stun the opponent. To me, it seemed strong, but not as strong as many other powers that weren't fixed. But perhaps there is a lot of concern with the ability to abuse stunning when using certain builds and fighting solo monsters. One of the first powers fixed was Blade Cascade; it is one of those powers I look at and think, "Doesn't seem all that great when used straight-up, but boy, does it beg to be abused". Spitting Cobra stance allowed enormous numbers of free attacks, which have now been more limited. Dance of Steel was flat out made better. I wonder why this was singled out for that treatment, when so many other disappointingly weak powers have been left unchanged. Maybe it was a misprint?

Some powers allowing surgeless healing were toned down. Unicorn's Touch allowed surgelesss healing as an encounter power, so it was changed to a daily. Spirit of Healing, which seemed to allow a stupendous amount of healing, was toned down. A couple of spells immobilized foes until they both made a save, and you missed your next sustain attack, and thus creating a real possibility the foe could never move for the rest of the fight; these have been corrected. A teleport spell, Maelstrom of Chaos could cause massive damage by teleporting you into the air; they fixed this simply by reducing the distance it could teleport you, to reduce that damage. I was somewhat surprised they didn't make a rule that you have to teleport the foe onto a solid surface;

Some adjustments have been made to Paragon and Epic powers; I haven't paid much attention to high levels myself, but I did notice a couple. The Demigod power to use encounter powers without limit was pretty confusing when combined with utility powers; now it is restricted to attack powers, which seems much more sensible. Arcane Riposte was made better by basing it on Intelligence instead of Dexterity. That is nice, but the power still seems practically useless.

The main power of the Battlerager fighter class was changed totally. I certainly felt that the class was overpowered when I first saw it. But the change notes mentioned the problem was worse than I had realized – that because the class had a sort of shield to reduce damage, they were practically immune to minions.

Magic items with encounter powers are much, much better than those with daily powers, because you aren't limited by your total number of daily magic items you can personally use. The Adventurer's Vault balance on many items with encounter powers didn't seem to recognize that, making such powers awfully tempting. Many of these were fixed, such as Swiftshot Weapon, and Tigerclaw Gauntlets. Interestingly, though, it seems to me that the fixes were mainly focussed on items that one can carry multiple of. I think the concern was not so much with how good encounter powers are, but with the abusive potential of carrying a dozen items with encounter powers and using them all. Reagents were somewhat limited for a similar reason; high-level characters could buy limitless amounts of low-level reagents and use them on every single attack.

The Quickcurse Rod was an example of an item which had an encounter power that was still effective when you reached a very high level. You could abuse this by getting a dozen of them and running through them with Quickdraw. This was fixed by requiring you to actually attack with the item in order to use its power.

Rod of Reaving was an item that allowed you to auto-kill minions without a hit roll. It was fixed, but only because it combo'ed with another item to let you kill vast hordes of minions instantly.

I don't really use the mount rules, but I noticed that the Giant Lizard had the most amazing mount power, allowing massive numbers of extra attacks; that power was fixed.

One item fixed which I had noticed was impressive was the Veteran's Armor. Not only was the power great, but it was cheap. Also fixed was the Healer's Sash, and a couple of at-will weapon enchantments – Bloodclaw and Reckless. The one thing I notice here is that although these powers were too strong compared to the others, they could actually let you make some fun characters. One of the themes of D&D4 is that the magic item powers are pretty weak, in order to make the feel of the characters come mostly from race and class. It could be fun making a character who was totally different because they had an "extreme" magic item. However, in D&D4 the emphasis is on the idea that anyone can have any item they want, so it causes problems to have magic items that everyone would want to have.

Various monsters were adjusted. A number of monsters whose attacks were too weak were made more reasonable early on, like the Hill Giant. The insanely mighty Needlefang Drake swarm was made less sick; I have commented before about that. I actually was involved in an obscure little thread on how the Magic Crossbow Turret was an usually potent trap for its level, and was amused to see that it was toned down.

It is interesting that the Fey Crocodile's swallow power was changed. I had noticed when reading it that it was a little out-of-sync with the general design of D&D4 in that it restricted what kind of weapons could be used to break out, and thus potentially would make characters who use the "wrong" weapons incapable of properly escaping. That would be totally appropriate with earlier versions of D&D, but seemed out of place in D&D4. It now was changed to use only "basic strikes", which is in keeping with the general balance philosophy of D&D4.

P.S. The July Updates have come out, so I thought I'd append some comments on that. When I was noticing that Righteous Brand was fixed, in the back of my mind I thought it strange that Lead the Attack, which at epic level let the entire party auto-hit for the entire encounter, wasn't fixed. Well, what do you know, it was fixed. Another bit of oddly-scaling weirdness that was fixed was Improved Armor of Faith; no longer does it give Avengers huge armor bonuses at epic level. Bless and Shield the Faith were changed from standard to minor actions. They were sort of wimpy before, now they seem amazingly good for mere level 2 utility powers. The astonishingly scary Legion's Hold spell was weakened. Free attacks were restricted to one per round, apparently they were having trouble with some sort of recursive combos (I don't know what they are).

The rogue power tumble was improved from letting the rogue shift half speed to letting him shift his full speed, in order to let the rogue "reliably gain combat advantage." I thought the rogue gained combat advantage pretty easily already, and that shifting half your speed is almost always enough to flank the opponents anyway. And it seems odd to imply that this power is practically required to be taken in order to be a good rogue.

Magic Missile was totally changed to be an auto-hit power just like in the old days. I suppose this is a good thing in terms of making the wizard's somewhat wimpy single target at-will attack more impressive. Interesting that they are putting in the updates, not only game balance and rules fixes, but total redesigns of powers as well.

Finally, the recommended damage values were changed. Interesting that it is the same as the old value at 1^st level, but gets higher and higher compared to the old values as you gain in level. Seems good to me, damage values certainly seemed pretty low at high level before. Actually, they still seem pretty low, the recommended damage values still seem to go up more slowly than the hit points and healing abilities of the characters.

D&D4 Updates Overview - General

2010-06-20T20:30:00.001-07:00

I've been impressed at how Wizards of the Coast has issued online updates to correct issues with D&D 4^th Edition. The question of issuing rules changes is always a tricky one. On the one hand, it means the rules are constantly changing, and your books you purchased soon becomes obsolete. On the other hand, it allows the rules to be constantly perfected, rather than having mistakes be carved in stone, making the game become slowly more and more obsolescent. As a lover of game design, I prefer the game to be updated and improved.

They seem to have changed their update philosophy. When the game was first released, there seemed to be no sign they would correct any rules imbalances, as they didn't seem to give much feedback. Then they started issuing fixes to badly worded rules and gross game balances. Recently they seem to have become more aggressive, really trying to solve game balance issues, as if they were a MMORPG.

Since I'll need to explain the rules changes to my players and friends, I decided to call attention to the rules changes I think are most significant, and what I think of them. Since there are a lot of changes, I'm concentrating in this first article on the more general rules changes and major racial/class feature changes. A lot of these changes were made in the recent May update, but I'm not restricting myself to those.

An extensive change in May was to change the tieflings racial power to some quite different. Instead of getting a bonus to their next counterattack after being wounded, they instead get automatic fire damage on the attacker. This is certainly a lot more potent than the old Infernal Wrath, which I considered to be a rather minor racial power. The other tiefling racial powers seemed pretty decent. I suppose the tieflings were not one of the more powerful races, but I really don't know why they decided to make such a major change.

Zone and Aura attacks no longer have the restriction that the damage they cause isn't cumulative. On the plus side, this is good from a game balance perspective. Before, if you had two creatures with damaging auras (say, 2 howling hags), the second creature was clearly not worth as many points as the first, because you could only take damage from one of the auras. It meant that one howling hag was a pretty scary addition to the fight, but a sisterhood of howling hags was pretty ineffective. Really, if you were a monster, you wanted to hang out with some totally different monster – having a fire aura and a cold aura together was a deadly combination, rather than cancelling out as you might expect.

On the other hand, this change doesn't necessarily improve game play - the GM can always make encounters with multiple identical aura creatures a little tougher to compensate, and you end up with an interesting tactical problem that killing one of them doesn't stop the aura. Also, the game is still chock full of things that don't stack, anyway. It is still the case that monsters with similar ongoing damage don't stack well. And creatures with dazing auras still don't stack. So I'm not sure why it was so important to issue a change to just how damaging zones and auras work.

The clerical power Healer's Lore was weakened so that it only applies to healing that spends a healing surge; the stated reason is to "reduce the potency of surgeless healing, such as astral seal". This seems like a good change, because many of the clerical powers to which it applied seemed more balanced without it, and adding Healer's Lore to a small amount of healing boosts it massively.

However, this did make me notice that I hadn't paid too much attention to the new clerical powers in Divine Power, such as astral seal. It always appeared to me that an unstated design premise of D&D4 was that healing that does not require a healing surge must always be a daily power. This is necessary to fit into the design of the healing surge system. The rule that healing requires use of healing surges gives you a resource that can only be restored by an extended rest. This means that, in an adventure with time pressure, the damage you take from a fight has meaning, if you take too much damage over multiple fights you will be forced to take an extended rest. Allowing surgeless healing that is still daily doesn't change this, it is still a resource that needs an extended rest to recharge. But if you allow surgeless healing with an at-will power, then you can forget the healing surges almost entirely and bypass this aspect of the game.

Now, astral seal comes with the limitation that you can only use it in combat, so normally you can't use it for unlimited healing. But allowing this sort of power creates an incentive for perverse tactics, like intentionally leaving a monster alive but helpless so you can beat on it until you heal. So it is puzzling that they removed the unspoken prohibition on non-daily surgeless healing.

The Aid Another action was fixed. Before, it required a check against DC 10, regardless of level, which made aiding easier (indeed, virtually automatic) at higher levels. This was too easy, and violated the general D&D principal of making things scale regularly with level. Now the DC is 10 + ½ level, and if the check fails, the aid gives a -1 bonus instead of a +2 bonus. It also mentions specifically that the DM should sometimes limit the number of creatures that can give aid. These changes make the actual skill level of the creature giving the aid meaningful and reduce the extraordinary ease of aiding another, so I think they are clearly an improvement.

The dominated condition was reworded to not make the dominated creature dazed, but has about the same effect. I'm sure there was a reason for the change, but I don't know what it was. Similarly, the restrained condition was reworded to not be based on immobilized, and to prevent even forced movement. This is cute, but I'm not sure why it was done. I think it is a fine rule, but I usually figure that published rules shouldn't be changed unless the new rule is a substantial improvement, and I don't really see how this qualifies.

Forced teleportation now gives a saving throw if you attempt to teleport a foe into the air or into hindering terrain. Seems like a good rule for balance. Also, a peculiar interaction with immobilized/restrained was changed. In general, a huge change between D&D3 and D&D4 was that effects are now controlled by game rules rather than trying to apply real world logic. So sleep spells work on the undead, poisons can slow you down in terms of movement without inhibiting your fighting ability, pole arms can be used at close range even when the monster is bear-hugging you, and so on. Some people didn't like the change, but it was consistent – no need for arbitrary GM interpretation of what works and what doesn't, the game rules say exactly what works. But teleportation would cancel being immobilized or restrained if it was a physical effect, but not if it was an effect on your mind or body. These terms were not defined in the game. The new rules say teleportation cancels being immobilized or restrained if it is an effect location in a specific square, such as a monster grab. I'm still not sure this is perfectly well clarified, but it is a big step in that direction.

The wizard's Orb of Imposition was totally nerfed; it now only gives a penalty to the next saving throw a monster makes against an effect. I feel the problem with the Orb was that it got proportionately better as you gained in levels, plus it was better when used on more powerful high-level status effects, plus you could combine it with other saving-throw penalty effects. When all of that combined, a high-level Orb wizard could totally neutralize a monster forever with a good attack. The change is good for game balance, it certainly fixes that. But I always felt that the Orb was conversely rather weak and disappointing at low levels, when the effect was weak and there weren't many choices to combine it with. Now I really feel like the power is disappointing at low levels.

Skill Challenges were changed so that "higher complexity" (longer) challenges are also harder. This is good and bad. Many sections of the original DMG rules implied that higher complexity challenges were harder to succeed at, when in fact they were not. So the new change fixes that problem. On the other hand, it isn't clear why a lengthier skill challenge should be harder to succeed at; it seems more intuitive to be able to decide the difficulty separately from deciding the length.

The Avenger's Armor of Faith ability was modified to work only with cloth armor, to make sure they wore cloth armor instead of upgrading to better armor. This is sensible, but what seems funny to me is that it was changed now instead of being that way all along. If the intent was for the class to wear cloth armor, why clearly specify that the Armor of Faith works with "light armor"? It seemed obvious to me the first time I saw the class that they would certainly want to spent the feat to get leather armor.

In the original Adventurer's Vault book, double weapons were introduced, and were so clearly superior to actually wielding two hand weapons that they supplanted that idea entirely, and made classes using two weapons, such as melee rangers and tempest fighters, much more effective. These have since been toned down to be less powerful, which seems good. The urgrosh changes were a bit odd. Before, the urgrosh was clearly superior to most of the other weapons, as it did the same damage if you attacked with both ends, but was better on attacks that only required attacking with the main end. Now the urgrosh has been made even better relative to the other weapons, but the two ends count as different weapon groups, making it harder to get bonuses from Weapon Expertise and similar feats. Odd, but I guess it is sort of appropriate for it to be the "most superior but hardest to use" of the double weapons.

The charge rule was clarified to work the way I had been playing it, that every square of movement during a charge must bring you closer to the opponent. The mount rules were rewritten, and the rules for move skills were clarified. The rules for flight were simplified even further, so that flying monsters don't have to worry about moving around in order to stay in the air.

Running Away is Hard

2010-05-20T20:46:00.000-07:00

I was recently reminded of something I've long found true in most roleplaying and wargames – running away from a combat is very difficult, much more difficult than it is in the source material.

There are really three sorts of situations I'm thinking of where the players might run away from a tactical combat. They might run away as soon as they see the monsters, they might run away as soon as they realize how powerful the monsters are, or they might run away near the end of a difficult combat once they realize they are going to lose. There are many other situations where the players might decide to flee due to story reasons or interesting complications in the encounter, but I'm sticking to the basics here.

For this article, I'm going to concentrate on the third situation, running away during a pitched battle as an alternative to being defeated by the enemies, as this is the most problematic time to retreat.

The primary reason that running away is difficult in roleplaying games is the problem of fallen comrades. In order for the players to be losing badly enough to consider retreat, they generally have to have taken a lot of damage and lost significant fighting strength. Since damage is not dealt at exactly the same rate to all characters, this usually means at least one of the characters has been knocked unconscious. This is a severe problem, as unconscious characters cannot run away.

Another character could try to pick up the unconscious character and run away, but this is usually quite difficult to do. How difficult depends on the game rules, but usually it is going to take a whole turn for someone to move over and pick up the fallen character – and you can count yourself fortunate if the game rules do not then give you a movement and/or combat penalty for carrying someone as big as you are.

In games with healing, you might be able to revive the unconscious character. But if you are losing badly, there is a good chance you have already used up all of your healing powers much earlier in the battle, while attempting to keep everyone fighting and maximize your chances of winning.

However, even if you do heal your ally, there is a good chance he is still surrounded by the same deadly enemies who defeated him in the first place, and they may just do so again. And if an ally picked up your unconscious comrade, he may go down too. After all, if the fight is that tough, he is probably pretty thrashed too, and now the opponents are getting uncontested attacks against weakened characters. There could potentially be a domino effect in which the whole party would be trashed trying to save one character.

To go further into the issue of being surrounded, it can very easily happen that in an interesting and well-roleplayed combat, one of the bolder characters has pierced the "enemy lines" and is flanking the front ranks or attacking the vulnerable back ranks. Or the desperate fight has broken down into a wild melee, and one character is separated from the others. In either case, once a retreat is called, the character now finds it is pretty tough to get out with enemies in between him and the rest of the group.

Worse, the combat may involve characters simply being in situations which specifically prevent them from moving. One of the characters might be encased in webbing, or hobbled by leg wounds, or grappled by a giant bear.

Even if the players can get into the situation where they are grouped up and trying to run away as a unit, they aren't out of the woods. Now the characters have to either outrun the enemies to a point that they can't be attacked anymore, "lose" the enemies (in a car chase, for instance), or move the fight to a point where the monsters won't follow.

If you can't plain outdistance the enemies, the tactical nature of the combat really becomes a problem. In a typical tactical combat system, the battle map can be seen very plainly, and the movement of all units is very plainly specified. Every time the characters move, the enemies can simply move to follow. A common strategy is to switch to some sort of non-tactical chase rules at this point, because if you don't, there often isn't much opportunity to shake off pursuers on a tactical map.

A further reason for this is the fact that tactical combat often has a very short time frame. In many games an entire combat takes place in less than one minute of game time. This means that if the enemies can continue to attack the charaters during the chase, there just isn't enough time for the characters to get anywhere that the opponents wouldn't want to follow. There may not be enough time to run from one street corner to another, much less to have a complicated chase.

So the characters are going to need to run away in a fashion that prevents the enemies from attacking them efficiently during the chase. Whether this is possible really comes down to the precise rules of the game in question.

If the game rules say that you can move full speed and attack, running out of range is pretty much hopeless unless all the PC's are faster than most of the enemies. But in the typical mixed party of adventurers, at least one character is going to be slow enough for the main body of the enemies to catch.

Many games have the rule that you can move twice as far when you are not attacking. This rule is what would seem to give a real fair shot at escape. But they may also have rules that circumvent this. Two games I'm thinking of, Champions and 4th edition D&D, both have "charge" rules that let you move at full speed and still attack, at least with melee combat.

Even if the PC's are fast, they may not be able to open the range fast enough without the aid of favorable terrain. In a game system with decent weapon accuracy at range, there is practically no chance of escaping beyond bow or gun range before being mowed down. If the enemies have range, you need to find terrain to block them off – and given the compressed time scale of tactical combat mentioned above, that terrain had better be really, really close by.

Furthermore, even if the characters are all conscious and all faster than the opponents and running away such that the enemies only get one or two shots, we return to the fact that if the players have decided to flee from a tough combat, they are probably pretty badly wounded. In most games, a lot can happen in one round of combat, and the process of running away doesn't give you any better defenses. So even one or two volleys from the enemies can wreak havoc with the wounted party, defeating or hindering one or more of them so they can't properly escape.

Finally, some notes about a couple particular games.

In Champions, you can move at full speed and still perform a Move-Through, potentially making escape difficult. However, a majority of opponents cannot effectively perform this maneuver, so that is not the primary problem when escaping. More pertinent is that the extremely varied nature of superheroes and supervillains means that even though you may be able to move twice as fast when escaping, it is quite possible for a character without movement powers to be half as fast as everyone else, and thus be incapable of escaping. There is some relief by the fact that the really fast characters are probably more than strong enough to pick up the slow people and escape at full speed. But Champions combat is also pretty violent, if you don't have the right powers the chance of being clobbered while attempting to return to the fight to pick up a fallen comrade is pretty high. The good thing about Champions is the genre; since the comics say that heroes get captured all the time, losing fights is not a big deal.

In 4th edition D&D, a fleeing character can take two run actions per turn and escape from a typical range 10 monster in a pretty short period of time. Escaping from a melee monster is a different matter, however. Some of the players are likely to be slowed by wearing heavy armor, and a melee monster than is even one point higher speed than the character can run/charge and keep pace while attacking every turn. The attack is at a penalty, but not enough of a penalty to be ineffective when you make it every turn against a foe who doesn't fight back. And all of the other monsters who can't do this can at least double run to keep up and make sure the party can't stop and fight. Actually, though, the situation for running away is much worse than this, because of the opportunity attack rules. Once you are next to a melee monster, trying to run away at full speed will provoke a free attack from the monster. You can run away at reduced speed to avoid this, but then you really aren't getting away from the monsters.

I am try to recall situations in games I've played in which tactical escape was actually possible. One time was in Car Wars, when one enemy car was defeating two trikes. The two trikes split up, the enemy followed one, and that trike was specially equipped with massive rocket boosters that let it pull out of range before being destroyed. In Champions, there were a couple classic fights in which our party was outmatched and called a retreat, but we soon discovered that retreat was tactically impossible while the enemies were still around, so we started fighting super-efficiently and abusing as many game rules as possible in order to get rid of the pursuers, and ended up winning the battle instead. But I can't seem to recall a successful tactical retreat in a roleplaying game.

Even my successful example shows that if you want to realistically escape from a tactical combat, what you need is some sort of "Deus Ex Machina" power, some sort of extremely powerful effect that allows you to escape from combat. In some cases, the effect has to be so powerful that you wouldn't allow it if it was usable to win combats rather than simply escape them. Something like "When the characters say the mystic word, the entire party and all of their possessions are instantly transported back to their home." Now, that's a way to escape from a combat!

Hybrid Classes

2010-04-19T15:07:00.000-07:00

The idea I thought was really cool in the Player's Handbook 3 was the idea of hybrid classes. Basically, this allows 4th edition characters to imitate 1st edition dual-classed characters, where you choose two classes as part of character creation and are equally good at both classes. In 4th edition, each of the two classes is called a "hybrid" class. You get all of the powers are both hybrid classes, but each hybrid class has only a portion of the powers of a full class. Numeric values like hit points and defense bonuses are, in general, half as much as a full class, so the final character is more or less the average of the two classes. Hybrid characters have the same number of total powers, but must split the powers within each category between the two classes.

An additional interesting concept is that for strikers, and some defenders, they came up with the idea of tying certain class features to class powers, so that hybrid strikers can only use their primary "striker ability" to pump up the powers derived from that striker class.

Here are a list of things I thought were pretty cool about the hybrid classes:

1. The idea of constructing specific half classes for every class seems really clever for game balance purposes. Instead of having to make some sort of generic rules and hope that they aren't totally unbalanced when applied to specific classes, you can craft each hybrid class to be half as powerful as a full class, and design the powers in that hybrid class to work well when combined with another class, while still having the freedom to design the powers in the main class without worrying so much about whether they will be balanced in a multi-classed character.

2. It is clever that the construction of 4th edition D&D, based on a common level progression concept for every class and bonus powers based on class, really works well with the hybrid concept. Each class can just have half the bonuses of the full class, and the level progression bonuses are either owned by the character as a whole, or divvied up between the two classes in a natural way.

3. Tying class features to powers makes the design of hybrid classes much simpler. Instead of having to figure out how to cut a feature in half (and many features don't really have a natural way to be cut in half), you just give the full feature and restrict it to combining with half of the hybrid character's powers.

4. Tying class features to powers seems very entertaining if both hybrid classes have tied powers. In particular, I like the idea of a fighter/rogue who can choose each round whether to "lock down" the enemy with his fighter attack, or backstab him with his rogue attack. It adds an interesting tactical dimension to the simpler alternative of a character who tries to both backstab and lock down the enemy, both with half effect.

Things that are not so great:

1. Tying class features to powers is cool when both classes have a tied feature, but is awkward when one does and the other doesn't. If you have, say, a striker/leader, you have a striker ability that can only be used with your striker powers, and a once per encounter healing power that is not tied to your powers in any way. This is OK with your encounter and daily powers; you will get to use the striker ability on about half of these (more like 2/3 in practice if you put your "odd" picks in the striker class). But with the at-will powers, you have two at-wills you can pick from, but one has a big bonus the other one doesn't. So it is tempting to use that at-will power an awful lot and skip the other one, which makes the character less interesting rather than more interesting.

2. Not only is having only one class with a tied feature less interesting, it is unfortunately also more efficient. A striker/striker can use only one striker power at a time, but a striker/leader can use a full striker power every round (abeit with somewhat less flexibility), and a half leader power on top of that.

3. What to do with armor is, and always has been, a tricky question. I really don't see a simple, elegant way to do this in 4th edition rules. I guess my best idea is to average the number of armor feats each class gets, then let the character buy extra feats without the statistic prerequisites until he reaches the armor type of the better class. Anyway, what D&D4 chooses to do is to use the weaker armor type of the two classes, then allow the character to spend his one and only hybrid talent to get the better armor type instead. This actually seems like a pretty decent way to solve the problem given the fact that averaging armor types just doesn't fit cleanly into the system.

4. The way that classes are tied very tightly to certain statistics in D&D4 is not very friendly to hybrid classes. With single classes this is relatively harmless, since you just pick your class first, then take whatever statistics it requires. But an awful lot of hybrid class combinations that might sound cool require incompatible statistics and just aren't practical (especially at high level, when you are going to fall seriously behind if you try to advance more than 2 statistics).

Each hybrid class has a "half-powered" role feature. The role feature is what gives strikers extra damage, defenders the ability to mark and tie down opponents, and leaders healing. Note that, in many cases, half of a role feature is more than 50% as good.

To see this clearly, consider whether a hybrid character with two classes of the same role is better or worse than a single class character.

A hybrid leader/leader has a slightly better healing ability than a regular leader. This is because, although he gets the same 2 healings per encounter, he can choose to use both on the same round. However, at 16th level he becomes worse, as he does not gain a third healing.

A hybrid striker/striker would have a very useful flexibility advantage over a regular striker, in that he can choose the better striker ability for each situation. As many of the striker abilities are situational and don't always work, this is a significant benefit. A rogue/ranger, for instance, could use hunter's quarry/twin strike whenever he was unable to arrange a sneak attack. The hybrid character does lose the ability to gain striker damage on basic attacks, but that doesn't seem a big enough penalty to offset the flexibility advantage.

Controllers don't have "role features" in 4th edition D&D. Presumably, in order to be game balanced, they have better powers. So, in effect, a controller's role feature is always "baked" into his powers, just like the role feature of a hybrid striker. However, a controller/controller doesn't seem too exciting; after all, all controllers have two at-will powers from a substantial list, the only difference with a controller/controller is that the two powers come from different lists. This just isn't as exciting as having two large striker powers with very different activation criteria. This is a good time, though, to consider the case of a half-controller, half-something else. In this case the one controller power starts to seem pretty good. A controller/striker, for instance, really would have two very different at-will powers, each with a very different situation they are good in, and would thus seem better than either a controller or a striker (in terms of the role feature).

The fighter hybrid has a role feature tied to class powers, and thus works like the striker. The other defenders work in a variety of different ways that are hard to describe in a generic way; each power has to be considered separately whether it is half as good as the full power, or more. My impression is that most are more than half as good as the full power.

The upshot of all of this is that a hybrid striker class feature seems rather better than half a striker class feature, and the same is generally true with controller and defender, but not with a hybrid leader class feature, so hybrid leaders seem to need more other stuff to really be equal. I guess the one saving grace of a hybrid leader is the ability to use your one healing per encounter to revive the real leader; but it seems like there are a lot of other, easier ways to get this ability.

Looking at the game balance as a whole, the advantage of a hybrid character is having better role features that a standard character, and more flexibility in selecting powers. The numeric values will be essentially comparable, except for minor things like having to round down, and the fact that the hybrid characters have one less skill. The hybrid character may, or may not, have inferior armor, and may, or may not, have more difficulty choosing optimum statistics. The real balancing factor is that a regular character will generally have two or more strong class features which are better than most feats; the hybrid character generally has few or none of these class features, but can get one (and only one) by spending a feat. This seems to me like a good overall balance, steering in the conservative direction of making the hybrid characters a bit weak, to make sure they don't overshadow the traditional classes.

Then there is the question of the balance of specific hybrid classes, whether they are strong or weak, looked at purely by themselves. That sort of thing is always an interesting exercise for me. There are two ways to do this – analyze each hybrid class from the ground up, or compare it to half of the real class. The latter is far easier, so I will do that.

My impression is that the typical hybrid class keeps a half class feature which is better than half as good as a full class feature, and loses two strong class features and half of the remaining features (if any).

Avenger: Typical half striker feature. Loses two strong features, Avenger's Censure and Channel Divinity. Loses Armor of Faith as well, which leaves the Avenger with pretty poor armor no matter what he combos with, instead of his usual fairly strong armor. Seems harsh.

Barbarian: Typical half striker feature (baked into the at-will powers). Loses Feral Might, which is really two features in one – seems tempting to get it back with the Hybrid Talent. Loses Barbarian Armored Agility, but this may not be too bad if the character can end up qualifying to buy a feat to wear heavy armor. Keeps the Rampage feature. Seems favorable.

Bard: Half healing power. Loses strong features Bardic Training, Bardic Virtue. Also loses minor features Multiclass Versatility, Song of Rest, Words of Friendship. Does get one extra skill, just like a full bard, and keeps the little Skill Versatility feature. Seems unfavorable.

Cleric: Typical half leader feature. Keeps the strong Healer's Lore feature, but effectively only half of it, since it only applies to cleric powers in the first place. Loses the strong Channel Divinity feature and the ritual caster feat. Can only get back half of the Channel Divinity feature. Seems OK.

Druid: Loses 3 decent powers - a third at-will power, +1 speed, and ritual casting. Seems OK. The loss of the Primal Aspect may make Con-based hybrid Druids less practical.

Fighter: Has a striker-like half defender feature. Loses the strong Combat Superiority and Fighter Weapon Talent features. Doesn't lose a skill, like a normal fighter. Has very nice armor proficiencies which will probably be lost in most hybrid combinations. Seems OK.

Invoker: Loses the strong Channel Divinity power, plus Ritual Casting. Keeps the pretty good Covenant Manifestation power. Seems favorable.

Paladin: The Divine Challenge defender feature does about half damage or a little more, and is clearly rather better than half as good. While the damage is halved, it is every bit as difficult for the monster to avoid the damage. So either it inconveniences the monster just as much to have to attack the paladin, or the monster takes damage more often. The paladin loses two strong class features, Channel Divinity and Lay on Hands. These are pretty good, and the paladin is likely to lose his massive armor as well. On the plus side, the loss of Lay on Hands may allow the paladin to skip the Wisdom statistic entirely. Seems OK at best. On the other hand, the Divine Challenge is exceptionally easy to abuse with a ranged character, so who knows, maybe the hybrid Paladin is quite deadly.

Ranger: Standard half striker feature. The ranger has three mediocre class features – Prime Shot, a free feat, and a free skill. The hybrid keeps the free skill, and only loses two weak class features. The ranger seems like a pretty sweet hybrid.

Rogue: Standard striker half feature. Loses the strong Rogue Tactics and First Strike powers, plus the ability to fight well with daggers and shurikens. Seems OK.

Shaman: Standard leader half feature. Loses the strong Spirit Boon and opportunity attack powers. Keeps the Speak with Spirits power. Seems OK.

Sorceror: Standard striker half feature. Loses a couple nifty but not all that strong powers. Seems pretty favorable.

Warden: The half defender power affects one adjacent enemy instead of all of them – this certainly seems more than half as good. Loses the strong Font of Life power. Also loses Guardian Might, which is odd, as this is a small power combined with an AC feature needed to balance the class. So you have to find a way to get a good armor class, which may or may not be difficult, depending on what other class you choose. So it is hard to say how favorable the Warden is.

Warlock: Standard half striker feature. Loses the strong Pact Boon and Shadow Walk powers, and the Prime Shot power. Ouch. The poor warlock never seemed that great to begin with, and just gets to keep the weak striker power and loses all the cool warlock stuff. Seems weak.

Warlord: Standard half leader power. Loses the very strong command presence feature, but keeps the solid combat leader feature. Not sure if this is good or bad.

Wizard: Loses two lesser features – ritual casting and spellbook – and keeps Cantrips. Loses the one primary class feature, Arcane Implement Mastery, but can get it back. Seems pretty good.

Three-Player Game Mechanics

2010-03-19T16:53:00.001-07:00

When games involve players being able to attack each other or ally with each other in a relatively unrestricted way, I generally feel that such games work best with only two sides. When there are more sides, certain characteristic things happen in the game that tend to overshadow the ordinary play of the game. I am referring to these developments of the game play as three-player game mechanics, as they tend to exemplify why it can be difficult to create a three-player game without careful thought to the game mechanic. The same things can happen with more players as well.

Perhaps the most classic 3-player game mechanic is the Alliance mechanic, where two players will form a semi-permanent alliance in order to knock the third player out of the game, before turning on each other. It is easier to win a 2-player game than a 3-player game, so it is very logical for 2 players to team up like this. And in the kind of games I'm discussing here, the third player is likely to have little or no chance of surviving against this kind of odds. So the most important part of game play is to be one of the players in the alliance. This is what I really think of with a game like Diplomacy. In my experience, given an average group of players, socializing among the players basically determines success, overwhelming any tactical or strategic considerations. Often the most persuasive player will convince the weakest player to join an alliance, hoping he can destroy the dangerous third player then eliminate his ally. The rules of the game don't make a whole lot of difference – the game is won or lost at the very beginning, when the alliances are formed.

In theory, when the alliance has just about crushed the third player, one of the alliance might want to suddenly backstab the other, thus allowing the third player to stay in the game. But this doesn't seem very likely unless the game is carefully constructed for it; there are many things that can prevent it. Sometimes attacking a weak player is very profitable in terms of stealing resources, so there is really no reason to attack your strong ally until the weak player is totally destroyed. Sometimes there isn't much of a gray area, by the time the alliance has done enough damage to consider turning on each other, the third player is hopelessly crippled. Sometimes the alliance has so many forces in the third player's territory that he'll be destroyed by the fighting anyways. Sometimes the game doesn't really allow the alliance players to catch each other with surprise attacks, so there is little incentive not to continue the alliance properly. Very often the personalities or social relationship of the players is such that they aren't inclined to terminate the alliance until its successful conclusion, regardless of other logic.

Another classic 3-player mechanic is the Balance of Power mechanic, in which player with the strongest position at any given time is opposed by the other two players, until that player is no longer the strongest. This mechanic is actually fairly popular, as it helps ensure that all players remain in the game. When this is done is a very weak way, it can be a nice mechanic for that purpose. But in the unrestrained format, it results in a game where any form of successful game play that is visible to the other players is meaningless, because they just team up to remove any advantage gained. So most of the game is just a formality, with no effect on the eventual outcome, unless a player can get some sort of secret advantage the others aren't aware of. Then, at the end of the game, it becomes a question of who chooses the right time to sprint for the finish line. Somewhat like the end of a cycling road race stage, where if you start your sprint too early, or too late, you lose. Very often the first player to come close to winning is just barely stopped, then another player sneaks in to victory.

A third mechanic is the Let's You and Him Fight mechanic. This is characteristic of games in which combat simply causes attrition to the attacker and the defender. In this sort of game, it is highly advantageous not to attack at all. If the two other players fight each other, you are the one that benefits. If all of the players realize this, then either the Alliance or Balance of Power mechanic takes over, or the game just goes on without combat, and is rather boring. Very often, however, if the game is about combat, the players will fight anyway, simply because there is no point playing if nothing is going to happen. And if they do, eventually a winner will be declared. But this means the game is creating a degenerate situation where trying to make the game fun causes you to lose the game – not a situation you want in your game.

If you are interested in a game of deception and tricky diplomatic maneuvering, the Alliance and Balance of Power mechanics can be very interesting. There are definitely games built around this sort of thing, such as Diplomacy. But if you don't want this to be the focus of the game, these 3-player mechanics are destructive, as they dominate the game play and make most of the actual game mechanics insignificant. The Let's You and Him Fight mechanic, as far as I can tell, is purely something destructive to be avoided.

If you don't want your multiplayer game to be dominated by one of these mechanics, they can be prevented or minimized by an appropriate game design; most popular multiplayer games do this. In many games players have strong reasons to be interested in improving their own unique position, and a very limited ability to concentrate attacks on specific players. But if you just take a good competitive two-player game, and add multiple sides, it is all too easy for the game to degenerate into one of these three-player mechanics and become a very different game.

Game Balance Analysis: Battletech 3025 Weapons

2010-02-17T11:50:00.000-08:00

I love game balance, and when I study a game, I usually like to look at the game balance and figure out whether the various items in the game are balanced against each other, and which are too powerful or too weak compared to the others. I thought I'd go over my game balance analysis of an actual game.

The game I felt like analyzing was classic Battletech, the version in the 3025 Technical Readout, an old game book I have a great fondness for. I was thinking of Battletech recently, and started thinking of the game balance between the various weapons, so that is what I'm writing about.

I'm not really an expert on Battletech tactics, and it has been quite a while since I've actually played the game. But this is primarily an analysis based on mathematics and logic, supplemented by some play experience, the typical kind of analysis I like to do. And I'm using my old Battletech Rules of Warfare manual for the analysis, not the latest Battletech rules; this is an example of game balance analysis, not a commentary on the current state of the game.

The first thing to note about the weapons is the distinction between energy weapons and ammunition weapons.

1. Energy weapons have unlimited ammunition.
2. Ammunition will explode if it suffers a critical hit; this typically destroys the Mech.
3. Energy weapons are better at clearing woods and starting fires.

In addition to these advantages, energy weapons tend to be smaller but require more heat sinks. Spending tonnage on heat sinks rather than spending the same tonnage on more massive weapons has advantages of its own.

1. If you have a weapon that takes up fewer critical spaces but needs more heat sinks, then more of the mech's critical spaces are filled with heat sinks compared to weapons. This is good, because a hit on a single heat sink is no big deal, much preferrable to a hit on a weapon.
2. Weapons that require more heat sinks are more flexible. If you are in danger of overheating, a mech with heat-heat weapons and lots of heat sinks can just skip a high-heat weapon and cool down a lot. A mech with low-heat weapons and few heat sinks would have to lose a lot of firepower just to cool down a little. This could be important if the mech has taken engine criticals or needs to use jump jets.
3. If you build Mechs like they do in the classic 3025 Technical Readout, with more weapons than heat sinks to handle them, then the flexibility of high-heat weapons becomes really useful. You can choose to fire the high heat weapon, and accept the heat buildup, or not fire it, and cool down.

I should then mention some other important effects I didn't put into the ETR, since I don't feel I can calculate them, but they do factor into my balance considerations. The effectiveness of a weapon is not directly proportional to its damage. Weapons that do a lot of damage to a single area are especially good because they cause damage more unevenly, and can defeat the enemy mech without destroying all armor on all locations. Weapons that cause a smaller amount of damage have the advantage of being more efficient at causing critical hits, since you roll on the critical table for each hit, and the amount of damage doesn't matter. In general, I think the first effect is more important, particularly as the absolute damage gets larger. A 10 damage PPC is definitely more than twice as good as a 5 damage medium laser. And the devastating power of a 20 damage AC/20 is really extraordinarily useful. At damage 5 or less it isn't so clear, and certainly two 1 point weapons would be better than a 2 point weapon. It should also be noted that having two small weapons is slightly better than one weapon with twice the firepower, since one hit can only destroy one weapon, and you can choose to fire only one for heat purposes.

To analyze the weapons more conveniently, I'm going to make up a number that estimates how resource-intensive the weapon is. It will be the tonnage of the weapon, plus 90% of the heat, plus the weight of 15 shots of ammo. This total will then be increased by 5% for an ammo-based weapon (to account for the disadvantages). The numbers don't have to be super-exact, since I'm not interested in perfect balance calculations, only determining whether different weapons seem close enough that you could argue over which one is better.

I made some charts calculating the ETR, damage, and damage efficiency of each weapon. The tables didn't copy easily into the blog, you can see the version of this article with tables here.

Let's start out by examining the long-range weapons. They generally have a range band of 5, or 6 with minimum range 3, or 7 with minimum range 6. It is hard for me to make a statement on whether the longer ranges with higher minimum ranges are better or worse, so I'm just going to treat them as pretty close.

My baseline weapons are the PPC and the laser laser. These weapons are pretty similar to one another.

The AC/10 seems like a pretty similar ammunition-based weapon to these two. By my estimate, it is pretty close, just about as good as the other two. The ETR is very close to that of the PPC, which does the same damage with slightly different range characteristics. I'd prefer the PPC, but still, they are pretty close.

The AC/5 is clearly an inferior weapon compared to the PPC. It is significantly less efficient than the PPC in my calculations, and it does less concentrated damage. Even if you ignore the advantages of the PPC as a concentrated-damage heat-based energy weapon, and use a more favorable way to calculate ETR, you still have the fact that the AC/5 does half the damage of a PPC, yet consumes more than half the tonnage.

The AC/2, on the other hand, is just silly and useless. It requires about 75% of the resources of the AC/5, but does 40% of the damage. It does have the best range characteristics of any weapon, but the extra range is not worth this much! And the AC/5 is already a weak weapon to compare to. It is true that it has the very longest range in the game, so maybe you could use it for some sort of strategic siege. But the weapon is so weak that if you carry the standard amount of ammo for mechs in the 3025 readout, you won't be able to seriously hurt another mech at long range before exhausting your ammunition.

The LRM/5 feels a bit weak to me. While its damage/ETR is slightly higher than average, the damage is very non-concentrated. And although the range is very good, I feel the terrible accuracy at close range is a real hindrance. However, that being said, for balance purposes it is close enough to the PPC and large laser that I would consider it an equivalent weapon, one you could easily argue was as good or better.

The other LRM's are practically just scaled-up versions of the LRM/5. They use slightly more tonnage and fewer heat sinks, and cause slightly more concentrated damage. I consider the LRM/5 the best, but really they are so close it doesn't matter much.

Next, we move on to the short-range weapons, those with a range band of 3. They are easy to compare with each other, but hard to compare with the long-range weapons, because I can't say for certain how much better the longer range actually is.

My general feeling is that the SRM/6 is the weapon closest to being balanced with the PPC and Large Laser. It has slightly more than 50% more damage efficiency, which seems to be in the ballpark of being an equal exchange for the long range.

The SRM/4 and SRM/2 are just inferior versions of the SRM/6. This can be seen pretty clearly by the fact that the heat output is more per missile in the smaller launchers, while everything else scales about evenly. This assumes you aren't using the optional Inferno SRM/2 rules; that weapon is insanely potent for its size.

The medium laser has a much better ETR than the SRM/6, and seems like an extremely efficient weapon. This has always been my intuitive feel as well; the key is that the one ton weight is just amazingly low for a weapon with pretty good damage. I tend to think that the medium laser is more efficient than any of the long-range weapons, despite the shorter range.

The AC/20 is a queer weapon. The ETR is pretty low, rather less than the SRM/6. But the damage from this weapon is so amazingly concentrated, it is absolutely deadly. 20 points to one hit location is just incredibly frightening. Because of this, the power of the weapon is hard to judge. My feeling is that it is a very good weapon, much better than an SRM/6, but it is probably not as efficient as the medium laser.

Finally, the point blank weapons. Again, it is hard to say how these compare with longer-ranged weapons. The Mechs in the 3025 Readout carry so few of these that it is almost irrelevant how efficient they are, they just don't have much effect on the total effectiveness of the Mech. But when you use the Mech creation rules to design your own Mech, it is very tempting to load it with an enormous number of point blank weapons.

The small laser is what I would think of as the "standard" point blank weapon, although with so few point blank weapons, this isn't a very meaningful designation. If you look at my ETR, I estimate it is more than 50% more efficient than the medium laser. It seems plausible that 50% might be worth the extra range of the medium laser, so these weapons seem maybe equally efficient to me. Since the medium laser is unusually good, I would say the small laser is awfully good too.

However, if the small laser is good, then the machine gun is really good, at least according to my ETR. It has the big disadvantage that the tonnage I'm calculating doesn't "come" with a heat sink; most of the tonnage of a small laser is in the heat sink, which can be used for another purpose if you are out of range, but the machine gun just sits there taking up space if you don't get to point blank range. But if you are building a custom mech, the machine gun seems like the best weapon in the game. You can get 10 machine guns and a ton of ammo for only 6 tons!

Now, there are some caveats to this. Saying it is the best weapon in the game doesn't necessarily mean you would actually want an army of nothing but machine gun mechs; there might be some situations they can't handle. It just means that in a typical Mech battle, if you could replace one of the Mechs with a custom design, I'd guess you couldn't do better than to put on a horde of machine guns.

Another point to note is that some of the weapons are much less effective when used in the typical configuration of a mech in the 3025 readout. You can make a pretty evil mech with machine guns using the mech creation rules, but machine guns on the standard mechs are usually pretty awful. They often have 2 machine guns with a whole ton of ammo, which is way too much ammo. And the key to counteracting the poor range of a machine gun is to be totally focussed on getting to point blank range. With so few machine guns, the average 3025 Mech may have little incentive to close the distance, so the machine guns stay idle, and might better be replaced by a different weapon.

The final weapon is the flamer. Since a flamer is identical to a medium laser, except that it does 2 damage instead of 5, it is clearly worthless for any purpose other than setting fires. In my opinion, it is pretty worthless even for that purpose. I would rather have a medium laser to start fires with. Even though it has only 7/12 the chance to start a fire, it can start a fire from three times the range. The flamer is mostly good if you want to set your own position on fire!

A final note is that from a strategic point of view, energy weapons are clearly better than ammunition weapons. The odd thing is that, in general, they do not seem to pay anything for this ability. The average energy weapon is about as good as one of the better ammunition weapons, even without the extra advantages of being an energy weapon. I'm not sure why you would mess around with the logistics for ammunition when energy weapon based Mechs are at least as powerful and never need rearming.

Disparity of Power Level in Superhero Games

2010-01-19T11:20:00.000-08:00

One interesting issue when designing a superhero roleplaying game is how to handle the vast disparity in power levels between characters considered to be superheroes. If you allow the players to imitate any characters from the comics, how can you play a game in which Captain America might fight alongside Thor? If you try to model the game in a realistic fashion, the results would be bizarre. Any attack which can hurt Thor at all should kill Captain America instantly with any hit. And any opponent who can withstand even a single attack from Thor should be immune to Captain America's martial arts attacks.

When designing a superhero game, you need to have an approach to handling these issues. And the fact that the comic books are unrealistic in this way isn't necessarily bad or something that needs to be fixed; I myself like to model the classic comic books and intentionally recreate the unrealistic action in them. But this means understanding how the action seems to work and what your game will do to deal with issues relating to the great variation in the scale of attacks and defenses in the comic books.

How do traditional superhero roleplaying games handle this issue?

Compression of Scale: This is a classic in superhero games. I tend to think in particular of Champions. Characters can have vastly different power levels in terms of conception, but the game mechanics ensure that they can engage in combat with one another and still enjoy a good slugfest. When a high-offense character attacks a low-defense character, he does a lot of damage, but not an unlimited amount of damage. And a low-offense character can cause a small amount of damage to a high defense character. Typically interactions with the unliving world are also scaled, so that strengths can vary a thousand-fold and strong characters can bust through concrete walls while weaker ones have to make a roll to pull the door off of a car. This approach gives great freedom in designing and playing characters who act like the comics, while still making possible a well balanced combat system; it is my favorite approach. The disadvantage is that a lot of edge cases tend to feel odd and unrealistic. If you are really thinking of the game as a comic book, it can be hard to envision how the martial artist can be grabbed by molten lava man without ending up in the burn ward, or how he can get lucky and karate kick his way out of a prison cell. You need even more suspension of disbelief than you would in an actual comic book.

Fixed Character Power Level: This is another mechanism that can work very well in superhero games. The game may allow you to be many different types of superheroes, but all of these superheroes end up having a similar overall power level. The game does not try to mimic the vast disparities between the power levels of supers in the comics. This approach feels more realistic than Compression of Scale. Everyone can engage in bang-up battles just like the comic books, and everything feels just about right. The down side is that the characters can look like classic comic book characters, but they clearly can't quite be the same. You can make a character who looks and acts like Superman, but he can't really lift the space shuttle into orbit or survive howitzer shells without a scratch. You can make a character with the attitude and super-senses of Daredevil, but he is also a "meta" with steel-hard skin and super-strength, who can't really go on an adventure in which he faces an ordinary human crime lord and is overwhelmed by hordes of martial arts minions. But as long as you don't mind matching your conception to the setting of the game, everything works great.

Harsh Reality: Many games just don't really deal with the scale issue at all. You can make characters of greatly varying power levels, and those characters are not balanced at all against each other, so fights can be lopsided and brutal. By "not balanced at all", I mean that they may be equally good overall, but they are not balanced so that a slugfest can really work. Maybe one guy controls minds, while the other is strong enough to kill with one blow, so the fight is decided by who can attack first. Such a game can work, but only if it is understood that the game is not trying to model a classic comic book reality, but something quite different. Typically this works well with games that are attempting a modern rethinking approach to superheroes - "what would happen if people had superpowers in real life?" I think of Aberrant as an example of this. The harsh reality approach is really meant for a game that encourages a "combat is rare and very scary" approach, with a focus on storytelling and noncombat activities. I am generally rather disappointed with games that use the harsh reality approach, but pretend to be a 4-color comic book game when you design the characters. You can make your classic comic book character, but once you start playing, you find your character had better change his entire outlook on life, lest he end up dead or booked for manslaughter. Unless the GM simply mandates that all characters have reasonably comparable attacks and defenses, in which case the game is transformed into Fixed Power Level.

How do the comic books handle these issues?

Compression of Scale. Often, in the classic comic books, big attacks are more powerful than small attacks, but not as much more powerful as you might expect. For instance, a superhero who can lift 50 tons may fight a supervillain who can lift 10 tons. The supervillain may appear to be outclassed, but not nearly as outclassed as you might logically expect when one guy is 5 times as strong as the other. Compression of Scale is often used when, visually, you can get away with it. I remember several times in the Avengers when a mighty villain would make his entrance with an explosion that flattened all of the Avengers. It looks good in the comics. But realistically, one explosion is not going to have an equal effect on Avengers of vastly different toughness levels.

Rationalization. Many comic books characters will give excuses for why attacks between vastly mismatched opponents can have the effects they do. For instance, a character with low defenses will say, "Good thing that attack only grazed me, or I'd have been killed!" Good thing the attacks always just cause grazing hits! Or a villain will grab him and say, "I'll crush you like an overripe melon." Odd that the panel makes it look like he is already applying the squeeze to a resisting hero. Realistically, if you can tear steel like tissue paper, you should be able to tear an ordinary human body to a pulp faster than you can say the line. Instead, the villain just announces his awesome capabilities, but the fight goes on with compression of scale. Some heroes, like Spider-Man, like to say that they always pull their punches against weak opponents. This is somewhat convincing - it would be logical for them to do so - but it is interesting that the fights then play out exactly as they would if Spider-Man's punch just wasn't strong enough to overwhelm a human-level villain. In other words, in terms of how you would simulate this in a roleplaying game, Rationalization acts much like a special effect of Compression of Scale, with the special effect being that whenever a low defense character is hit by a big attack, he takes the usual amount of damage, then says "lucky I avoided 90% of the blow." And whenever a high offense character attacks a low defense villain, he rolls the usual amount of damage, then says, "good thing I pulled my punch, or that would have killed him." But otherwise, the fight goes on with the character exchanging blows according to the regular rules of the game.

Comic Book Coincidence: This is my term for a staple of comic books and many other media, the fact that the books are scripted so that heroes and villains without superhuman defenses are virtually never hit by bullets and other lethal attacks. The effect is really strong. Batman can dive through a hail of gunfire again and again and again without getting hit, but switch to punches or non-lethal energy blasts, and he gets quite often (he is agile enough to dodge most of them, but he still takes many hits). I often try to think of ways to model this, but I haven't seen this modeled in a published roleplaying games. That is, many games model the idea of comic book luck, but not the idea that characters are much luckier against bullets and swords than concussion blasts and fists. The closest is games that use fairly abstract damage such as hit points, then encourage you to think of hit point damage as just representing fatigue from avoiding close attacks. But this approach isn't very convincing when the game mechanics ignore it - when the unarmored character not only takes damage from being encased in molten lava, he is also immobilized and suffocating until someone breaks him out.

Harsh Reality: The advantage of the comic books is that, since they are totally scripted, they need not be consistent. The comic book writer is free to switch to harsh reality when desired for dramatic effect, then switch away when it becomes inconvenient. So many comic books which generally use compression of scale have some dramatic moments in which the true disparity of power levels becomes apparent. Sometimes this is used for comic relief - the hero seems so much mightier than the villain that instead of the writer trying to convince the reader that the villain can really provide a challenge, they just make him the joke for the issue. In any case, this relates to the general difference between highly scripted source material and freeform roleplaying games; you can't always match the source material unless your roleplaying game is also highly scripted. Of course, the more straightforward form of harsh reality is that some comic books, especially more modern ones, that just don't try to match the four-color feel at all, and combat really is pretty brutal and short unless both foes are very well matched. A game trying to imitate this form of superhero action wouldn't need to worry about the problems of scaling attacks and defenses.

Balancing The Game To Encourage Genre Appropriate Actions

2009-12-29T18:32:00.000-08:00

One of my primary goals when designing game mechanics is to make the game encourage actions which are genre-appropriate, fun, or fit well with the theme of the game. Encouragement can mean different things, but it most often means making that action one of the best possible actions from the competitive point of view (winning the game or defeating the adventure).

Let's create an example of what I'm trying to prevent. Imagine you have a fencer in a swashbuckling adventure game. The character concept, and the genre, imply that he should frequently use his weapon to disarm his opponents, rather than simply stabbing them.

In most traditional roleplaying games, the disarm maneuver involves the attacker making some sort of (often fairly difficult) roll to successfully force the defender to drop his weapon. So the game has fulfilled the mechanical requirement of permitting the character to disarm the foe.

The problem is that the disarmed opponent can then spend his action to pick the weapon back up. So all the fencer has done is spend an entire action to force the opponent to spend an action. And that is if he succeeds in the disarm; otherwise, he has spent an action for no effect. So overall, disarm costs an action for the attacker in order to cost the defender less than an action. Not very useful.

Now, one might point out that there are situations where this disarm maneuver is indeed useful. In particular, if there are two PC's fighting one opponent, one PC can disarm the opponent, and the other can pick up the weapon, leaving the defender unarmed and helpless. Or if you are fighting near a cliff or in a bog, you may be able to disarm an opponent and have the weapon be lost for good. Also, you can use disarm just to waste time, in case the situation doesn't require you to win, or if you are one-on-one with a more powerful opponent and want to delay matters until your allies arrive.

Unfortunately, none of this really helps the situation at hand, which is capturing the spirit of a swashbuckler movie where the fencer frequently disarms opponents in situations where none of these are true. Indeed, the fencer is often outnumbered and pressed for time, yet still disarms the opponents. But when playing a game with standard disarm rules, one would very quickly realize that this is totally ineffective and basically a waste of time, and the player would want to start stabbing opponents to win the battle.

One response to this would be to say that the swashbuckler has a psychological limitation that makes him enjoy disarming opponents even though it isn't really effective, just because he enjoys doing so. This limitation could give him the points to be such a good fencer that he can get away with some nonsense and still win the fights. But I don't really feel like this is true to the source material or the character. If this were true, you'd expect the other characters in the movie to say, "Wow, that guy's a good fencer. Too bad he's a grandstanding moron!" But they don't do so, and the movie doesn't convey that impression. Indeed, the character concept for the swashbuckler may well be that of a reluctant hero forced to fight for an important cause, not a that of an egotist enraptured with his own fencing skill. Also, if the psychological limitation theory were true, you'd expect the swashbuckler to drop the disarming when he has to save the life of his true love, but that doesn't really seem to happen in the source material.

A slightly different response would be to say that because disarming is appropriate to the source material, it is the player's responsibility to throw in some disarm attempts as "good roleplaying". The idea of expecting players to help make the game fun is a good one. I don't generally play roleplaying games in a highly competitive style, and in the roleplaying games I play in, it is understood that the players don't just go all-out to optimize every game mechanic to win the game, but try to do fun things and advance the story, or at least make the battles entertaining. There is no way to balance everything perfectly or guarantee that the most entertaining move is the most effective. You expect the players to mix things up and put some variety in the game even if a careful analysis may reveal that a more boring strategy is somewhat more effective. But I generally think this sort of thing works best when the game balance between the different actions being considered is pretty close. A lot of the time, you may suspect a certain action isn't optimal, but there are pros and cons both ways, so it isn't really clear. So you really feel free to do whatever you think is cool.

For instance, in Torg you had the ability to take "approved actions" each round, like taunting or tricking the opponent, instead of just attacking them. Success would give you a minor advantage over the foe and an extra card. We loved approved actions, they were cool, and we did them over and over. We always strongly suspected that just attacking the foe would be more effective; ending the battle early is generally a good thing. But the benefit of cards was hard to quantify; they could set you up for a big attack later on, and could potentially be saved for use later in the adventure. And approved action were fun, and Torg characters were so full of possibilities (hero points) that you weren't that scared of combat anyway. So it all seemed to work OK. Actually, though, I should admit that in this case I did make some rules changes to make the approved actions a bit better and encourage them more.

However, when one action is just flat out way inferior to another, even in cases where it ought to be useful, that is just going way beyond the scope of what should be expected from the players. In the case of the disarm example, using disarm in most situations isn't an interesting choice with pros and cons; it is just a way to make your character less effective. The more you use it, the less effective you are. It is basically as if the GM is saying, "I'd like you to vary your actions to make the combat more interesting. Whenever you do so, I will punish you by making you less effective. The more interesting you are, the more I will punish you." It is perverse and unfortunate, and even though players can and often do make games more entertaining this way, it would be much better if the rules were changed so that they were not made ineffective by doing so.

On a related note, the players can bypass various forms of rules abuse by following conventions. For instance, in Champions, when an enemy strongman jumped up to you and started trying to smash your face in, it was most effective within the rules to ignore that person and attack a weaker enemy. Nothing in the rules required you to pay any attention to enemies attacking you; even if you were virtually surrounded on all sides with angry swordsmen, you were free to run off to a different part of the battlefield as if they were all paralyzed and attack the vulnerable boss behind them. Since this was totally inappropriate to the genre (and reality too), we made a convention that you were expected to defend yourself when attacked and had to do something if you wanted to fight your way past the attacker. This was a good convention; conventions can be useful to fix bad rules or substitute for rules that don't exist. But it is even better to fix or create the rule, rather than having a convention. Then you know exactly when the rule applies and what the penalty is for breaking it. In any case, the idea of making a convention doesn't work well for disarm example because it isn't clear how you would apply the convention. Saying that you had to disarm every other attack would just be way too unnatural.

Another way to deal with the issue here is for the GM to compensate by rewarding genre-appropriate maneuvers. I highly approve of having the GM reward genre-appropriate maneuvers with cool custom bonuses. But this is best for things done infrequently. If the genre rarely involved disarming opponents, and you suddenly had a good reason to do so as a surprise maneuver to liven things up, it would be very appropriate for the GM to make up some sort of bonus on the spot. But if you disarm constantly as part of the genre, custom bonuses aren't very practical. If you give the same bonus every time, you've created a rule, and the rule might as well be written down. If not, you start to play a game where the GM is just making up the rules arbitrarily. You can do this, of course - you can roleplay without any rules at all if you want to. But the assumption here is that we are playing a game with rules, and the premise behind playing a game with rules is that, most of the time, it is better to have a rule than rely on pure GM arbitrariness.

So for all of these reasons, I would want to devise an improvement to the disarm rule. One could argue against this by pointing out that boosting the disarm power as written shouldn't be done because it would be too strong and would break the game in the situations where disarm is already a useful ability. This is true, but simply means that attempting to fix the problem requires rethinking the rule rather than simply boosting it. Part of the skill in modifying game rules is making sure that you don't create more problems than you fix. Just because my game analysis indicates that a game has some sort of problem or imperfection doesn't mean I will make a rule to fix it. I only make a rules change if I think the new rule will be better overall than the previous rule.

The truth is that every game is going to have problems simply because of the choices made in meeting various conflicting design goals. And sometimes those elements that make the game fun also seem to have disadvantages too. For instance, one of my favorite board games is History of the World. But it has the disadvantage that more than 6 hours to play. It can be hard to get people to play for this reason. But the length of the game is related to the fact that it plays out the "History of the World", and that is part of what I like about it. I haven't really thought of any clever way to speed up with game without detracting from the epic quality I like about it. So I haven't tried to make a rule to speed up the game, I just consider the length part of the pros and cons of a game I really like overall. I feel that putting in a simple-minded rule to speed up the game - like playing for only 3 turns - would make the game worse rather than better.

But if I did think of a way to make the game just as fun but twice as fast, I wouldn't hestitate to try it out. Just because a rule is hard to improve upon doesn't mean you shouldn't try. Sometimes I try a lot of experiments, and a lot of those experiments fail. Sometimes I try experimental rules that I know won't work perfectly, just to get information. But in the end, the goal is to craft a new rule that is better overall than the previous rule.

By the way, I've never really come up with what I would call a perfect solution to the disarming problem, only various ideas. One example of an idea would be to use the 4th edition D&D power design philosophy and have disarming be a special attack that causes damage, with the special effect that the damage is totally abstract and the attack looks totally non-violent. Attacks which fail to kill have the bonus effect of temporarily disarming the enemy; attacks which kill the enemy either look like kills on-screen, or the enemy looks like he is still conscious but is counted as "defeated" and no longer has any game effect on the battle.

Planet Busters - New Rules 2.0

2009-12-17T07:13:00.000-08:00

Since I didn't have any real problems with the modest rules changes in version 1.0, I felt that my conservative changes were successful and I wanted to go farther and make more improvements, particularly to the balance of individual pieces.

With my 1.0 rules, I had essentially specified that 96 game pieces would be used to play the game. But there are 118 game pieces in the box. I realized that I might as well specify which 96 tiles were used rather than picking them randomly. This meant removing 20% of the units. Since most units are present in quantities where 20% is either 0 or 1, this gives me the opportunity to fine tune some adjustments by picking which pieces to leave out and which to leave in.

I removed a carrier and a tug, as 3 seemed like an awful lot and these units are hard to balance. I removed one deathon so that it would be unique - the ultimate warship - while leaving the other 6 capital ships (Baycruz and Dranaught). I removed a whirler, a salvage vessel, and a screen satellite because these seem somewhat extreme, one of each should be enough. In the fuel vessel category, I removed the tanker but kept the armed merchantmen and the fuel satellite; this makes the immobile fuel satellite more unique. I kept all of the satellites so that there would be as many things for tugs to pull as possible, and I kept the mines too because it seemed useful to have more defense in the game. I kept all of the sailing ships mainly because the numbers worked out that way, and they are handy.

Deciding which special events to leave out was tricky. Peace Treaty was obvious. Revolt was the other obvious one; the piece isn't very interactive or interesting, you just suddenly steal a planet. I was tempted to leave out both, but chose not to. So the other piece I left out was meteor swarm, mainly because I had to choose something to keep the balance of categories even and I liked the other events more.

That leaves the planets. I need to get rid of 2 to maintain the balance. But I like the symmetry of having the traditional 9 planets of the solar system. So I decided to leave out the colonies. The colony combat rules were awkward and didn't seem to add much to the game.

The remaining changes were to adjust individual pieces.

The carrier seemed like a devastating unit, too powerful in playtesting. I would rather have this be more of a support unit and give more glory to the Deathon and the Dranaughts. I considered a number of changes to the rather extreme way the drone rules work, such as reducing the effectiveness of screening. But ultimately I went with the simple rule of reducing the number of drones. I allowed for the possibility of zero drones, so that there is at least some mathematical chance that the screening ability won't work.

To make the game move faster, I like to play that the defender's ships are arranged randomly. The only factor discouraging this is that you know that the scout is likely not to pick an edge unit, so this affects your choice of unit arrangement. So I removed the restriction about scouting the edge, allowing wraparound. This also makes the very wimpy scout units a little bit better.
Since the Deathon is so mighty, I considered having it cost you an extra piece to draw it. But this would make you extra bummed when it was sabotaged or mutinied. Instead, I slightly weakened the unit by making it cost two fuel. I like that this emphasizes the impressiveness of the ship. It's big!

Finally, the tug and the satellites are still too wimpy. It is pretty pathetic that the satellites not only can't move, they don't fight well either. But I didn't want to change the numbers on the tiles. So I decided to have satellites not cost any fuel to defend you. This fits the idea that they are dependable defensive units, always there to protect you. And it makes the compare in an interesting way to the sailing ships; an armored satellite can't move, but it doesn't have the "fire last" penalty.

A tug pulling a satellite is still not equal to two units, so it needs more help. First, I removed the penalty of getting your satellite captured when used on the offense; that just added insult to injury. But how else to make the combo more effective? I remembered that the scout ability is a nifty offense-only power, and it seemed logical that satellites would have good sensors, so I gave that power to the combo.

Rewritten rules:

These rules are for the 2-player game.

Tiles:
To create a standard 96-tile deck, remove the following pieces from the 118 tiles that come with the game:

1 carrier
1 conicle
1 deathon
1 tanker
1 salvage vessel
1 screen satellite
2 scout
1 tug
1 whirler
2 zerstor

2 colonies
1 planet buster (3)
4 fuel (2x6, 2x7)
1 meteor swarm
1 peace treaty
1 revolt

Setup: Each player receives a starting hand of 8 tiles. Put 20 tiles in the personal stack of each player. Put 40 tiles into a common stack.

Drawing: Each player must draw tiles from their personal stack until it is depleted, at which point the player draws tiles from the common stack. If the common stack is depleted, no more tiles may be drawn.

Victory Conditions: If at the beginning of a player's turn, that player has no tiles in play ("melded") and no tiles in his personal stack, that player loses the game. Otherwise, the game ends at the end of the turn when the common stack is depleted, and the player with the most points worth of planets wins the game.

Fuel: When a point of fuel is spent to allow a ship to fire weapons, that fuel allows it to perform any number of special functions for the remainder of the turn. You do not need to pay separately to activate special powers or attack a planet.

Planets: When you play a planet, draw one tile immediately.

Carrier: The number of drones created is 1d10/2, rounded down, with no minimum number.

Deathon: Counts as two ships for all fuel costs.

Satellites: Satellites do not require fuel to fire weapons.

Scouts: The revealing effect of a scout wraps around - if a scout engages the leftmost enemy unit, it reveals the rightmost enemy unit (as well as the unit it engaged and the unit to the right of that unit).

Tugs: If a tug is pulling a satellite on the attack, the value of the tug is added to the value of the satellite to determine the total combat value, without dividing by two. If combo is damaged, the satellite is automatically destroyed and the tug is safe. A tug pulling a satellite has the same detection powers as a scout.

New Rules Design for Planet Busters

2009-12-08T16:36:00.000-08:00

Following my previous analysis, I wanted to make some rules adjustments to this game. My interest is in making improvements for the two player game. I get the feeling the game was really designed more with 4 players in mind, so this may entail some changes for that very reason.

As you can see in my analysis, the biggest issue I had was with the fact that one player would eventually crush the other one far before the game would end. I could have tried some sort of fancy rebalancing to ensure that one player can't easily crush the other until much later in the game. But instead, I decided to go for a simpler approach of ending the game sooner. I could just shorten the game, but since this is a wargame, I decided to really go with the idea of a battle to the death. I will simply formalize the concept of one player attaining a dominant position, so that the game ends at that point instead of going on indefinitely.

How to make the game mechanics decide that one player has a dominant position? This generally seems to involve one player running out of forces in play, so I will make that the criterion. The only problem with this is that in the early fighting, sometimes one side will temporarily have nothing on the board, but can still make a comeback if the right forces are drawn quickly. To allow for this, I will give each side a grace period - the game cannot end until a certain number of turns have passed. Keeping track of turns tends to be error prone in a game like this, so I will use a common game mechanism of setting aside a certain number of tiles for each player during the setup, and once these tiles are used up, the second phase of the game has started and you need to keep forces in play or lose the game.

What if the game really does go the distance? The original rules use the peace treaty tile to end the game after going through all the tiles about 1.5 times. This means that 2-player games will last twice as long as 4-player games. So I decided to shorten the 2-player game by ending it before going through all the tiles. This means the peace treaty tile isn't really necessary to end the game. However, the other effect of the peace treaty tile is that the players never know exactly when the game is going to end, so they can't to tricky things like playing a ton of planets or making an all-out attack just before the end of the game. By in my 2-player rules, this isn't much of an issue. In a zero sum game the players make all-out attacks half the time anyway, end of game or not. And hoarding planets in your hand isn't nearly so much of a temptation when it can get you knocked out of the game. So I'll just skip the peace treaty entirely.

Now that the big issue is out of the way, it is time to try some small improvements. In particular, making the tiles more game balanced. Now, in a game where you draw tiles totally at random, balancing the tiles isn't truly necessary for the game play; you can just accept that some draws are good and some are bad, you still have to fight with what you are dealt. But my preference is always for game balance unless there is a specific reason to do otherwise. In Planet Busters, I have no intention to create total balance between the tiles - a Dranaught is just better than a Baycruz. But when an overpowering unit can be toned down to have weaknesses as well as strengths, or when a pathetic unit could be improved to be more fun to draw and interesting to use, that is the sort of change I'd be looking for.

Planets seem awfully good. You get a fuel source, plus two extra tiles, for the price of one tile. The disadvantage of a planet under the normal rules is that it is a tempting target for attack, especially in a multi-player game. I think the bonus tiles are to encourage you to play it rather than leave it in your hand. But with my rules, and a two player game, I don't think this is so necessary. The game usually ends due to a military defeat, and a planet will help prevent that defeat. So I will reduce the planet bonus to one extra tile.

Colonies are even more extreme. In a game where tiles are really your only resource, having 50% more resources in just incredible. I couldn't think of a really elegant way to draw a fraction of a tile per turn, so I decided to make colonies have the same strategic benefit as planets, extra fuel. Planets don't give all that much fuel to begin with, so I figured it wouldn't hurt to give a little more. Running out of fuel isn't much fun anyways.

Tugs are just awful, by far the most worthless unit. They are useless by themselves, they are only effective as part of a combo. So they had better be pretty darn good when part of a combo; if you are lucky enough to get a tug and a satellite, you would think the combo would be better than your average 2 tiles. This is completely not the case. First of all, the satellites themselves are pretty pathetic; not only can't they attack by themselves, they also are weak units even on the defense. All that the tug does is give you the honor of pulling these weak units on the attack. Not only is the tug/satellite combo not as good as even a single average unit, it has the extra disadvantage that the enemy might capture the satellite. So I definitely wanted to make the combo more effective. My first idea was to simply add the tug strength to the satellite strength without halving.

Streamlining the fuel rules was something I did just to simplify the game. The main effect of requiring separate fuel to attack the planets is to make it harder to attack planets. With military victory so common, attacking planets doesn't seem nearly so valuable, so why make it hard. It just means that an attacker with little fuel will have a harder time finishing off a beaten opponent. I'm not sure if this is good or bad, but I feel like removing the extra step of fueling attacks on planets and seeing how it goes.

Here are the new rules:

These rules are for the 2-player game.

Setup: Each player receives a starting hand of 8 tiles. Put 20 tiles in the personal stack of each player. Put 40 tiles into a common stack. Don't use the Peace Treaty tile.

Drawing: Each player must draw tiles from their personal stack until it is depleted, at which point the player draws tiles from the common stack. If the common stack is depleted, no more tiles may be drawn.

Victory Conditions: If at the beginning of a player's turn, that player has no tiles in play and no tiles in his personal stack, that player loses the game. Otherwise, the game ends at the end of the turn when the common stack is depleted, and the player with the most points worth of planets wins the game.

Fuel: When a point of fuel is spent to allow a ship to fire weapons, that fuel allows it to perform any number of special functions for the remainder of the turn. You do not need to pay separately to activate special powers or attack a planet.

Planets: When you play a planet, draw one tile immediately.

Colonies: For noncombat purposes, colonies are treated as planets for all purposes; they provide free fuel and victory points rather than extra cards.

Tug: When a tug is used to tow a satellite, the value of the tug is added to the value of the satellite to determine the total combat value, without dividing by two.

New Rule for Street Illegal

2009-11-29T07:32:00.000-08:00

This week, time for some game design. I'm going to try to create a new rule for Street Illegal.

As you can see from my game impressions, my only complaint is that there is no penalty for travelling extremely slowly when in last place, whereas cars in the other positions actually have to keep their speed up to avoid being passed - in other words, they actually have to race. So I wanted to make a rule to discourage slow speeds in last place, so that everyone wants to race. Since the game basically works pretty well as is, I'd like to be conservative and give my new rule a fairly subtle effect.

The initial thought is to penalize players who are travelling slowly in last place. There are really only three things you can "lose" during the game - position, chips, and hand size. Losing hand size is rather drastic, and you can't go farther back than last place. So penalizing with chips seems logical. This leads to rule idea:

Rule v1: If you end the round in last place, you lose a chip if you have any.

Note: When the rule says "lose a chip if you have any", this is a potential red flag - can a player unfairly avoid the rule simply by arranging to not have any chips? In the present case, this isn't an issue. The behavior we are trying to discourage is driving slowly at the back to build up chips. There is no need to penalize players who have no chips, as they clearly aren't performing the behavior we want to discourage.

The idea with Rule v1 is to make players want to compete hard to stay out of last place, because last place is bad. The negative is that the rule is too broad. It penalizes players who are racing as fiercely as possible, but are unsuccessful. Basically, it kicks the player who is down, something I usually try to avoid. So:

Rule v2: If you are in last place, you must pay at least one chip during the round, either to exceed the speed limit or to pass the car ahead of you.

This is much better. It doesn't really penalize you much at all if you are really trying to race, but if you aren't racing at all, it is practically the same as losing a chip straight out.

Now, what is the game rationale for not travelling really slowly when in last place? The obvious is that you would be left behind. But an idea I had that is more consistent with a penalty in chips, rather than position, is that the police are chasing you on your illegal street race, and if you drive too slowly you have to spend a chip trying to outmaneuver the cops. This leads me to another idea:

Rule: If you are in last place, you must pay a chip if you travel less than the speed limit.

Hmm, this is missing something - what if there is no speed limit?

Rule v3: If you are in last place, you must pay a chip if you travel less than 90 mph.

This was my first solution, but I think the following may be more elegant:

Rule v4: If you are in last place, you must pay a chip if you travel less than the speed limit (100 mph if no limit).

This is the same as Rule v2, but if you can exactly match the speed limit, you don't have to pay. I think I like that it is slightly more subtle, and it means that you can still try to save up chips, but you need driving skill to do so - to drive at exactly the speed limit, rather than just driving really slowly. And setting the minimum speed based on the speed limit matches the fact that when you aren't in last place, you need to driver faster on roads with higher speed limits to avoid being passed.

I will try Rule v4.

New Rules:

Police: After performing your drive action, if you are in last place and you are travelling less than the speed limit (less than 100 mph if no speed limit), you are harassed by the police and you lose one chip. If you don't have any chips, you don't lose anything.

Game Impressions: Age of Mythology

2009-11-20T13:30:00.000-08:00

I've never played the computer game this is based on, the this game seems to capture some of the idea of the real-time strategy game. You start off with very little, try to build up your production base, create combat units, and go fight the other players. The box is absolutely crammed with plastic miniatures that don't really add much to the play of the game. But they are fun to look at.

I quite enjoyed the production and building aspect of the game. You have three actions every turn. Each action requires a card, and you draw 4 or more cards, splitting between face up cards and more powerful random cards. It is fun picking your actions and deciding whether to gamble on random actions that might be more powerful or might not be useful. The three actions you get is adequate but never enough, just about the balance you want in this sort of game. You can use actions to explore for land to give you better production, or to produce, purchase things, attack, or exchange resources. Each actions seems interesting in its own way. In fact, if you aren't feeling very violent, it is tempting to skip combat entirely and just have fun building up.

Purchasing the combat units is neat. Each player is a different culture and has unique combat units with unique costs and abilities. Some of the units are clearly better than other units of the same cost, but this is not a problem for two reasons. First, each unit requires a different mix of the 4 resource types, so you generally just try to buy what you can afford with what you have. Second, the units have a rock-paper-scissors circular superiority, where each unit is super-good against one or more other unit types. Normally this isn't my favorite game mechanic, but here it works well.

You can send your units to attack other players. What I really like is the idea of limited warfare. Only a portion of each player's forces are involved in a battle, and either side can easily retreat. The attacker can obtain a certain fixed benefit if he wins. So there are definite reasons to attack instead of sitting back, and you can lose a fight without losing the game. So in a three-player game, if everyone is out for himself, you can end up with end up with lots of battles but no one getting knocked out.

On the down side, I'm not sure the game balance goes far enough in this direction. It really helps for the players to want a three-way battle. Otherwise, you could easily end up with players either refusing to fight or teaming up to demolish a player they don't like.

A negative factor is the length of this game. This is a really, really long game, hard to finish in a single play session. Combat takes forever, as you match up the monsters in your army one by one and roll out who wins each fight. Normally, I am not bothered by lengthy combat systems, and I think rolling lots of dice is fun. But this game still gives me pause. You just roll, and roll, and roll. My hand got fatigued from all that rolling; I can't remember that happening to me in any other game. Maybe it was because the dice are so big. Also, before each matchup, each side secretly picks a unit to fight. If you carefully calculate what you think is the best unit to use before each and every matchup, I found the combat quite tedious. I greatly preferred just choosing a unit at random.

There seems to have been a game balance mistake with one type of monster ability. Some Norse units have the "berserk" power, which gives them the option to roll two more combat dice at the cost of losing all ties. This is generally treated as if it were a useful power. But mathematically, losing all ties is approximately equivalent to losing 3 combat dice, so going berserk is normally quite bad. The power is slightly useful if you are badly outmatched, but in general it is a trap for the unwary, and I don't think that was the intent. Conversely, the medusa's ability to win all ties makes it an extraordinary good unit, far better than any unit of its cost in the game.

My least favorite part of the game was the victory conditions. Many modern games try to stand out with unusual methods for determining victory. But this one I just found to be downright unpleasant. Each turn, each player puts a victory point on one of 4 victory conditions. For three of the conditions, the victory points are given out all-or-nothing to the winner of that condition at the end of the game. Near the start of the game, you have to decide what condition to make more valuable, without having any idea who will ultimately win that condition. I don't like making choices like this, which are simultaneously pointless (since you have nothing to base them on) and vital (since they determine the winner). At the end of the game, the mechanic ultimately means that unless one player scores a dominant victory (in which case this mechanic is a moot point), the winner is determined by a sort of vote, by where the players put the victory points. So if two players are vying for one victory condition, they can shut out the third player, unless they tie with each other, in which case the third player wins. I find the whole mechanic weird and don't see how anything fun can come out of it. I'd much rather have a conventional linear scoring system.

In general, I liked a lot of this game. As an inveterate game rule designer and tinkerer, I felt it was a good fixer-upper. I just need to make a new way to determine victory and a few other minor changes. The only problem is that it is so long, it will be hard to get anyone to play it with me.

Game Impressions of Geek Wars, Bankruptcy, Top Secret Spies

2009-11-13T16:24:00.000-08:00

More impressions from playtesting a bunch of borrowed games to see which ones I would like.

Geek Wars is a CCG-style game; while not sold in the collectible format, it does have rules for deck construction. It is a variant of MTG, you put down your "troops" and then fight it out until one player is out of "bucks" (life). The gaming geek theme of the cards is somewhat amusing.

The combat system allows the troops to attack each other directly. Unlike MTG, when a troop dies, you lose life. If the other player has no troops left, you can attack him directly, which is a much more efficient means of taking his life down. I thought this variant of the MTG combat mechanics was interesting. Also interesting was that you don't have any resource other than cards and life. More powerful troops cost only a card to put into play, but if a powerful troop dies, you lose more life than if a weak troop dies.

You cannot gang up on offense or defense, and you cannot attack the other player if he as any surviving troops. This means that one powerful troop is superior to any number of weaker troops. Theoretically this could be made interesting, but in practice I found it frustrating that weak troops don't seem to have any purpose other than buying time.

This is also a game balance issue, in that while powerful troops cost your more life than weak troops if they die, the difference is small and by no means sufficient to make up for the vast superiority of strong troops. In general, it was difficult to see any real balance between the various cards, many are awesomely good or terribly bad.

The basic flow of this game was sufficiently amusing that, if I had some extra time, I'd be tempted to fiddle around with it some more and analyze what is going on. But I'm borrowing it, and I'm not really inspired to buy a copy.

Bankruptcy is a classic card game (in the style of a traditional card game like Gin, except for the exotic cards). The objective is to be the first to empty your hand. You can get rid of your own cards, or give yourself or the other person cards. You may need to give yourself cards in order to have the right cards to keep playing effectively. And there are a few special cards in the mix. When I first read the rules, I was excited, because the game seems very playable. By playable, I mean that it is easy to just sit down and play a few games in a relaxed style, without being daunted by a major investment in time or having to comprehend lots of vital but obscure tactical complexities. You just draw your cards, look at your hand, see a few options, and play one.

Actually playtesting the game, it certainly seems very playable, but not very exciting. Without knowing what was in everyone else's hands, it seemed very difficult to know what to do to interfere with other people – and even if you do interfere, unless you have a rare special card, all you can do is randomly give them extra cards which they may or may not want. And when you are concentrating on looking at how to improve your own hand, there didn't seem to be many exciting options, just a mechanical process of trying to get that hand whittled down. Perhaps, if you mastered the game, you could become fascinated with the knowledge gained by watching everyone's card plays. But I don't plan to play this game enough times to find out.

Top Secret Spies is a board game where any player can move any piece, but the owners of those pieces are secret. Spies is an abstract game (it has nothing to do with espionage) which features an unusual scoring system which I find hard to describe in one sentence. Basically, it seems difficult to put yourself in a good scoring position, without making yourself vulnerable to other players taking better advantage or moving you out of position. No doubt this was a design goal, and it seems to work well, at least to an inexperienced player's eye.

The game rules heavily emphasize the secrecy idea, where you disguise which piece you control and try to figure out which piece other players control. This is certainly a classic and popular game mechanic. Personally, though, I never liked games of this style, where the way to hide the identity of your pieces is to make moves that benefit the other players, and everyone tries to record which pieces were helped by other player's moves. So I wouldn't really ask to play this game. But if someone else wanted to play, it might be entertaining moving pieces around the board and watching the wacky scoring system.

Game Impressions: Street Illegal, Employee of the Month, Shipwrecked, Romance of Three Kingdoms

2009-11-09T22:23:00.000-08:00

Street Illegal is a card game of illegal street racing. I really like this game. You lay out a random course with cards, and there is a system where you use your cards to control your speed while trying to gain chips that let you go faster than the maximum safe speed or help you to pass other competitors. The actual racing is not done in terms of absolute physical position, but rather in terms of ordinal position – what order everyone is at one time. Even though the game is somewhat abstract compared to a board game like Formula De, with a little imagination I feel like I am really racing at high speed along the course, and I like the way the cards work. It handles any number of players from 1 to 7 easily, since you always have 7 cars but there are rules for faceless characters to drive the cars not controlled by players. In fact, I think I prefer fewer players in the game because I have so much fun trying to pass the "Old Pros". I've only really noticed one problem with the game. You can build up unlimited chips, but driving fast and trying to improve your position against other cars tends to cost a lot of chips. But since position is ordinal, you can't get any farther back than last place, which is where the players start. So one strategy is to drive the first half of the race at extremely slow speeds and save up your chips. While this strategy is far from a sure win, it does seem rather too tempting for something so boring. I'm thinking of possible rules variants to put a damper on this.

Employee of the Month is one of those totally abstract games whose theme is printed on the cards but has nothing to do with the play of the game. It is a bidding game where you bid on good cards by deciding what bad cards you will be willing to take with them, then at the end, you calculate who has the highest and lowest totals in various categories, to determine a victor. I set up the game to begin a solo playtest, and discovered I couldn't motivate myself to actually play a game. Each round, each player has to determine their correct play. In a regular card game, this depends on the cards you hold and the state of the game. But at the start of this game, everyone is pretty much in the same position, bidding on the same cards with pretty much the same value to everyone. There doesn't seem to be much to do except "solve the game" and figure out the correct bidding strategy. By the end of the game, this would be totally different as you compare your mathematical totals to other players to determine bidding. But in general, the game just seemed too unbearably abstract and mathematical for my taste. I'd rather write a computer program to play for me.

Shipwreckeded is a card-based bidding game. The key mechanic of interest boil downs to an outguess game (like rock-paper-scissors) – you make secret bids, and the best bid for you to make depends on what bids you think other people will make. The mechanics and design appear to be reasonably interesting. But I don't enjoy outguess games, so I skipped playing and moved on to the next game in my stack of games I borrowed.

(You might think it isn't too useful giving my impressions of a game I never played, but I figure I might as well share the information I have. Maybe if you are a big fan of outguess games, you'll want to give it a look).

Romance of Three Kingdoms is a CCG-style card game where players send warriors into battle to conquer land. You can see from comments in the rules that this is clearly intended to be a Diplomacy-type game, where the card play is just a backdrop to the real game of negotiation between the players. The game mechanics are OK, but the balance is odd. You start with no lands, but controlling any land at all makes you far more powerful. So the two-player game doesn't seem to work, as whoever wins the initial battles and holds a piece of land soon snowballs to victory. The balance needs to come from the diplomacy. Since I don't enjoy diplomacy games, I didn't pursue the game any further.

Game Impressions of Flagship: Coyote Stands

2009-11-03T21:18:00.000-08:00

This game is one of those non-collectible CCG's, I'm not sure what the right term is. It comes with decks for a couple of empires, all ready for you to have a space battle between different space empires.

This game cleverly tries to avoid some of the pitfalls of CCG's like Magic: The Gathering (my favorite CCG). In particular, the extreme randomness that can cause many games to be lopsided one way or the other. Here, instead of drawing forces randomly, you purchase your starting spaceships, and the cards merely improve the capabilities of those spaceships. You can't be "mana-hosed" because you get a fixed number of command points per turn, and even without improvement it is enough to buy any one card. Also, you can discard and redraw every card you don't use every turn, so you go through a lot of cards and are never stuck with anything you don't want. This is a much more controlled, balanced game than MTG (even assuming you play MTG, as I do, with decks that are equally good against each other on average). And the actual game balance of the individual cards seems to be much better than I'm used to; it looks like I'd have to play it more to figure out whether anything is off with the balance. In terms of technique with the individual game mechanics, this is my kind of game.

My only real issue is not with any specifics, but with the overall fun factor of the game. To me, the fun part of MTG is in drawing a random selection of forces and abilities, and having to make the best battle strategy you can from what you draw. The game wouldn't be that interesting if you pre-selected the cards, as the actual game mechanics are fairly primitive. With Flagship, that core randomness is greatly minimized. It seems like the cards just add spice and extra variability to the space combat game between your preselected ships. The problem is that the basic space combat game is completely uninteresting without the cards, so the cards have a very difficult task trying to make up for that. It feels like it would be cool if more were going on in the base game, maybe the ships were maneuvering around on a map and shooting each other with dice rolls, and the cards were adding on top of that. As it is, I feel a little bit like I am playing not so much a game, as a nicely designed simulation of a game, a way to determine who would win in a battle between the Standing Nations and the Kirkin Swarm. Sort of like when I used to take a bunch of RPG characters and have them roll attacks against each other without using the map, to see who would win. Only here, the randomness of what you draw each turn from the deck is used as a substitute for the randomness of dice rolls.

Game Impressions: Planet Busters

2009-10-29T22:06:00.000-07:00

This is a tile game from Tom Wham, whose games from Dragon Magazine I have fond memories of. This game less of his characteristic humor and whimsy than some of his others, but it is still cute.

The basic idea is a spaceship combat game where you collect forces to attack those of the other players, trying to steal or destroy their planets; at the end of the game ownership of planets determines the winner. There are lots of types of spaceship forces you can draw, and the combat system seems fun. I generally enjoyed the madcap chaos of the big pitched battles you can get at the start of the game.

When I tried a 2-player game, however, I found that the overall flow of the game didn't work so well. Basically, you draw new tiles (essentially cards) into your hand every turn, you can play as many as you want, and you have a hand limit, but no limit to the number of units played. One oddity is that only units can be attacked, and you start with no units, so the initial draws and plays seem very random and very critical, in a way I didn't find pleasing. Once both sides have units, they can send in starship attacks to savage each other. The trouble is that since combat is pretty bloody, it seems likely that after a few heated battles, one side will be victorious and destroy all enemy forces. That seemed to happen in all of my games. At this point, the winning side can continue to build up ships, but any ships the losing side puts down will be outnumbered and crushed. So the losing side has to wait until the perfect hand can be put down all at once to have a fighting chance, while the winning side builds up more and more ships and planets until it has an overwhelming advantage. But the winning side can't do anything to make the game end sooner. In my tests game the real fighting lasted about 5 turns, but the game lasts more than 30 turns. You could try to fix this by cutting the game short when a winner becomes obvious.

Another very odd feature is that the victory condition is based on the number of planets you have, but planets are drawn randomly and are very rare. Plus, you can draw "planet busters" to try to destroy planets, and their chance of success doesn't depend on the size of the enemy's forces. But you get a game benefit from playing planets. This creates all sorts of strange effects. If you get lucky and draw multiple planets, you can end up with a very strong edge. If nobody draws planets, there can be nothing to fight over. If one side is totally winning but has few planets, it could lose them all to planet busters, then both sides could try to horde planets in their hand so they can't be destroyed. So potentially, a side which has decisively lost the space battle and plays nothing for 25 turns could just try to get lucky and be the one to draw the end of game tile, then play all the planets in their hand and win the game.

A game with three or more players would probably work quite differently. But it seems likely to follow one of the usual 3-player game mechanics. Perhaps two stronger players conspire to crush the weaker player then battle between each other. Perhaps a balance of power is created, where nobody is ever allowed to get ahead, and everyone just tries to save up for a power play that will give them a sneaky win before anyone else can stop them. Perhaps everyone is too afraid to attack at all, as a battle of attrition between 2 players gives the third player an advantage. I don't really like any of these dynamics of unregulated multi-player wargames.

I've been trying to think of an analogy to the flow of this game. Basically, it is as if you were playing a WWII wargame, but instead of using the carefully designed orders of battle and starting positions, you just scooped up a big handful of counters, sprinkled them over the map, and started playing. The individual tactical battles may end up pretty interesting, but the sense I get from a lot of modern games, of a well-crafted overall play experience, is missing.

I have to say, though, that I find the spaceship combat simple, colorful, and fun. I feel like I do with a lot of old games, that I want to make some adjustments to the game so I can enjoy the good parts.

Game Impression: Drakon

2009-10-22T10:40:00.000-07:00

At first, before I looking carefully at this tile game, I thought it was a game of random dungeon exploration. Actually, though, it is more of a strategic tile placement game.

Each turn, you either place a tile, or you move. You can't normally move backwards, so often you or someone else will have to place a tile in order for movement to be possible. Each tile can contain traps, special actions to take, or treasures. You win the game when you gain 5 gold pieces.

Consider a 2-player game. Both players start together. Whenever you extend the dungeon from your current location, the other player has the option to move first. But if one player moves, the other can follow. The two players could do this until they reach a portion of the dungeon which has no exit tiles placed yet. At this point the person in the lead loses the initiative, as he has to place tiles rather than move. So the person who moved first really hasn't gained anything over his rival. These rules mean that, from a theoretical standpoint, there is no benefit to moving until enough tiles have been placed to give you a winning path, so that by moving first, you can either pick up the 5 gold one turn before the other player can if he follows you, or you can "shake" the other player by being the first to take a special action from one of the rooms. But if you put down the tile that creates a winning path, the other player can take the path first. This symmetry is broken by the fact that you have hidden tiles in your hand, and some of those tiles could break up the path the other player takes. So you want to trick the other player into starting on what looks like a winning path, then play your own path which disrupts it or is better. Or you want to trick him into not realizing that you just played the winning path – although this is still a pretty good chance he can do something to mess you up. Anyway, until the players actually split up, the complexity of deciding which play is actually the best one is just way too much for me. Some people might like this sort of deep thinking, but for me, it just hurts my head.

I tried playing with the rule that the players couldn't follow each other, and the game was much more to my liking. Basically, you end up trying to create a profitable path in your part of the dungeon, while messing up the other player's path in his part of the dungeon. The fact that you have to place your tile on one turn, and move into it on the next turn, creates a funny slow pace that is different from what would I expect from an exploration game. But it works OK, and I like building up the dungeon and wandering around. And it doesn't take too long to build up enough money for someone to win the game. I wouldn't mind playing this variant of the game some more, though I'm not sure I'd go out of my way to do so.

Game Impressions: Rabbit Hunt

2009-10-15T21:40:00.000-07:00

Me and my wife tried out this game – my wife loves bunnies, so the theme was cool. The game has a surface mechanic that was reasonably fun, moving your farmer around to look for bunnies and finding various good and bad tiles. But the core mechanic is a memory game. Basically, each player places tiles at a certain rate, and must choose when to play his 3 scoring tiles. Each player also turns over tiles at a certain rate, and scores by turning over one of the other player’s scoring tiles. Occasionally, you learn how many scoring tiles the other player has left. So the object is to remember which tiles you put down (since it is useless to turn them over), and remember or guess which of the tiles the other person put down are scoring tiles. I don’t like memory games, nor does my wife. And with the tiles of both players being interspersed with each other, this is a pretty hard memory game. Unless one player has his hand revealed at the wrong times, in which case it is obvious where the scoring tile must be. There is also something of an outguess mechanic involved with trying to put tiles in places where you think the other person won’t choose to turn them over. I don’t like outguess mechanics either. I just didn’t care for this game. Perhaps if you like the memory mechanic, you might like it.

The idea with a "game impression" is to be a micro-review, what I think of it and would tell someone after playing it once or twice (which, for a game I don't actually like, is as many times as I will ever play it). I avoided reading any other review before writing this, so as not to influence my judgment.

Disadvantages, Part IV: How the types of disadvantages work with the disadvantage system goals

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

In my last article, I classified disadvantages into 4 types, and previously to that, a described 2 goals of disadvantage systems. Now I will discuss how each type of disadvantage fits into each goal.

If you are thinking of the goal of your disadvantage system as encouraging characters to take interesting disadvantages, you want to give points for disadvantages which make the characters and the story more interesting. In that case, all 4 types of disadvantages are pretty valuable and important, and should be encouraged. Restricted choice is perhaps the most interesting to encourage, as it makes you describe the psychology, motivations, and beliefs of your character. This can both come through in your roleplaying, and provide hooks for the GM to make customized adventures. Story disadvantages can be even stronger in terms of really providing clear hooks for the GM to make stories – putting a rival or a loved one in a scene can be a convenient way to add some emotional connection. On the flip side, they may have little effect if the GM doesn’t want to customize an adventure – they tend to require work from the GM. Situational vulnerabilities are similar to story disadvantages, though it is often rather harder to use them in a fashion that is fun for the player. Negative abilities are good to encourage, and along with situational vulnerabilities they are the least likely sort of disadvantage to be taken in a game with no disadvantage system (roleplayers are more likely to given themselves interesting psychology and back story than to arbitrarily penalize their own characters). But in some sense, they are less important to encourage than other types of disadvantages. Characters are likely to have clear strengths and weaknesses even in a system with no disadvantages at all; for instance, a fighter may have the “weakness” of being incompetent in ranged combat, simply because he didn’t put any points into it. Thus, even with no disadvantage system, the GM can create situations that play on character weaknesses. So encouraging negative abilities isn’t really a qualitative difference over having no disadvantage system at all, it just provides more and stronger weaknesses to differentiate the characters. But really, all types of disadvantage are pretty close in terms of the goal of encouraging interesting disadvantages.

When it comes to the goal of compensation, however, we have a different story. If you are trying to give characters extra points as compensation for the problems the disadvantages provide to the characters, then the disadvantages had better be truly disadvantageous.

Negative abilities are the perfect disadvantages to offer compensation for. Your character is less powerful, and you get back points corresponding to how much less powerful your character is. If the disadvantage is small, you earn a few points; if the disadvantage is large, you get back lots of points. Of course, there are many tricky practical issues around how to correctly price disadvantages and how to reduce the risk of abusive minimaxing, but I’m not getting into that here. In terms of high-level theory, compensating characters for negative abilities is quite straightforward.

Giving characters substantial numbers of points as compensation for a story disadvantage, on the other hand, is fraught with problems. A story disadvantage adds features to the character’s adventures that cause him problems. But the point of adventures is already to be difficult and cause the adventurers problems. Story disadvantages work very well as a way of helping the GM find challenges to put into the adventure, but not so well if you try to make sure they are a large penalty to the character.

In Champions, one method of using story disadvantages is to create the story first, then add the story disadvantages – the character’s enemy just shows up as an extra menace to cause trouble. But this is an example of what I would call “disadvantages which penalize the GM”. Part of the GM’s job is to make a good adventure, which is basically an act of creative writing. Trying to shoehorn a bunch of extraneous elements into an adventure is hard work for the GM, and is likely to reduce the quality of the adventure. The more natural and desirable approach for story disadvantages is to periodically make adventures that are designed to feature them, or to otherwise work them nicely into the plot. This matches the way such story elements would be used in the source material.

When you do this, it becomes very hard to say how much of a penalty the story disadvantages are, because there is no source of comparison – you can’t really say how difficult the adventure would have been if the storyline had been different. This is true in the source material as well. In a comic book, for instance, a Superman story which includes Lois Lane getting in trouble isn’t necessary more difficult overall than a storyline which doesn’t. If is just a characteristic type of Superman story showcasing a special problem which Superman often has to deal with.

Now, in principle, it would be mathematically possible to construct adventures in such a way as to make sure that story disadvantages appear with a predictable frequency and adventures which include them are appreciably more difficult. This is tricky to do correctly. Consider, for instance, a Champions character who is hunted by a team of supervillains. You can’t just add the enemies on top of an existing encounter – that way make it way too hard, totally unwinnable. The most likely thing to do is to add the enemies as a separate encounter. But this just isn’t worth the same kind of compensation as a negative ability, which actually makes your character less powerful. From the player’s point of view, you can only fit so many encounters into a play session, and one encounter is just being replaced with a different one. Champions characters don’t normally suffer any lasting effects from fights, so it doesn’t really hurt the character in later fights. The main penalty is the chance the players may lose the fight, and that this would have negative repercussions within the story.

Since story disadvantages usually don’t come up too frequently, the GM would really have to stick it to the characters to make them worth a substantial amount of compensation. There are certainly a number of ways the GM can do this. But I don’t think it is the right approach. I think the game works best when story disadvantages mostly just make the story more interesting, and you acknowledge that they aren’t really worth many points from a compensation point of view.

The same is true of situational disadvantages. Consider the case of Superman and kryptonite. You could just randomly add kryptonite at random spots in your adventure, on top of threats that are already balanced for the characters. Whenever it showed up, Superman would be rendered helpless and the villains would win a devastating victory. This might be fair if the vulnerability to kryptonite is worth a good number of points. Mathematically, if that were true, Superman should find non-kryptonite encounters slightly easier and krytonite encounters vastly more difficult, in order to balance out the points. But it doesn’t seem like that much fun. A more comic-book approach is to use kryptonite as a way to challenge Superman in situations that wouldn’t normally be a challenge – for instance, to allow him to be captured by villains who lack the earth-shattering might necessary to defeat him in open combat. And conversely, you don’t normally want to make all of Superman’s other fights easier just because they don’t have kryptonite. This points to the vulnerability being used primarily to enhance storytelling rather than as something that is really equivalent to a negative ability.

Restricted choice disadvantages don’t necessarily have this aspect of wanting the adventure to be designed around them. It is common enough to just go on a prepackaged adventure and find that your desire to do everything by the book is getting in your way. However, characters can make both good and bad choices during an adventure whether they have formal disadvantages or not, so the effect of the disadvantage is somewhat muted. Also, the kind of extreme psychological limitations that cause you to make very bad choices can often be very annoying for the GM and the other players. Restricted choice disadvantages that have strong effects on the style in which you complete the adventure, without preventing you from properly playing the adventure, are usually most interesting. But such disadvantages really aren’t worth as much compensation as a negative ability.

So my conclusion is that all types of disadvantages are worthy of encouragement, but negative abilities are generally worth more in terms of compensation than the other disadvantages. I might describe negative abilities as “hard” disadvantages and the others as “soft” disadvantages. This leads me to describe a problem stemming from this.

In designing a game with a disadvantage system that wants to encourage characters to have disadvantages, it is typical to make all 4 types of disadvantages worth comparable numbers of points, and try to force everyone to take a substantial number of such disadvantages. In the natural play of the game, though, negative abilities are more of a penalty than other disadvantages, and players tend to lean towards soft disadvantages in taking the required disadvantages. When the game master or game designer notices that this is happening, the tendency is to want to “crack down” on the soft disadvantages by trying extra hard to penalize characters who take them, in an attempt to make them worth their points. In my view, this is counter-productive, as for the reasons I’ve listed above, it makes adventures harder to write, more awkwardly constructed, and generally less fun, and restricts character design to a subset of particularly deranged and troubled characters. I think that a better solution would acknowledge that the purpose of soft disadvantages is to make characters more interesting, and that it just isn’t natural to expect that even several of them will reduce a very powerful character to be no better than a very weak character without disadvantages.

Disadvantages, Part III: General Classifications

2009-09-28T17:40:00.000-07:00

As I mentioned in my previous article, I’m going to classify some general types of disadvantages:
1. The negative ability. This sort of disadvantage is something that makes your character statistically worse, the opposite of an advantage or ability which makes your character better. So if having superior eyesight is clearly an ability that would cost points, having inferior eyesight is a negative ability that should give you back points. If being wealthy is a useful ability that costs points, being flat broke is a negative ability. Similarly, having a bad leg is the opposite of being a fast runner, being vulnerable to fire attacks is the opposite of being fire proof, being forgetful is the opposite of having a perfect memory, and so on. Corresponding Champions disadvantages include Physical Limitation, Unluck, and Vulnerability. Getting points back for having very poor statistics is basically also in this category, though in many games (such as Champions) it is not formally considered a disadvantage.

2. Restricted choice. With this type of disadvantage, the character has no limitations on how well he does things, just limitations on what he can choose to do. Normally, the assumption in a role-playing game is that the player can have his or her character perform any action at any time. So if a villain threatens to kill a hostage if the character doesn't surrender, the player can decide whether the character surrenders, or tries a risky gambit to stun the villain before he can carry out his threat, or ignores the threat and attacks the villain, or flies away and becomes an insurance salesman. But if the character has the disadvantage “Protective of innocents”, then the character is more limited in the choice of actions he will consider. This disadvantage does not inhibit the character in carrying out whatever course of action he chooses to pursue. It just means that the character may not be able to perform the action which the player believes is optimum in that situation. Corresponding Champions disadvantages include Enraged and Psychological Limitation.

3. Story disadvantage. This type of disadvantage tells the GM to put specific additional elements into the adventures that cause trouble for the hero. For instance, if the character is wanted for a crime he did not commit, this can control the entire flow of adventures in which he participates. The character really wishes this wasn’t the case, and is constantly inconvenienced by having to stay one step ahead of the law. But the character doesn’t have any penalties to his abilities, and no restrictions on what actions he can choose to take. Corresponding Champions disadvantages include DNPC, Hunted.

4. Situational vulnerability. This means that certain story situations cause severe problems for your character. The classic example is Superman’s susceptibility to kryptonite; whenever the opponents have kryptonite, he is a much less powerful character. This is similar to a negative ability in that it materially reduces the character’s effectiveness, but feels quite different because it is applied more like a Story disadvantage. Corresponding Champions disadvantages include Dependence, Susceptibility, Vulnerability.

These classifications aren’t necessarily exclusive – an individual disadvantage may blur the line between two categories. But these represent what I think are the broad types of effects that disadvantages have. Actually, it is the first three I was really thinking of as describing the fundamental categories of disadvantages. But as I was writing this, I felt that the situational vulnerability was distinctive enough to be described in its own category.

Next article: How the classifications relate to the 2 goals.

Disadvantages, Part II: Design of the Champions disadvantage system

2009-09-20T17:31:00.000-07:00

In my previous post, I said that there were 2 different goals for disadvantage systems, encouragement and compensation. Now I will go into some more specific analysis and say that Champions, my reference system, is primarily designed for encouragement. By the way, when I say designed, I don't necessarily mean that it was intentionally designed with this goal in mind, but rather that the game design as it stands is most effective at supporting that goal.

The fact that Champions is designed to encourage disadvantages can be seen with a very high-level analysis, without actually looking at the disadvantages themselves. A fourth edition Champions character is built with 100 base points plus up to 150 points of disadvantages. Almost every character I've ever seen uses the maximum 150 points of disadvantages. This is very telling all by itself, strongly implying that the points that disadvantages give you is a very favorable trade in return for the disadvantages you suffer; in other words, that the points you get from disadvantages is more than they are really worth, so you want to take as many as you can. If the points from disadvantages were balanced to be exactly what they were worth, you would expect that a character built on 100 points with no disadvantages would be about as good as a normal 250 point character. This is not at all the case, 100 points is totally insufficient, such a character would be totally inadequate compared to a 250 point character (unless the 100 point character were built in a much more point efficient manner than the 250 point character, but this wouldn’t be a fair comparison).

This sort of structure, with disadvantages that are very favorable and a cap on the total amount, is very well suited for the goal of encouraging disadvantages, and seems to do an excellent job of achieving that. I can attest that most Champions players I know of spend quite a while sitting around trying to think of disadvantages which aren't part of their initial character conception, just so they can make the 150 points.

If, on the other hand, your goal is to fairly compensate people for disadvantages that are part of their basic character conception, this structure would seem a little weird. The compensation you get for building a character with a major flaw is not that really that you get extra points, since every character ends up with the same 250 points. Rather, the compensation is that you are not required to take as many other disadvantages. In effect, the advantage you get from wanting to play a character with serious disadvantages, is that you are an easier time picking your 150 points of disadvantages and are likely to be happier with the results. This is a workable mechanism, but sort of sub-optimum for this goal; it is odd that character conceptions for which it is easier to think of disadvantages cannot actually end up with more disadvantages then character conceptions which do not naturally lend themselves to a lot of disadvantages. And what happens if the flaws that arise directly from your character conception are more disadvantageous than the 150 points of disadvantages that a normal character takes? Then there is no way to be fairly compensated.

However, at this point this is all a bit too abstract to continue discussing without knowing more about the actual disadvantages themselves. So for the next article on this topic, I will start going into more detail by categorizing the types of disadvantages.

Next topic: Disadvantage classifications

Disadvantages, Part I: Overall Purpose

2009-09-13T09:47:00.000-07:00

A major game mechanic I've often thought about and analyzed is the disadvantage system. This is a complex subject, so I’ll start with some introductory analysis. The classic disadvantage system is that of Champions/Hero system, so I'll use that as my reference system. Role-playing game systems tend to have so many variations between different games that it is difficult to make any statement or use any terminology that is true across all games, so I think it is most practical to take one classic system as a reference model about which comments can be made that are true about many games, then describe the many variations at a later time.

What is a disadvantage system? When making a role-playing character in almost any system, you can make choices that determine how strong your character is in various categories, and you can make choices that grant your character extra advantages or abilities. In a point system like Champions, you pay for these extra abilities. In a system with disadvantages, you can make choices that are disadvantageous for your character, and you can get points back to spend on other things. These disadvantages can take many forms as listed in the individual system; examples include “one-eyed”, “wanted by police”, “won’t kill animals”, “unlucky”, or “afraid of spiders”.

In games without formal systems for disadvantages, some players will usually take some equivalent of disadvantages for their characters. This is particularly true of players who really like role playing. The player may decide that the character is obsessed with avenging her husband's murder, for instance. Or a whimsical player may decide that his dwarf drinks too much and smells bad. After all, the purpose of a role-playing game is to have fun, and making your character more complex and interesting can be a lot of fun. Other players, however, may be more interested in other aspects of the game and less interested in designing personality and back story, or they may have a very specific character design which is not particularly disadvantageous – perhaps a laid-back elven noble with an elaborate series of political connections. But whatever they choose, it has no impact on the formal character design and doesn't involve use of game rules.

An actual disadvantage system formalizes this process and assign some sort of value to each disadvantage. My analysis is that a disadvantage system has two distinct goals.

The first goal of a disadvantage system is to make characters more interesting by encouraging them to take characters with dramatic flaws as well as dramatic strengths, or by simply encouraging them to think a lot more about the personality and background of their character, creating more interesting facets of the character and more things for the game master to hook stories off of. Certainly this is very evident when comparing a bare-bones Champions character (one where the player builds the character according to the rules but doesn't add any optional written description) with a bare-bones D&D character. The D&D character has practically nothing on the sheet that indicates personality, except perhaps for some idea of the combat and noncombat styles and whatever stereotypes you might expect from their race, class, and statistics. With a Champions character, on the other hand, you can usually glean a lot about their major role-playing elements just by looking at the list of disadvantages. Of course, in D&D it is recommended that you write up a detailed back story, but many players don't do so. And even if they do so, the character may not have many really tangible flaws or problems that would make adventures more dramatic. And a disadvantage system not only encourages creating character flaws and hooks, it provides a standard structure for doing so, and a very helpful list of examples.

The second goal of a disadvantage system is to fairly compensate characters who put flaws into their character conception. If characters have to pay points for having positive attributes, it is only fair that they receive points back for having negative attributes. This is particularly true when you consider that, in many cases, not purchasing some sort of advantage that all the other characters have is equivalent to a disadvantage even in systems that don't have formal disadvantages, and you certainly are allowed to spend more points in other areas if you do so. The important point here is that most players, in addition to wanting their characters to be cool, want their characters to be effective, and are reluctant to intentionally weaken their characters in any significant way without getting something back. Receiving fair compensation for disadvantages makes players feel more free to make the character design choices they really want to make.

The second goal (compensation) may seem very similar to the first (encouragement), in the sense that the mechanism for achieving the first purpose is basically the same as for the second purpose - to compensate characters for having disadvantages. But in terms of how you analyze and craft the precise disadvantage mechanics, these are different goals. In particular, they would have different ideal end results. The ideal result of encouragement would be for every character, without exception, to have a large list of interesting disadvantages. Whereas the ideal result of compensation would say nothing about how many disadvantages the characters have - they should feel free to have many, few, or none, according to their conceptions, and know that they will be fairly compensated for the ones they picked.

Next Related Post

Not so impressive features of 4th edition D&D

2009-09-06T21:58:00.000-07:00

Previous related article

Since last article I wrote about some of the great features that really impress me in 4th edition D&D, now I’ll write about the things I didn’t like. But really, it is hard to find too many concepts I didn’t really like. So this is more of a list of things that don’t particularly impress me.

1. Feats. The idea of picking a feat every other level to customize your character sounds like a fine idea. But although I like the feat selection better than in third edition, I still find the execution of the feat concept to be not very exciting. When I look at the feats, especially in the powers books, I see a vast sea of weird, specialized abilities that I'm not really interested in taking, and a bunch of small bonuses that are almost more trouble keeping track of than they are worth. Even with the abilities they really mean something, it tends to be the case that some characters need a bunch of feats in order to complete their character conception, and others don't. So I find it frustrating that there is no way to "give up" anything to get more feats at low level; some character concepts just can't be implemented until the character reaches, say, 6th level. I think that part of the problem is that, for balance reasons, the effects of the feats have to be very small, but I'm not all that interested in having a large number of very small abilities. If I wanted to customize my character, I'd probably rather do something more dramatic, perhaps giving up one strong ability to gain a different strong ability, as is done with the alternate build options in the powers books.

2. Magic Items. The issue I have here is pretty much the same as with feats. For balance reasons, the powers of the magic items need to be pretty small. But having a whole bunch of specialized little powers just seems like a nuisance to keep track of. I'd rather consolidate 4 of my obscure little magic items into one big macho magic item. One problem is the idea of restricting the daily use of magic items. I think this idea is clever, but I'm not so thrilled with the execution. The number of daily uses you have is so limited that it really makes you prefer magic items with non-daily powers. In fact, it is often the case that finding a daily magic item is practically worthless if it's daily power is less good than that of the magic items you already have. Of course, some of the magic items (and feats) are actually quite good, but that appears to be a balancing mistake since the great majority are not so good.

3. Skill Challenges. I really like the idea of skill challenges, of trying to put in a full-featured noncombat skill resolution system like the awesome dramatic skill resolution system of Torg. But the skill challenge system seems to be very much a work in progress, a series of ideas and experiments about how a skill challenge might be made to work well. There doesn't seem to be one concrete finished system for me to analyze. So I await completion of the skill challenge rules so I can see how much I like them.

4. Action Points. This is probably one of my least favorite features. I certainly very much approve of the idea of adding something equivalent to "hero points" to the system. But I'm not very excited by the action point concept. There are a few situations in which being able to perform two big powers in the same round lets you do something cool and useful. But otherwise, the action point is just giving you an additional at-will attack. This just isn't very interesting. It is so uninteresting that many of my players seem to have a difficult time deciding when to use action points, because the effect is so bland that there doesn't seem to be much of a tactical reason to use it in one situation rather than another, or in one fight rather than another. And since you can use an action point in more than half of your fights, but can't use more than one per fight, they don't really have very much ability to let you save up your resources for the big fight. I like the special powers you sometimes get from spending an action point, especially from paragon paths, but tying these powers to taking an extra action just seems like a bit of a nuisance to me.

Impressive features of 4th edition D&D

2009-08-30T11:19:00.000-07:00

I was looking over 4th edition D&D and trying to summarize the things I really like and dislike about it. I actually found that, although I have various complaints about the execution of certain concepts, it is hard to find any major new idea I don’t like, and easy to find concepts I think are fantastic. So in this article, rather than concentrating on one aspect of the game, I’ll put down my overall list of the ideas I really liked.

First, concepts I think are my very favorite, ideas that would be good for any RPG. The weren’t necessarily first introduced by 4th edition D&D (I’m not keeping track), but when I saw them, I was really impressed, they made me think of things in a new way.

1) The tactical combat system. Although I don’t necessarily like every single element of the 4th edition combat system, overall, I am really impressed. I always liked how Champions allowed you to treat a combat as if it were a tactical board game, something interesting in and of itself. But I think 4th edition D&D does it much better. Combat is really fun! And making the combat system so good doesn’t seem to revolve around one new idea, but just a lot of hard work on a lot of things to make the system work so well. One of the features that really impresses me is how non-abstract the movement is, how important your exact position on the map is, in a non-trivial way. It allows movement-related powers to be really interesting, and allows characters to exert zones of control through opportunity attacks. This is something really different from most RPG’s I’m familiar with, where movement is just a way to go from “far away” to “close up” or vice-versa.
2) Taking ordinary monsters and making them distinctive and interesting. You know an idea is great when you think, “Why didn’t I think of that?” I can often remember thinking how much more interesting it was to fight a band of supervillains than, say, a bunch of mutated animals who just tried to bite you. I never really quite thought of just arbitrarily assigning interesting combat maneuvers and powers to different animals to make the combat more fun. The way 4th edition turns kobolds into many types of kobolds with different “powers”, even if they have no magic, is really cool. A bit wacky, perhaps, but the fun factor way outweighs that. I think the detailed combat system really supports this by allowing a wide variety of different powers; there is a synergy here, it would be harder to make interesting monster combat maneuvers with a less intricate combat system.
3) Minions. Although many games have distinguished between boss monsters and “cannon fodder”, there is something about the implementation of minions in 4th edition that I find really appealing and inspiring (article here). It is cool that the minion’s statistics are skewed for better playability – instead of being weaker overall, the minion has full accuracy and is not easy to hit, but does low damage and takes only one hit to kill. This combination seems great. I have some issues with the execution of the minion within the game – many powers are allowed that are too good against minions – but I think the concept is awesome. I would definitely use minions in other games I make.
4) Healing as a minor action. The way that healing works in 4th edition D&D, from a viewpoint of the underlying game mechanics, is quite clever. On one level, making healing a minor action is very nice because it allows healers to fight as well as heal, making them more fun to play. But on another level, by giving the healer two heals per combat that don’t cost attack actions, you are turning healing into an attribute of the group as a whole. It means that the group as a whole has some extra “group hit points” which can fill in where needed, in order to keep everyone conscious and fighting. A very good idea, I’ve considered doing something like that myself.

Next, I list things I think are generally good, and particularly great within the context of D&D, as compared to previous editions.

1) Game balance! In previous editions of D&D, the classes were so different from one another that it was practically impossible to compare them in a meaningful way to tell whether they were balanced with each other. Especially since they change dramatically with levels, and at a different rate than each other. If they were balanced, which is doubtful, it would be purely a matter of art and extensive playtesting. In 4th edition, the classes are all built with the same underlying mechanism, and go up with levels at roughly the same rate. It is possible to compare them, and they are pretty close to game balanced. I’ve always been a devotee of game balance, but making such a drastic change to D&D took guts.
2) Making martial and spellcasting classes work the same way. Certainly you can do this sort of thing in Champions/HERO system. But doing this within the classic D&D framework is not something that had really occurred to me as a possible way to modify D&D. But now that I see it, I think it is great, it really does feel like the martial classes are just as cool as the magical classes. It makes me want to use this concept more often. I should mention that the idea is not so much that martial and magical classes are indistinguishable – that would be boring – but rather that martial abilities are just as interesting as magical abilities.
3) Encounter Powers. Previous editions of D&D had at-will powers and daily powers. Creating encounter powers as an in-between is a great improvement, a way to allow potent abilities to have limited uses without all the problems associated with daily abilities. Actually, I was tempted to put this on the first list, seeing the concept of encounter powers put into play with such interesting power lists really inspired me. I just have some uncertainty about the execution, and whether once per encounter is really ultimately the best way to do the powers (as mentioned here). But I’ve no doubt that this is a great improvement over what preceded it.
4) Races. I just like a lot of things about the new races. I like the selection of races; more cool races and fewer small, cute races. I like the way the racial powers make the races more interesting. I like that races are designed in such a way that a 1st level character can belong to a race that normally produces high-level monsters, and it feels perfectly natural.

Some additional changes in 4th edition D&D that are not particularly novel, but which I approve of:

1) Switching hit points from a daily resource into a per-encounter resource. I’ve written an earlier article about this.
2) Having skills go up automatically with levels, and having skill training provide a fixed bonus.
3) Giving each class a certain type of armor proficiency and then assuming they will wear the best armor they are allowed to wear. Also, the way you add your Dex bonus to light armor but not to heavy armor.

And some more interesting things:
1) The skirmisher concept. The idea of giving a monster an arbitrary bonus for moving around the map, just to encourage it to move around, is pretty clever. I think I need a lot more experience to evaluate how well it works, but it is an intriguing concept.
2) Having healing restore a fraction of the character’s full hit points, by defining a “healing surge” value. A handy way to package and present a mathematically useful concept.
3) Rituals. Separating the noncombat spells from the combat spells seems like a great idea. I’d put this in my list of impressive concepts (article here), except that I haven’t actually been inspired to use any of the the rituals in my games.
4) Allowing inspiration to count as a legitimate source of healing, so that you can have fighters heal themselves and warlords as a martial healing class. Weird, but a pretty convenient way to use the healing mechanic without requiring a very specific type of character conception (the cleric).

Next related article

Game Transparency; Old School GM Style

2009-08-21T07:30:00.000-07:00

I really like some of the gamemastering articles associated with 4th edition D&D. They often tend to say exactly what I’ve been thinking myself. This was basically the case when I was reading the article on Game Transparency in Dragon 375. It is close enough to what I would say myself that there isn’t much for me to add, just to say it is a good article. In particle, I quite agree with the idea that if the players have no idea that a monster has fire resistance, and have no way to find it out, then that fire resistance has no tactical interest or meaning. In order for the players to devise interesting tactics based on the opponents, they need information about the opponents.

What the article also made me think about, though, is that many of the suggestions in the new D&D material are a matter of style. It reflects the attitude that the GM is basically an ally of the players, working with them to make the game as much fun as possible. I’ve always had this approach to role-playing games, but in terms of D&D, this is basically the “new school” attitude. This attitude is opposed by the “old school” approach, which still has many adherents. I was thinking about how to define the distinction.

The tradition of the old school play style is that the the adventure is full of truly deadly hazards, and the players must be extremely cautious and devious while they try their best to defeat the adventure as efficiently as possible. Sometimes it seems like the old school approach involves the GM being the opponent of the players, but that is not how I would put it. I think the ideal of the old school approach is that the GM sets up an adventure to be very challenging to the players, then runs the adventure with total impartiality. If the players come up with a clever idea, they can kill the big boss in his sleep; if they fail to notice an important trap, they may all die. Everything is totally fair, and the players control their own destiny. If the GM decides the players are getting too powerful, he adjusts the adventures accordingly, but only in a fair way. It is sort of like how a sporting organization works. If a given tactic proves too effective, that tactic is banned for everyone, but only at the beginning of a season, not in the middle of a game, because that would be unfair. In old school D&D, if a player had a powerful magic item, it would be fair to send thieves to steal it, but only if the players had a fair chance to set up guards, place magical wards, and so on.

To continue with the sports analogy, I would say the old school approach treats the game much like a competitive team sport. The goal is to do everything you can to win the game within the rules, and the nature of the competition and the challenge it presents is what is fun. If you aren’t trying to win, you aren’t really playing the game. Whereas the new school approach is more like playing a party game, where you are ostensibly trying to win, but in reality you are just using the structure of a game to have a good time. If you have a choice between trying to do whatever it takes to win, and being more whimsical and entertaining, it would appropriate to choose the latter.

I’ve always preferred the idea that the GM and the players are working together to create a memorable story and have a good time, and the GM should mix a “say yes” approach together with the impartiality needed to create an exciting adventure. The old idea of RPG tournaments, with the party who achieved the most success in the adventure being the winners, always seemed strange to me. In my mind, this seemed to encourage exactly the wrong thing, a party of hyper-competitive rules lawyers trying to beat the dungeon, not the sort of fun role-playing I prefer. In my preferred style, not only is the GM friendly to the players, but the players work with the GM, trying to go with the spirit of high adventure rather than tapping everything in the dungeon with 10-foot poles.

Nevertheless, the old school concept is theoretically sound. Pure competition has been exalted in games since time immemorial. Why not take this approach with role-playing games? It reminds me of playing a Star Fleet Battles tournament. Commanding your starship correctly requires mastery of hundreds of obscure rules and capabilities; forget even one, and your ship is destroyed. Not the sort of thing I really enjoy. But if you love pitting your skill against the opponent in pure, ruthless competition, you wouldn’t want it any other way.

Comparing Champions roles with D&D roles

2009-08-12T09:15:00.000-07:00

Previous related post: Identity of the character roles in 4th edition D&D

Last blog I discussed the relative purity of the roles in 4th edition D&D, and in doing so briefly mentioned the informal roles from Champions. So I thought I’d compare the meaning and use of the role concept in the two systems.

The 4th edition D&D role concept is a less concentrated form of the role concept in MMO’s, where every class has a specific purpose during combat. The ideal fight would seem to involve the defenders standing in front and absorbing damage, the strikers killing monsters, the leaders healing the defenders and boosting the attacks of the strikers, and the controllers hiding in back and helping everyone out by softening up the monsters with area effect attacks and inhibiting them with status effects.

The old role concept from Champions had a different purpose. It was meant to describe the kind of characters that would be found in a typical superhero group. Since Champions is a point-based game where you can design your character anyway you like, the roles might be seen as similar to D&D classes in describing what kind of character you appear to be. But they are also like fourth edition roles in describing what general capabilities the character is supposed to have.

The Champions roles have been formalized in different ways. The list of roles my playing group used to use was Brick, Martial Artist, Energy Projector, Mentalist, and Other. Other included some recognizable but less archetypes such as Gadgeteer and Speedster, as well as weird characters who defied description. Actually, I was never completely happy with the idea that Mentalist was on the list, since in the comic books this was not nearly as common a role as the other major roles (except among mutant superhero teams). But since Champions devoted a fair amount of attention to defining mental powers, and Mentalists are stupendously useful, it was sort of a tradition that the classic Champions group would have a Mentalist. Anyway, that is beside the main point of this article.

One difference is that Champions roles were totally informal. In effect, they were essentially stereotypes that characters tended to fall into; there was no particular need for characters to fit their role. Characters who fit the roles exactly, and characters who completely defied the expectations of the standard roles, were both equally valid types of characters and were equally encouraged. On the one hand, you had articles extolling the virtues of the “well balanced” super team. And on the other hand, you had people extolling the virtues of thinking outside the box when making your character. But regardless which you preferred, there was a general sense of what the completely classic version of each character role would look like.

Here is my description of the classic Champions character types. The Brick was super strong and super tough, but somewhat slow and not too smart. The Martial Artist was extremely skillful both in and out of combat, but couldn't take much punishment. The Energy Projector had a versatile array of ranged powers. The Mentalist wasn't too tough, but had a versatile array of mental powers. And who knows what the Other did, so we will ignore them.

The obvious approach would be to directly equate these Champions roles to similar looking D&D roles. So the brick is a defender, the martial artist is a melee striker, the energy projector is a ranged striker, and the mental list as a controller (Champions had nothing similar to a leader). But this doesn’t quite seem to fit. The brick was not only considered to be the toughest member of the team, but also the hardest hitting. This would seem to make him both a defender and a striker, which doesn't make much sense in D&D terms - what are the other classes for?

For one thing, the brick may have been the toughest member of the group, but that didn't account for the fact that the brick was easy to hit. After all, champions doesn't have the D&D peculiarity of merging armor and agility into the same value. The incredible agility of the martial artist meant that, potentially, he could be just as good or better defensively than the brick. But the 2 kinds of defenses had very different feels to them. The brick had the advantage of much more reliable staying power. If the martial artist was attacked in a way that he wasn't prepared to defend against, he could quickly get slaughtered, while the brick was just going to take a lot of punishment to put down whatever you did. And the brick could afford to intercept attacks against others, or run into dangerous zones of damage, or otherwise use his defenses in a more flexible fashion. But on the other hand, if the enemy had some sort of "control" power, it was quite possible that the easy-to-hit brick would be neutralized, while the martial artist would dodge the attack with ease.

And while the brick had the biggest single attack, his slow speed meant that he didn't necessarily have the best total damage output. And if he was being blinded or knocked around, he might miss a lot of attacks and even have a somewhat low damage output. But he could hurt guys who were too tough for the others to hurt. And when it came time to perform a group combination attack, it often ended up with a gigantic haymaker from the brick.

So in theory, the brick and the martial artist would have comparable total offense and defense but in very different ways. The energy projector would have somewhat less defense but the advantage of range. Also, the energy projector had a more versatile selection of powers, the ability to do things other than just blast the enemy. But the mentalist was the real master doing things differently, with the ability to ignore normal defenses completely and attack in ways that the villains may not be capable of dealing with.

In practice, though, it should be said that the brick very often was just flat out more powerful than the martial artist and energy projector. Bricks were often more powerful than energy projector is because, in Champions, they are more point efficient. And in games modeling the comic books, martial artists were often less powerful than bricks because they the party experts at noncombat skills, rather than masters of raw combat power. Similar to the thief in first edition D&D. Of course, fourth edition D&D made a conscious decision to delete the concept of a character whose special role is being good in noncombat.

Overall, it seems that the Champions role describes the combat style of the character rather than an MMO-style role. Although each role has certain expectations, they are more subtle than being a “DPS” or a “tank”. The Champions roles are perhaps more primitive, less useful for building a game where every character has a very clear role within the party. But on the other hand, I think they are more intuitive. The idea that a D&D paladin is an expert at forcing enemies to attack him is sort of a funny “game think” idea. The more natural idea to someone not familiar with the MMO role concept is that a paladin is a brave, heavily armored guy with a little bit of healing power. This would be more equivalent to the Champions role concept.

Identity of the character roles in 4th edition D&D

2009-08-03T18:54:00.000-07:00

In 4th edition D&D, there are 4 official character roles: Defender, Striker, Leader, Controller. Each role is supposed to have a specific purpose within the party. I've observed that some of the roles have a clear, unified identity, while other roles seem to be a combination of multiple sub-roles which could potentially be separated.

The purpose of a striker is to deal maximum damage to a single opponent, and the powers given to strikers allow them to deal extra damage to a single opponent. This is the simplest and most pure of the roles. There is one clear purpose to the role, and one type of power which directly serves that purpose.

Actually, the description in the Player’s Handbook mentions that strikers also have powers to help them single out a specific target they want to attack. But in practice this doesn’t really seem to be a distinction, different strikers have a wide variety of powers that help them or inhibit them from attacking a specific target, or no such powers at all.

The purpose of a defender is to protect the party by absorbing the enemy’s attacks. Defenders have two powers to achieve this – the ability to force enemies to attack the defender instead of someone else, and high defenses to absorb that damage. This is slightly more complicated than the striker, since these two powers could mechanically be separated – you could have the ability to draw attacks without having high defenses. But it doesn’t seem like a good idea! If you have the ability to draw attacks, having high defenses is practically required, so really defenders have a single clearly identifiable focus.

Leaders have one purpose – to help out the rest of the party – and two sub-roles – healing and support (support referring to improving teamwork and making other party members more effective). In terms of theme, these naturally fit together as ways of helping out the rest of the party. But mechanically, there is no particular reason these two sub-roles need to be combined. It would work perfectly fine to have a character with healing and no support abilities, or vice-versa. The reason to fit them together is that both fulfill the leader’s purpose, so if you want to play your character as being the party’s support character, you would want both abilities.

Controllers are the real mystery. Controllers have strong area effect attacks, and the ability to place enemies under various conditions. What these two types of powers have to do with each other beats me. They don’t seem related in either game mechanics or theme. The controller role doesn’t seem very descriptive. When I see references to a class having “controller abilities”, I never know which type of power that refers to. The theme of the controller seems to be “the offense-oriented class that isn’t a striker”.

Maybe the purpose of grouping these powers under the controller role is based more on having a fair division of labor. 25% of the characters focus on concentrated damage, 25% on absorbing damage, and 25% on healing and support, and 25% on other forms of offense. By putting one of each role in the party, you know you have everything covered. If there were separate roles for area effect offense and true control, there would be five roles, and if players chose them evenly, then 40% of the party would be special offense. If 25% special offense is the right amount, then having 5 roles would lead to too much special offense and not enough of the other roles. So perhaps grouping multiple abilities under controller leads to a good distribution of classes.

This reminds me somewhat of Champions, where some of the classic roles were Brick, Martial Artist, Energy Projector, Mentalist, and Other. Other wasn’t very descriptive – it just referred to characters who had some sort of strange powers. You might have the power to control luck, or to turn into an energy-draining ghost, or to transform enemies into animals. It didn’t really say much about what exactly you were or what you did. But when it came to party composition, it was sort of fitting that a “classic” party would have a good selection of traditional superhero archetypes, plus room for one character who does something totally different, whatever it may be.

Next related post: Comparing Champions roles with D&D roles

Full Defense actions

2009-07-25T15:48:00.000-07:00

This week I am discussing some of the issues behind the “full defense” actions in games. A classic full defense action is a type of combat maneuver in many games in which you spend an entire round (depending on how the game manages time) doing nothing but defend yourself, and in return the attacker suffers a penalty to hit you. In some games you have to declare the full defense maneuver without knowing whether you are attacked, while in other games you can declare full defense in response to being attacked. For purposes of discussion both have similar properties, although obviously the latter is a much more favorable rule.

The important game effect of a true full defense action is that it is not a maneuver performed for the purpose of winning the combat. In a straight one-on-one combat where your goal is to defeat the opponent without being defeated yourself, in the absense of extenuating circumstances, performing a full defense action is always a losing maneuver – it increases your chance of being defeated. Many games are deceptive in this regard, implying that a full defense action is an appropriate reaction to being attacked in a heated combat. When the full defense maneuver is named something like "Parry”, and you have the option to take full defense on some actions and attack on other actions, this may at first glance seem like a reasonable idea. But in fact, this is not so. Every round in which you perform a full defense action, you cannot hurt the opponent, but they have a chance of hurting you. In abstract terms, essentially what you are doing is taking a small amount of damage in return for slowing down the combat. But in a straight out one-on-one combat for victory, slowing down the combat (i.e. making it take longer to finish) has no benefit whatsoever, since the combat keeps going until one person wins or the other. So the full defense has no tactical value. It is only useful if there is some way in which the tactical situation is significantly different from this simplified straight up one-on-one combat.

As I mentioned, some games are deceptive and may even give combat example suggesting that it would be appropriate to occasionally respond to an attack with a full defense action, one with a deceptive name such as Parry or Block or Dodge. The trouble is that the kind of parry or block which one might perform as part of a duel is simply not at all modeled by the full defense action. In many games, that sort of defensive action is something the character is assumed to perform automatically as part of a normal attack action. So the good roleplayer should be describing how he blocked or dodged attacks which miss him, rather than actually using the full defense action. A classic full defense should be not be expected in this situation; a player shouldn’t be penalized with a lower chance of winning the battle just because he is creative in describing his actions. I really like how 4th edition D&D calls the maneuver “total defense”, making it perfectly clear that a full defense is an extreme action that takes you temporarily out of the fight.

However, full defense is only truly useless in the abstraction of the straight one-on-one combat, and only if the game does not define other interacting rules to make it more effective. So I will go over some of situations in which full defense can be effective – the situations that define what the purpose of a full defense rule actually is.

For the purposes of this discussion, I will define full defense as a “winning combat maneuver” in situations where it could possibly increase your chance of winning a straight up one-on-one fight, and a "losing combat maneuver" in situations in which it can do nothing but lose such a fight.

First, I shall describe some of the ways in which games can adjust the rules to transform a full defense action into a winning combat manevuer.

1. In some games, characters do not always have the same number of actions; some characters may earn actions at a faster rate than others. If a character is allowed to use full defense against every enemy attack action, and the character still has actions left over, he can use his extra actions to attack. This means that it is mathematically possible that this could be a winning strategy – that the reduction of the enemy’s chance of hitting could actually be more significant than the reduction to the faster character’s number of actions, such that the faster character gains a fighting edge by using full defense. In order for this to work, the defense bonus for the full defense action needs to be fairly large, unless for some reason the characters have far more actions than the opponents.
An example of this is Champions. In that game if you have a 6 speed and 11 dcv, and the opponent has 4 speed and 9 ocv, then if you dodge every time you are attacked, you lose 2/3 of your actions, but the opponent's chance of hitting is reduced by more than 3/4. Therefore, you come out ahead by dodging.
Unfortunately, Champions also shows the weakness of this approach. If dodging is good, then a lot of dodging is better. But if you dodge every enemy attack, then even your own offense is reduced by 2/3, and the fight would take 3 times as long to play out. Ignoring the question of who wins or loses, this just isn't fun because the fight becomes interminably long. And in fact, Champions characters actually heal at a fairly rapid rate during combat, so in fact the fight could go on practically forever. It is so impractical I’ve never seen anyone even consider trying this. It does mean that the fast character could choose to occasionally dodge just for fun without being penalized, which is amusing. But mechanically, the trade-off between effectiveness and tedium is not a very desirable one.

2. Some games give you a bonus in later rounds of combat when you perform the full defense action. In Torg, performing a full defense action successfully can sometimes let you draw an extra card. In the Lost Worlds combat booklet game (this is not an RPG, but still works as an example), if you perform a full defense action against the right kinds of attacks, the enemy may be pulled out of position and vulnerable to your counter attack. I like this method of turning full defense into a winning combat maneuver, it seems like a flexible and fun approach. It does not restrict whether the full defense bonus needs to be small or large, since you can simply adjust the additional bonus you are giving to be smaller or larger.
The tricky point here is that if full defense is a good way to set your next round of combat, you can easily end up in a situation where every character simply alternates between full defense and attack every other round of combat. This isn't a disaster, but it is strange and awkward. Both of the games I listed above have ways to prevent this problem. In Torg, you can only get a bonus card for dodging if defense is an approved action that round, and it is random which actions are approved each round. Lost Worlds is a game based on the “outguess” principle of rock-paper-scissors, so any predictable strategy like this will automatically lose.

3. It is possible to design the game so that what might, at first glance, appear to be a classic full defense action, is actually something different once you consider the interaction with the other rules. For instance, in Burning Wheel, at first glance some of the individual combat maneuvers such as Block appear to be full defense actions which would act strictly as losing combat maneuvers. But this assumes you can only perform one action at a time, which is only true for slow characters. Fast characters can have multiple actions in a round that are performed simultaneously. And performing Block and Strike actions simultaneous is a totally different type of action from full defense; it is more akin to the standard attack action in other games.

Next, I shall list some of the reasons why a classic full defense action, despite being a “losing” combat maneuver, can be effective and desirable in a variety of specialized tactical situations. These situations are typically the primary mechanical reason for including a full defense action in a game.

1. The most obvious situation is when you are under attack and you are unable or unwilling to counter attack or escape, so all you can do is try to wait things out. Perhaps you are trying to survive while you reason with a violent opponent, or you're waiting for someone who has gone berserk to calm down and regain their reason, or intangible poltergeists are throwing things at you and there is no other action you can take.
In many game rules, if you are trying to escape, you are better off spending your entire round moving rather than attempting a full defense action. But in games where you can't substitute your attack action for increased movement, a character who is trying to escape will instead want to substitute his attack action for a full defense action. And if the full defense bonus is very large, it may be better to move more slowly and have an extremely strong defense.

2. You are temporarily unable to attack due to the tactical situation. For instance, in fourth edition D&D, if you are immobilized and you have no ranged attacks, you may find it worthwhile to go on total defense until you are allowed to move and attack again.

3. To wear down an opponent with expendable resources. If the enemy is throwing one use attacks at you, or they are expending endurance at a rapid rate, you may wish to use full defense, knowing that you will have an advantage later in the fight when your opponent has expended his abilities and you have not.
The opposite of this is when you have a powerful maneuver of your own which you have expended, and you are buying time to recharge it.

4. To tie down a very powerful opponent. If you are attacked by an opponent who is much more powerful than you, it might be worthwhile to go on full defense and try to survive long enough for your allies to finish up what the other enemies and come help you out. The idea is that if the opponent's actions are more effective than your own actions, it is beneficial for you to perform a full defense which costs both of you a large portion of your effectiveness. The key to this, and some of the following reasons, is that even though you pay a cost for full defense (the fact that you can still take damage and your target can’t), if the reduction in the effectiveness of the enemy’s action is more significant than the lose of your entire action, you come out ahead.
Some similar to this is the situation in which you have temporarily got yourself in a bad matchup with an opponent you cannot handle, and you need to wait for your allies to come rescue you.

5. If you simply outnumber the opponents, losing actions costs your site a lot less proportionately than it costs the other side, so if you know exactly who they're going to attack, it can be worthwhile to have those people perform full defense while everyone else smashes the enemies at full strength.

6. When you are personally outnumbered, and you can perform a single full defense action against all of the enemy attacks, it may be favorable in terms of action balance for you to sacrifice some actions in order to make a much larger number of enemy attack actions less effective.

7. If you are simply waiting for a certain event to occur, an event which will either end the fight or make you much more powerful, then you have a vested interest in making the fight go longer and you may be interested in taking full defense. Whether you actually do may depend on whether it is more effective to use full defense or to attack the enemies in order to reduce their numbers and thus the amount of damage they cause.

8. If your character has very strong passive abilities and very little attack ability, you may wish to take full defense just so that you can survive long enough to gain the full benefit of your passive abilities, since your attack abilities don't matter much anyway. For instance, if you are playing the “coach” and all you do is give tactical bonuses to the other characters.

Analysis – Let it Ride rule from the Burning Wheel

2009-07-16T19:15:00.000-07:00

In the roleplaying game the Burning Wheel, there is a rule called “Let it Ride” that states that when you have a lengthy, multipart task which requires a certain skill, you should only have to roll the skill check once, and that skill roll is applied to every part of the extended task. Today I’m analyzing this rule and the context behind it.

On the positive side, I can totally see where this rule is coming from. The author mentions that it is directed against the concept of “roll until you fail.” This is a good way of putting it, I have experienced and hated that very same problem myself.

The problem here involves lengthy skill uses which take up considerable "screen time" and involve many sub-elements. For instance, trying to sneak into an enemy base involves sneaking past many areas with sentries or other dangers. Each time, there is logically a chance that the character would be spotted. Indeed, in the movie, there would be a bit of suspense as the character tries to sneak past each individual area where he might be spotted. So it is probably natural for the GM to want to call for a stealth skill check each time the character does something that risks getting spotted.

Unfortunately, when combined with the ordinary skill check rules used in a normal role-playing game, this can easily go disastrously wrong.

The main problem stems from the fact that the probabilities assigned to a skill check usually assume that the check will only be performed once. The GM is expected to determine a difficulty rating according to how hard the check seems to be. So a highly skilled character might have a 70% chance of succeeding in a "hard" skill check, for instance. This is okay when the hard skill check is to quickly repair a badly damaged sports car; since the individual steps aren't very interesting and quite possibly would occur "off-screen", the GM would probably call for one check and see if it succeeds or fails. But in the example of sneaking into the enemy base, the GM might decide it seems like a hard thing to do, and call for 6 hard skill rolls. But this disregards the fact that since failure in any of those roles of essentially means total failure, you have to succeed all 6 times, and that is much much harder than succeeding once. Now your chance of success is only 12% instead of 70%.

Not only is this excessively difficult, but the whole process is very arbitrary. The difficulty of the task ends up depending on how many sub-tasks the GM decides to split it into, and there is no telling how many of these there will be. This can even mean that if the player is good at role-playing and describes his actions in a more thorough and interesting fashion, the GM will think of more opportunities to call for skill checks, and the chance of succeeding will drop. Not much fun at all. I can recall playing games where you just knew there was no way the GM would allow you to succeed in a multi-part self check, even though the GM probably wasn't aware that this was what he was doing.

Even if the GM is fully aware of this problem, however, and wants to make the individual rolls easier, there are further issues. Unless the GM has considerable mathematical sophistication, determining how much easier to make the individual rolls is difficult. After all, there are no guidelines in the game for how to adjust difficulties based on number of rolls required for the check. It would be all too easy to over compensate or under compensate. Especially when you may not be sure how many rolls you are going to end up requiring beforehand. Also, the kind of adjustments required would depend upon the type of dice rolling used in the game.

Trying to convert to making numerous skill checks with a tiny chance of failure is just awkward. There isn't a lot of granularity. If you are making skill checks on d20, for instance, the chance of rolling 3+ 6 times in a row is 53%. Improving the skill check to 2+ increases the odds to 74%. And the next step up is 100%. This means that there is no way to map the many different success probabilities the characters might have on their skills; whether your normal chance of success is 8+ or 5+, the closest you can get to the same probability when rolling 6 times is 2+ either way. You certainly can't easily use a formula like add +6 to your skill bonus, as small variations in skill bonus or difficulty number would mean major changes to the overall chance of success.

But getting the odds correct still leaves a further problem. Rolling many checks, each of which has only a small chance of failure, is not necessarily as exciting as one might like. Rolling a d20, and trying to get 3+, means that a roll of 3 and a roll of 19 are pretty much the same thing. It feels odd, like you aren't really demonstrating your skill, but rather rolling dice to see if your character screws up. When you're rolling for tiny sub tasks, it is hollow to succeed extremely well in one sub task when failure in the remaining sub tasks are just as likely to make it a totally moot point. While if you “Let it Ride” and let one skill roll cover the entire task, it is much easier for the GM to interpret the overall quality of the roll in determining the amount of success you achieve.

For all of these reasons, I think the “Let it Ride” rule is a considerable improvement over the alternative of “roll until you fail”. My only complaint is that I still feel it is pretty far from the optimum rule for complex skill uses. It goes too far the other way. When you have a multi-part skill check with many possible points of failure, you either fail right up front or not at all. As I mentioned earlier, in an actual movie or book every point of failure would be a point of suspense, and you can never be sure whether the entire operation will succeed, or if not, at what point it will fail. But when one skill roll covers everything, once you succeeded in one task, you automatically succeed in every subsequent task – not very dramatic. Of course the difficulty could increase, but if you fail the check because of this, you may feel less like you failed and more like the GM suddenly pulled a dirty trick on you. Of course, the GM could have every task become more difficult than the last, but that means the GM is really “cooking” the adventure in a very specific way. And that it runs head-on into another problem, which is that if you know your roll is low or high to begin with, you can take advantage of this in illogical ways - retreating because you know you are bound to fail the next check, or taking all sorts of extra risks because you know your roll is so high you can't fail.

I think the best solution to this kind of thing is a much more elaborate system for resolving complex “skill challenges”, something like the superb Dramatic Skill Resolution system in Torg. Indeed, the Burning Wheel itself has a very simple version of such a system. But this is a difficult area in which the state-of-the-art in game design is still under development, I don't think any existing skill system I know of would really hit the “multi-part infiltration” scenario totally on the head.

Game Rule Goals, part 3

2009-07-09T12:52:00.000-07:00

Continuing my discussion of the various possible goals of game rules. The truth is, the goals which I've really thought about and considered for a long time and wanted to describe are those of realism, genre simulation, and entertaining game mechanics. But as I started writing this series of articles, I felt I needed to try to give fair coverage to the goals of games which seem to be trying to meet goals which were not one of these 3.

The next possible goal of a game rule or game mechanic is novelty. One of the reasons to create a new game mechanic for a game, rather than reusing a game mechanic used in older games, above and beyond any specific benefits the new rule might be trying to achieve, is just the fact that the game mechanic is interesting purely because it is new and distinctive. Making your game seem new and distinctive could be valuable in marketing a game.

Another aspect of game rules is consistency with other rules. I'm not sure whether I should classify this as a goal or a constraint, in fact I'm not sure I've made a good distinction between the two. It is a generally good thing in games to make elegant and consistent game rules. But it certainly comes to mind that I've seen games which place an extremely high value on the goal of "universality", of making sure that every possible situation is covered by an extension of the basic universal game rules, with as little possible modification of these rules to fit the specific situation. The idea of having some universal rules that cover everything might seem similar to a minimalist approach, but the examples I'm thinking of are quite different. In the old game DC Heroes, practically every object or situation was giving a measurement in terms of AP’s. In many cases this seemed unnatural and made the corresponding rule seem more complex and harder to follow. But ensured that every situation could be described in a way that it was covered by the basic universal rules of AP’s.

Finally, while I’m on the subject of purposes of rules, one of my favorites is game balance. Certainly when I make game rules, game balance might not be the overall purpose of the game, but many of individual rules have the purpose of making sure the various aspects of the game are correctly balanced with each other, with no options that are excessively good or bad.

So in summary, the game rule goals I've covered are:

1. Realism
2. Genre Simulation
3. Self Simulation
4. Entertaining Game Mechanics
5. Minimalism
6. Atmospheric Game Mechanics
7. Novelty
8. Universality
9. Game Balance

I don’t really claim to be putting together a conclusive list here, and my criteria haven’t really been rigorously thought out, but I wanted to put some ideas up for discussion and refinement.

Now, my own great passion is for making game rules with the goal of genre simulation, with a secondary focus on making entertaining game mechanics and maintaining game balance.

What I often find interesting is the interplay between the various goals. When trying to make a perfect game, the “simulation” goals (realism, genre simulation, and self-simulation) are somewhat exclusive - you need to decide what it is you are trying to simulate, if reality and fantasy work differently you can't simulate both at the same time. But genre simulation, entertaining game mechanics, and game balance are things I would all want at the same time, but in many cases it is very difficult to make a rule which optimizes one goal without interfering with other goals.

For instance, I think fourth edition Dungeons & Dragons has really ramped up the entertaining game mechanics and game balance, but at some cost in terms of believability (the simulation aspect). For instance, consider the paralyzing touch of a ghoul. It is very difficult to create a convincing mental picture of why a partially paralyzed character is unable to move from his space but maintains his full agility and combat prowess. But it sure is a whole lot more fun for the player than having his character rendered totally helpless for the entire combat. I think it was overall a good change, but I'm still tempted to think that, ultimately, I'd like to create a rule that is also fun and balanced, but which makes more sense as part of a fantasy story.

Game Rule Goals, part 2

2009-07-02T15:21:00.000-07:00

Before I go on discussing game goals, I'd like to discuss a couple of goals that I am not considering to be the kind of goals that I am discussing. One is the goal of making the game fun. This is practically a universal goal of every game, but it begs the question, "what is it that actually makes the game fun?" The differing goals I’m discussing are each for the purpose of making the game fun from a certain point of view. The second is the goal of playability. If playability means making the game easy to play, then for the purposes of my discussion I would describe it as a constraint rather than a goal. After all, if your only goal were to make a game that is easy to play, you could make a game that was infinitely easy to play by making no game at all. Trying to make a game easy to play is only a challenge when there is something else that you are trying to achieve with the game.

A different interpretation of the word “playability” is what I am getting at with my next major goal of game rules, which I found difficult to describe succinctly. I think "entertaining game mechanics" is most descriptive, though “gaminess” is more concise. This means that playing the game mechanics according to the rules is just intrinsically entertaining to do, regardless of the role-playing context. An example of what I mean here is that a lot of modern “Eurogame”-style board games seem very strong on entertaining game mechanics. Compared to more straightforward older games, a lot of the modern board games have ingenius, clever game mechanics that are fun to play and may have very little to do with the ostensible theme of the game.

The role-playing game that I always thought brought entertaining game mechanics to the forefront was Torg. An element that comes to mind is that of approved actions. This rule gave you a strong in-game bonus for performing nonviolent combat actions such as tricking, taunting, or intimidating the opponents, instead of attacking the opponents. This was cool and different and a lot of fun to do. What I think is interesting to mention is that this rule, which I always admired and found extremely entertaining, greatly advance the goal of entertaining game mechanics but actually worked somewhat against the goal of genre simulation. The idea of these approved actions definitely fit the cinematic genre of Torg. But in Torg, we were using these actions several times per combat per character, to an extent that was amusing but rather silly. Although at the time Torg was my favorite game, I felt that if I wanted to play an adventure that I was really going to take seriously, I would be better off with one of the earlier, more primitive games.

Although I said earlier that ease of play was not something I would describe as a goal, now I'm thinking I could incorporate this somewhat differently as the goal of "minimalism". My passion is for game mechanics, but many games are really designed on the strength of the source material. If this is the fundamental core of your game, you might decide that you want to emphasize that source material and de-emphasize the game mechanics, by making the simplest, easiest, and most concise game rules that still support the minimum requirements for a set of role-playing game rules. Note that this is quite different from genre simulation. With genre simulation, you are trying to make sure that the tactics and outcomes that follow from the rules match what you would expect to see in an adventure of the genre. So when the adventure is done, a recap of the story matches, say, a comic book or a movie. With minimalism, the emphasis is more on the state of mind of the players during the game, on making sure the players are immersed in this scenario and not thinking about the rules. The rules may not do much to encourage cinematic gameplay or character actions, but they also don't distract the players. Minimalism seems appropriate for a game that emphasizes pure role-playing.

If you are trying to particularly emphasize the source material, an opposite approach is the goal of “atmospheric" game rules. Instead of hiding the game mechanics, you bring them to the forefront, because fiddling with the game rules inherently brings out some aspect of the mood of the game that you are trying to convey. My example here is the game "My Life with Master", which I recently read. It has a rather humorous set of rules where character actions for your gothic monster servants are based on concepts like Fear, Weariness, and Self-Loathing. It might appear that these rules serve the goal of genre simulation, but on my reading of the rules I would say that the actual effect of the rules upon the execution of the game is mostly random and would do little to make the action better fit that of the fiction the game is loosely based on. Rather, I would say the strength of the rules is more likely that just talking about rolling your Self-Loathing dice is cool and amusing and encourages you to play the game in the style that the rules intend.

(to be continued next article)

Game Rule Goals, part 1

2009-06-18T14:53:00.000-07:00

On my blog, I like to analyze game rules and determine whether they are effective and desirable, and I like to analyze games and suggest new game rules that would improve the game, and I like to design game rules for new games. However, thinking of role-playing games, it is important to note that there are different goals which one might be trying to achieve with a game or a game rule, and sometimes a game rule might be well suited towards achieving one goal, but badly suited for another. So I thought I'd describe some of the classic role-playing game goals.

Probably the most classic goal is the goal of realism. When a rule is being judged according to the goal of realism, it is judged according to whether the effect of the rule is as similar to real life as possible. Before D&D was invented, its predecessors in the hobby game field were wargames, which descend from the concept of actual wargames used to study actual military tactics. The traditional goal of old wargames was realism. This is to say that such games were unconcerned with playability and fun. These are required considerations in the design of any game. But with the focus on realism, these are treated as constraints, with the desire being to maximize realism while maintaining the desired level of playability. I always enjoy reading the Designer Notes of old Avalon Hill wargames, with the detailed discussions of how and why the game rules were chosen in such a way as to maximize historical accuracy.

A second, somewhat different goal is that of genre simulation. When a rule is being judged according to genre simulation, it is judged according to whether the flavor and situations resulting from the rule match the source material of the game as closely as possible. The source material is typically works of fiction, and the difference between realism and genre simulation is the difference between how the world works in fiction, and how it works in real life.

Going back to the original Dungeons & Dragons, it was clearly designed with some core game rules meant to simulate the fantasy genre. The idea of hit points that increase massively as characters gain experience is clearly not realistic, but meant to simulate the idea that the fantasy characters are larger than life, and that great mythological heroes are not going to be killed by a single stray arrow. And, of course, aspects of the game like the magic system couldn't possibly be realistic because the setting of the game is not based on real life, but on fantasy.

When I think back to old D&D, however, my memory of the rules discussions in the old game magazines was that they tended to focus on realism as a goal, rather than genre simulation. It seems to me that in 1st edition D&D, and a lot of other games, genre simulation was used more as an inspiration of the rules rather than a goal of rules. That is, the fantasy genre was used as inspiration to create the fundamental game rules, but once those were created, the original source material was no longer used to guide the development of new rules. Rather, the goal was what I might call "self simulation". The game became its own genre, and the focus of new rules and supplements was to logically extend the game as defined by the basic game rules.

An example of self simulation would be the third edition D&D idea of putting law vs. chaos as magical concepts on a par with good vs. evil, so that you would have lawful weapons that damaged chaotic creatures and so on. The goal here certainly isn't realism, nor is it based on genre simulation (there are certainly fantasy works that involve the forces of law vs. chaos, but not, I think, in the style of D&D, where you have lawful good and lawful evil in some sense banded together against chaotic good and chaotic evil). Rather, this is driven by looking at the alignment system and trying to extend it to its full logical extent. If you already defined that there are 9 equally valid alignments, and they "great wheel" cosmology which implies again that all of the alignment axes are equally important, then it creates a pleasing sense of logical completeness to put law vs. chaos on equal terms with good vs. evil in the game rules.

Going back to early D&D rules discussions, however, and the frequent focus on realism. D&D didn't seem to be founded on the basis of realism, but it did seem to be surrounded in an atmosphere that considered realism a highly appropriate goal. The fact is that the D&D rules were the most realistic RPG rules in existence, since they were the only RPG rules in existence. So it is hard to meaningfully discuss the intended goal of the core game rules compared to other games. However, certainly could be said that many of the individual rules could be easily recognized as realistic in intent. For instance, discussions of keeping track of your exact monetary status, of tracking the passage of time so that you know when your six-hour supply lantern oil is used up, and so on.

What I always found strange was the way that game rule concepts would focus on realism while simultaneously incorporating without question certain highly unrealistic game mechanics, creating very strange results. For instance, the idea that when you are hit by a fireball, it would be realistic to check to see whether all of the wooden items on your person catch on fire. This ignores the complete unreality of the character himself surviving the fireball without being totally disabled by serious burns. If the core game mechanic being modified here was trying to be realistic, it would make sense to add extra rules to make it more realistic. But when the core game mechanic is not trying to be realistic, I think this kind of rule just sacrificed playability for no real gain.

(to be continued when I return from vacation).

Level progression balance discrepancy - statistic bonuses

2009-06-11T10:17:00.000-07:00

In my previous article, I described the impressive way in which the level progression in fourth edition Dungeons & Dragons has been balanced such that character abilities retain more or less the same balance relative to each other as the characters gain levels. In general, attack, defense, damage, and skills all go up at the right rate to remain generally in proportion as the characters gain levels, and prevent high-level characters from becoming progressively more polarized. However, there is one major discrepancy in this system - the fact that character statistics do not go up at the same rate. This creates a number of discrepancies as the characters gain levels.

1. Each character build has certain primary and secondary statistics needed for the class. Many of the builds, and the suggestions for those bills, imply that you would want to concentrate on 3 statistics. However, this makes no sense as far as level progression is concerned because you can only increase 2 of your statistics at the maximum rate. Of course, it is possible to divide your statistic increases between 3 statistics. But the problem with this is that you will fall farther and farther behind a character who divides his statistic increases between only 2 statistics. Primary statistics are used to calculate your attack bonus, so it is absolute essential that they be increased at a maximum rate to comply with the mathematics of the game. Otherwise, you will become less accurate than the other characters as you gain levels. This is why the idea of a character class with 2 primary statistics and a secondary statistic, like a paladin, just doesn't work. It is relatively feasible (if not optimal) to make such a character at low levels, but as the character increases in levels, one of those statistics has to be left behind or the character has to become less and less powerful compared to the other characters. Some secondary statistics are not quite as critical, affecting only things like damage or healing or other things that are not as sensitive to single points. In this case, it would be more feasible to have a character with one primary statistic that splits his points between 2 secondary statistics. However, this isn't very tempting and still results in a character who, at high levels, won't be quite as appealing as his 2 statistic counterparts.

Once you realize this is the case, you can banish the idea of 3-statistic characters from your mind and concentrate on 2-statistic characters, which work properly. However, it remains peculiar that the game tempts you to build multi-statistic characters because they appear to work okay low-level, but you have to rethink your design once you discover they don't quite translate properly at higher levels.

2. The most significant level progression imbalance is with the skill system. Fourth edition gets rid of skill points in favor of fixed bonuses for training in the skill and universal bonuses to all skills according to the level of the character. This design promises to prevent huge discrepancies in skills between the characters at high levels, and in general provide the benefits that I described in my previous blog article. However, the fact that the statistics increase at an uneven rate disrupts the symmetry. At low level, the skill system allows just about everyone to participate in skill checks whether they are skilled or unskilled. And a character who takes skill training in a skill governed by a statistic is not especially good in, still has a pretty good chance of having the best skill roll in the party if no one else took that skill. But at high levels, each character will have 2 statistics that are much higher than the others, and the skills controlled by the statistics will start to get much bigger bonuses. Now the characters who are trained in skills that match their statistics far outshine every other character. Not only does this mean that the balance of the game changes at high levels, it has effect that which class/build you have taken has more effect on your skills and which skills you are trained in. This is an effect I always disliked in games, where the streetwise fighter is forced to be less streetwise than the otherworldly fey warlock, regardless of the background stories and options chosen in character generation.

3. There are some other small effects which diverge in ways similar to the first 2 points. For instance, characters with Dex or Con bonuses gain more of a relative initiative / healing surge bonus compared to the rest of the party as they gain levels. So an infernal warlock may have fewer healing surges than a paladin at low level, but more at high level. This isn't really fatal, but it doesn't quite fit the symmetry of the uniform level progression idea. Also, there are some situations where characters make attacks which don't use primary statistics, such as longbow attacks from melee characters. At low levels these may be at least somewhat effective, but at high levels that will become less and less effective compared to the main attack to the point of uselessness.

So the next question is, what would you do if you decided you wanted to fix this imbalance? Well, a very straightforward way to do so would be to have every statistic increase every 4 levels instead of just 2 statistics increasing every 4 levels. This would have a significant advantage of fixing the problems listed above. I should also note that it would make all sorts of unusual multi-class combinations possible and fun. However, it would also carry some potential disadvantages:

1. As mentioned above, primary and secondary statistics often have effects where the same amount of bonus is just as good at high-level is a low level. I think a good word to capture this is that some bonuses are "logarithmic". A 2-point bonus to attack or defense is just as good for a high-level character with a +30 attack as it is for a local character with a +4 attack. Other benefits are non-logarithmic. A +2 damage bonus for a high-level character who does about 22 points of damage is much less effective than the same bonus for a low-level character who does about 8 points of damage.

If every statistic increased at the same rate, then for non-logarithmic abilities controlled by secondary statistics, the actual value of your statistic would mean less and less as you gain level. That is, at low level, a barbarian with a relatively high constitution might gain 3 temporary hit points when he defeated a foe, while barbarian who had basically ignored constitution might only gain 1 temporary hit point, a big difference. But at high-level, it might be the difference between 8 temporary hit points and 6 temporary hit points, not a big deal. So in this case, having all of the statistics increase at the same rate would cause some abilities to scale less well with level. I think this would be the major disadvantage of allowing every statistic to increase.

Although this definitely causes some problems with the scaling, some of the other effects it has on the game might be good or bad. It would mean that at high-level, classes with 2 secondary statistics would now find it very practical to take powers relying on their lesser secondary statistic. My general impression is that such powers are normally much less tempting to take then the flavor of the game would indicate (in particular, they seem to imply that you should take some of these powers when they describe the class builds, but I find it quite difficult to ever want to take a power which is based on a secondary statistic that I am not improving, unless the power is really broken to begin with). So feeling more free to take these powers might be a good thing. Or maybe not, I can't really say.

2. With constitution increasing at a faster rate, high-level parties would have noticeably more healing surges than low-level parties. Since they have noticeably more healing powers, I don't know whether this is a good or bad thing.

3. Many feats have prerequisites that prevent certain class builds from getting those feats. With every statistic increasing, pretty much every build would eventually be able to get most feats. If those statistic minimums were carefully designed and considered as part of the class balance (it isn't clear whether this is true), this might mean the class balance is disrupted somewhat. For instance, normally only fighters who invest in high Dex scores can take scale armor specialization, but now even Con-based axe fighters could do so.

4. I would expect that a major actual reason that not all statistics are made to increase with level is a combination of inertia/tradition (only one statistic increased with level in third edition, and none before that), and the idea that it is fun getting to choose where your statistic points to go with levels. It is true that there is a small amount of discretion in the way you allocate your statistic bonuses, it is sometimes possible to make little trade-offs, not increasing a secondary statistic in order to raise constitution or a statistic necessary to qualify for a feat. But in general, the game balance so strongly demands that you increase the 2 statistics associated with your class build, that I haven't found getting to choose where your statistic bonuses go to be a particularly interesting process in practice.

Balanced Level Progression

2009-06-04T07:53:00.000-07:00

A very impressive feature of fourth edition Dungeons & Dragons is that the level progression has been balanced so that, on average, the various capabilities of players and monsters go up at the same rate as levels are gained.

In previous editions of Dungeons & Dragons, the distinctions between the various characters and classes started out at a fairly modest level, but grew greater and greater at higher and higher levels. For instance, at low levels a fighter had only a small “to hit” advantage over a cleric with the same strength. But as the fighter gained levels, the fighters hit advantage would become greater and greater compared to the cleric. And previous to third edition, the fighter would gain multiple attacks at a certain point, and the cleric never would. Of course, this was balanced out by the fact that at low levels the cleric spells were not all that amazing compared to the natural fighting ability of the classes, whereas at high levels they grew disproportionately and became massively powerful. However, the point is that at low levels the cleric could be a "secondary fighter" who didn't fight as well as the fighter, but fought decently. On the other hand, the cleric could have some pretty useful spells, but couldn't really concentrate on being a major spellcaster, he had to do a lot of conventional fighting. But at higher levels, the cleric’s fighting ability would become less and less important, and the spell ability more and more important. In other words, the essential purpose and style of different classes and characters would vary continuously as levels were gained. In theory, there is nothing intrinsically wrong with this. In practice, however, it made the game very difficult to design and balance correctly. Typically there would be a “sweet spot” level where the relative capabilities of the 2 classes felt about right, and the farther you were above or below this level, the less well the game seemed to work.

This issue of gains in levels changing the essential balance of the game occurred in many other places as well. For instance, in third edition you earned skill points every level, and it was possible to put the maximum number of skill points into one skill, or to divide up your skill points more evenly. Dividing them up worked interestingly at low level, but at high level it would mean that you were so far behind someone who had maxed out the skill that the GM practically couldn't design an adventure which would challenge one skill level without being either impossible or trivial for the other skill level. And it meant that at low level, an ordinary character might notice a stealthy opponent, but at high level, a character class which didn’t specialize in perception was practically blind against a stealthy opponent.

Designing the hit bonuses and defenses of monsters was also tricky, since with a d20 system it is important for the values to fall within a narrow range in order to prevent the rolls from becoming trivial or impossible, but when the characters diverge at higher levels is soon becomes impossible for maintain this balance. You don’t want characters to hit on 2’s or only hit on 20’s, but when hit bonuses diverge tremendously you can’t cover everyone.

Note that the fact that fighters got more hit points per level than clerics was not an example of this sort of divergence. If a fighter starts with, say, 50% more hit points than the cleric, and gains 50% more hit points than the cleric does every level, the fighter will always have 50% more hit points than the cleric. So for game design purposes, the relative abilities of the fighter and the cleric in this regard stay constant, even though both are becoming more and more powerful. But if the fighter hits in melee combat 20% more often the cleric at low level, but at high level he hits 80% more often and gets twice as many attacks, then his power relative to the cleric has tripled at high levels, drastically changing the nature of the relationship between fighters and clerics.

Fourth edition Dungeons & Dragons tries to solve this problem by having the capabilities of the characters improve at a uniform rate such that the characters remain more or less in balance compared to each other. I think this works really really well and is a great idea. Classes of all kinds get new powers, feats, magic item bonuses, skill bonuses, and attack and defense bonuses at the same rate. And this rate is carefully calculated to be equal to the rate at which the monsters improve. Some of my previous articles have noted some small discrepancies in his calculations, but in effect these mistakes are the "exception that proves the rule". That is, the fact that small discrepancies are actually noticeable and worthy of correction shows the extent to which the game has been balanced; such small differences would be lost among the vast disparities in powers and abilities between the classes in previous editions.

Now, the relative stability in capabilities between the classes as levels progress is not going to be 100% perfect. Since players have flexibility in what feats, paragon paths, and epic destinies they take, and in what magic items they discover, the various characters are likely to become more different from each other at higher levels just because they have more choice available. But this is no big deal, it isn't a system of inevitably increasing disparity with level. Whenever I see an ability that changes disproportionately with level (that is, becomes less effective or more effective than other comparable abilities as the character level changes), I call that out as a deviation from the normal level progression balance. In most cases, such deviations detract from the game, as the ability will be "just right" at some levels, and too weak or too strong at others.

A good practical example of this is the way that attack and damage bonuses work. A bonus of +1 to hit is equally valuable at all levels, because the increase in monster defenses means that your base chance to hit monsters of your level should stay the same as you gain levels. But a bonus of +1 to damage becomes less useful at higher levels, because the total damage you are doing is higher and thus the additional one point of damage is a smaller percentage increase in your damage output. Therefore, in order for a damage bonus to not become ineffective as you gain levels, the damage bonus needs to increase with every level you gain. This is also true with hit point bonuses. But with attack and defense bonuses, they need to stay the same, otherwise they become overly effective as you gain levels.

This is why the bonus from weapon focus increases with every tier; it has to increase in order to stay equally effective relative to the character. The fact that the damage bonus from Dwarf Weapon Training is a fixed +2 bonus means that it does not retain its usefulness at high levels.. It means that dwarves are incredibly potent with axes and hammers at low level, but lose a lot of this advantage at high levels.

On the other hand, the fact that the new Weapon Expertise feats give you increasing hit bonuses at higher levels means they increase in power at a disproportionate rate. At low level they are very useful, at high levels they are absolutely incredible and indispensable. This would be broken if it wasn't clear that these feats were meant as mathematical fixes rather than legitimate optional feats.

The idea that attack bonuses should not increase with level and damage bonuses should is a corollary of the underlying game system and seems to have been fairly well followed by the designers of features and powers, although there are a few mistakes. For instance, the fact that the wizard’s orb feature gives an ever increasing penalty to saving throws as the wizards level increases, despite the fact a penalty to saving throws, like just about anything else rolled on the d20, does not need to and should not increase as you gain levels.

I'm not going into examples of this right now. But there is one major area in which the game's wonderfully balanced level progression is disrupted at a more fundamental level; I shall describe this next week.

Player’s Handbook 2 Classes Analysis Wrapup

2009-05-28T22:53:00.000-07:00

Now that I’ve analyzed all of the classes in the PHB2, on to answering the original question I was posed, of whether I think there is power creep in the PHB2. Accumulating the results of my previous examinations, I get:

Avenger > Barbarian > Melee Ranger
Bard > Warlord
Wizard > Invoker > Druid
Shaman > Cleric
Sorceror > Warlock
Warden > Paladin

So it looks like the answer is yes, I think the PHB2 classes are better than the corresponding PHB1 classes. However, I notice that most of the comparisons were to the PHB1 classes that seem weaker to me (no comparisons to the fighter or the archer ranger, for instance). And in general, the difference was not that large, and in many cases the PHB1 classes were less balanced and thus seemed better the more you looked at only the most effective powers and class builds.

There is a spectrum of character design going from picking options purely based on characterization, to pure minimaxing. I probably fall somewhere in the middle. With that style, I’d say that the PHB2 classes are, on average, a feat or two better than the PHB1 classes, so there is some power creep. But I feel like they are better balanced, which is nice.

If you are minimaxing – well, there are a lot of people analyzing the game who are more interested in that sort of thing than me. I wouldn’t be surprised to find that the most optimized PHB2 characters are not better than the most optimized PHB1 characters.

Player’s Handbook 2 – Druid analysis

2009-05-28T14:24:00.000-07:00

My final comparison is the Druid, the one class that I intuitively felt was somewhat weak. The Druid seems easiest to compare to the Invoker. I will compare a Wis/Con Druid who takes human-form powers with a Wis/Con Invoker.

Same statistics and armor. Both have Ritual Casting powers.

Druid has more hit points than the invoker. The Druid has a third at-will power which is a beast form power and thus allows the Druid to fight with good effect in melee, which an invoker cannot do.

Invoker has +1 fortitude, Covenant of Wrath, Armor of Wrath, and Rebuke Undead.

This is interesting. My initial impression had been that the Druid was very lacking in class features. But now that I look at this comparison, it strikes me that each the Druid class features is pretty substantial, better than any one of the Invoker class features. I'm not really sure that the Invoker class features are really better than the Druid class features.

In general, I seem to like the Invoker at-will powers a bit better (Vanguard’s Lightning > Chill Wind or Flame Seed, Sun Strike > Thorn Whip, Avenging Light > Storm Spike). The L1 encounter powers are much better for the Invoker, though the L3 powers are not. The invoker has lots of cool utility powers; the druid’s utility powers are sleepy except for Camoflage Cloak, which seems out of place. Both have solid daily powers, the Druid has one of those scary auto-hit wall spells.

So it seems to me that the Invoker is better than the Druid because it has better powers, but the difference isn't all that great. The Druid still seems like a pretty decent class, but I certainly wouldn't say it was better than a class in the PHB1.

Player’s Handbook 2 – Warden analysis

2009-05-24T09:15:00.000-07:00

Continuing with my comparisons of PHB2 classes with similar PHB1 classes, this time I’m comparing the warden with the paladin. We shall compare a Str/Wis warden with a Cha/Wis paladin.

The paladin has substantially better armor class. But the warden has better movement and better special defenses, and one point less armor penalty. I favor the paladin here.

I’ll say the Warden makes up for this with the second wind ability (I don’t much favor taking second winds in combat, so I don’t consider this ability that great).

The paladin has an extra healing surge, and a very useful Lay on Hands ability. The warden has substantially more hit points. I think a like the paladin a bit better here.

The paladin needs to use an implement rather than a weapon for his daily powers, while the warden can use a weapon for both. So I’ll say the warden is back to even.

Next we compare the defender powers. These are hard to compare without playing. The paladin can mark at range and cause damage at range. But the warden marks multiple foes as a free action.

A Str/Wis warden has one cool at-will power (Thorn Strike), and a bunch of really blah powers. I slightly favor the paladin here.

The warden seems to have a broader, more consistent, and more interesting selection of powers than the paladin. The paladin has a terribly limited selection of useful utility powers, but has a few good ones. I think I’d give the warden the edge for his better daily powers and the better selection.

The warden has the very impressive Font of Life ability. The paladin has Divine Mettle and can give a saving throw to someone else with a bonus once per encounter. Despite the paladin’s flexibility, I have to give the warden a solid edge here.

Finally, the Paladin needs melee training to have effective charge and opportunity attacks, while the warden does not. But Cha gives more skill bonuses than Str, partially making up for this.

So, overall, I’d have to say that the warden is better than the paladin, but not by a large margin.

Player’s Handbook 2 – Sorceror analysis

2009-05-21T06:07:00.000-07:00

Next I’ll analyze the sorceror, comparing a Cha/Dex wild sorceror with a Cha/Int fey warlock.

Same hit points and healing surges.

And Unfettered Power is a cute ability which gives you a useful benefit 10% of the time. I’d judge it slightly better than Prime Shot, which is a nuisance to use (we’ll say 2.5% to turn a miss into a hit). And the sorceror has a better initiative because his secondary statistic is Dex. But the warlock has Shadow Walk, which seems slightly better than Chaos Burst. And the warlock has slightly better special defenses (+1 Reflex is better than +1 Will). So I’ll judge this about even.

The warlock’s strengths seem to be defensive. Misty Step is really cool, much better than Wild Soul. And the warlock gets leather armor proficiency for free.

The sorceror’s Chaos Power striker ability is substantially better than Warlock’s Curse.

The warlock has only one interesting at-will power, Eyebite. The sorceror has Chaos Bolt, which is awesome, especially for a striker. This power can cause a lot of damage!

The sorceror has a much broader spectrum of encounter powers than the painfully restricted choice of the warlock. The warlock’s powers aren’t bad, though, so I don’t know whether to say the better selection is an advantage for the sorceror.

Both have respectable utility powers. The sorceror has a really cool class feat which allows him to use ranged attacks in melee, neutralizing the biggest weakness of ranged characters.

The low-level fey warlock has some of the worst daily powers of any class. The sorceror’s daily powers seem just fine.

So we have the warlock’s superior defensive powers against the sorceror’s stronger striker ability and better at-will and daily powers. Considering my play experience that the fey warlock has too much defense and not enough offense, I’d have to say that the sorceror is better than the fey warlock by a noticeable margin.

Player’s Handbook 2 – Invoker analysis

2009-05-18T07:42:00.000-07:00

Continuing series of comparing classes from PHB1 and PHB2 by looking at all the class features and low-level powers. This time I’m looking at the Invoker. I’ll compare a Wis/Con invoker with an Int/Con wizard. I prefer comparing the staff wizard as the power of the orb implement varies wildly with level and the wand has unclear rules.

Hit points, healing surges, skills, and usefulness of stats is equal.

The invoker would appear to have much better armor. But when the wizard buys the leather armor feat, he ends up with equal or better AC and more mobility. So the wizard is better. We’ll say the invoker counters with his better non-AC defense bonuses.

The wizard’s free rituals are probably better than the invoker’s free stuff, but this is small stuff.

The wizard has his staff power, a very strong defensive power. Comparing this with the Covenant of Manifestation is tricky. The invoker’s bonus damage has a high upside if you get a lot of targets, and it is more consistent with the mission of a controller. But you can’t use it very often at low levels, and the fixed bonus damage will be less relevant at high levels. I’m not sure which one is better.

Wizard has those silly cantrips and the spellbook. I generally don’t find these useful, but in some campaigns they will be useful. I like the invoker’s Channel Divinity much better since it really does something, even though Armor of Wrath isn’t all that powerful.

Comparing at-will powers, Vanguard’s Lightning is a little better than Scorching Burst. The others seem OK on both sides. The encounter and utility powers are varied, but comparable I suppose.

When it comes to dailies, the invoker’s powers are pleasant and useful, but rather underwhelming for a controller class. The wizard, on the other hand, has some awesome conjurations. Here I see a substantial wizard advantage.

So the comparison seems to be typical for PHB2 vs. PHB1. The invoker has better class features, but when you look at who has the abnormally strong dailies, the wizard catches up. Overall, I don’t know who is better, the invoker seems to have a better balanced design. I’d say the wizard is better if he takes his best superpowers, some of them are ridiculously strong.

Player’s Handbook 2 – Shaman analysis

2009-05-15T07:33:00.000-07:00

Continuing with the Shaman. I will compare a Wis/Con shaman with a Wis/Cha Cleric.

Basic hit points, healing surges, number of skills, are all the same.

Spirit Boon is distinctly worse than Healer’s Lore, since not only does it involve moving around the spirit companion, but it uses a secondary statistic rather than a primary statistic. Healing Spirit is a bit less convenient than Healing Word, since you have to maneuver the spirit companion around. However, the two of these combo when you can get two allies next to your spirit companion, effectively doubling the benefit of Spirit Boon. This also makes noncombat healing more efficient. I think I’d still prefer the convenience of the cleric, but it isn’t a big advantage.

The Shaman has Con rather than Cha as a secondary statistic, a nice benefit. But the Shaman has to spend a feat to get Chain Mail proficiency, which cancels this out. But also, the Shaman has to take Str 13 to qualify for this feat, which is not difficult, but still inconvenient.

Channel Divinity with Turn Undead is a very fine ability. Speak with Spirits is hard to compare because it depends on what kinds of noncombat checks the DM allows it to be used on. If the interpretation is restrictive, and it can only be used on checks that clearly take exactly one round to perform, it is mostly limited to combat checks and doesn’t seem better than Channel Divinity. If the interpretation is expansive, and the shaman gets a major bonus on almost every noncombat skill check, this power is a very potent noncombat ability worth many feats. I’ll assume a restrictive interpretation, so the cleric is a bit ahead.

The shaman has some fine at-will powers, but I think the cleric’s Sacred Flame is better than any of them, and that’s even without the fact that it does radiant damage. The shaman has some cool encounter powers, but I think the cleric’s Divine Glow puts it on top. The shaman may have a bit better utility powers (his L2 powers are better than the equivalent cleric powers).

The cleric has no melee powers, nothing to do when pinned. But the shaman can attack through the spirit companion in this situation, a big advantage that may compensate for the cleric’s better powers. However, it is a drawback that the shaman sometimes has to maneuver the spirit companion around in order to attack at range. Nevertheless, the shaman's flexibility makes up for a lot.

When it comes to daily powers, the cleric’s Consecrated Ground is broken. Assuming the DM fixes it, both the cleric and the shaman have some great daily powers. Wow, that Spirit of the Healing Flood looks mighty. But overall, I don’t know who is better.

At this point, the classes are close, perhaps the cleric is still slightly ahead.

Finally, the shaman has the spirit companion with its ability to block a space and perform the Spirit’s Shield opportunity attack. The shaman has lots of different things it needs to spirit companion to do, so placing it seems non-trivial. And Spirit’s Shield is not going to be very useful in the situation where a summoned creature would otherwise seem easiest to use (tying down a melee fighter at the beginning of the battle). But gosh, compared to the various minor advantages of the cleric, the chance of getting the equivalent of additional attacks without spending actions is pretty mighty. In particular, it a summoned creature is anywhere near worth a daily spell (as it is for other classes), it would have to be pretty mighty. I’ve never played with a summoned creature, though, so it is hard to judge the tactical consequences.

So whether the shaman or the cleric is better depends on how the DM interprets certain abilities and how the tactics of the spirit companion work out. Under the assumptions I’ve made, I’d say the shaman is better, but it looks like there is something to be said for either one.

Player’s Handbook 2 – Bard analysis

2009-05-12T15:35:00.000-07:00

Continuing with the Bard, which I will compare with the Warlord.

Defense and basic offense are the same.

The Majestic Word of the Bard is clearly better than the Inspiring Word of the Warlord.

At 6th level, the Warlord is healing 6 points per character per action point, which with 4 allies is about 12 points per combat. The bard is granting 4 temp hit points per round in which a foe was bloodied or defeated, which is probably quite common. These abilities seem at least somewhat similar.

The bard has a high Con, an especially useful secondary statistic due to the healing surges. But the bard has to buy Melee Training in order to have effective basic attacks.

The warlord has Combat Leader, a strong ability. But the Bard has Words of Friendship, an extra skill, skill versatility, and bardic training, which I think is plenty of compensation.

The bard gets multiclass versatility, and a lot of those multiclass feats are pretty good.

The bard can choose to mix melee and ranged at his leisure, but he has no effective ranged basic attack. The warlord can throw only basic javelins as his ranged attack. I think the bard is better here.

So far, due to his horde of class features, it seems clear that the bard stands ahead of the warlord. Those PHB2 classes have a lot of cool class features!

Both classes have a pleasant selection of at-will, encounter, utility, and daily powers. The warlord appears to have an edge if you cherry-pick the very best powers – none of the bard powers strike me as being as far above average as warlord superpowers like Bastion of Defense and Stand Tough.

My analysis only covers low levels, which is what I tend to be most interested in.

So it seems like the comparison is what I’m seeing as typical between PHB1 and PHB2. The PHB2 class has better class features, but a more balanced selection of powers. If you assume a random choice of powers, the bard looks rather better. But if you minimax the power choices, the warlord catches up, potentially even passing the bard (it is hard to compare big dailies with reliable powers).

Player’s Handbook 2 – Avenger analysis

2009-05-09T08:30:00.000-07:00

Finishing my analysis of the PHB2, I will try to do actual point-by-point comparisons of the PHB2 classes with similar PHB1 classes.

Of course, trying to estimate the value of a class before playing is error prone. Thinking back to when I was first looking at the PHB1, I recall mis-estimating the rogue on a couple counts. First, I assumed that sneak attack was about as good as hunter’s quarry. I didn’t realize how easy it was for rogues to gain combat advantage until I actually played. Also, for some reason I thought the extra damage from the brutal scoundrel ability was countered by the artful dodger’s extra damage from Sly Flourish, I overlooked the fact that Piercing Strike is just as good as Sly Flourish.

But the point of writing things down is to make the comparison clear, and to open up the opportunity for someone to point out anything I missed.

The Avenger is most similar to the Barbarian, and since I already ranked the barbarian, I can use this comparison as a point of reference and compare the Avenger directly to the barbarian. In particular, a Wis/Dex Avenger vs. a Str/Con barbarian.

Using a standard of +4 stat, +2 weapon, +1 weapon focus, crag hammer. Both cause 15 damage then as a basic attack. The barbarian’s at-will boosts this to 18.5. The avenger’s oath of emnity is a 40-50% boost when it works. How often does it work? Beats me. Assume 2/3, so it gives a 30% bonus. This is 19.5, so the avenger is ahead. But the barbarian gets a free attack on every critical, so we’ll calll it even.

Barbarian has +4 AC, +1 Reflex, -1 armor check. Avenger has +5 after getting leather armor, but this costs a feat. Avenger has 3 points of special defense bonuses instead of 2. I’d say this is a small edge for the Avenger.

If you factor out the +1d6 we’ve already including, compare the at-will bonuses. The barbarian can charge, and some of the powers have nice bonuses when raging. I guess this is a bit better than the Avenger’s powers, but it is close.

Avenger has an extra skill, Barbarian has +1 surge and +1 hit point.

Barbarian’s secondary stat is Con, but Avenger’s is Dex, so we’ll say these cancel out.

The barbarian’s encounter daily powers look more impressive. But the Oath of Emnity inherently combos well with encounter and daily powers. So I’m not sure what is better.

Barbarian is allowed to take Improved Rageblood Vigor, which looks like a great feat at low level. But Avenger can take Improved Armor of Faith, which looks fearsome at high level.

The Avenger is behind one feat to get Melee Training. But the barbarian has to use a tertiary stat, Dexterity, for his AC bonus, which is terrible, so I’d give the edge here to the Avenger. But the Avenger’s need to spend so many feats will make him suffer at low level, so that may cancel out.

Avenger has a small number of ranged attacks, but they seem wimpy and require him to divert from other choices. Barbarian’s ability to throw javelins may well be better. We’ll say this is partially countered by the little Avenger benefit that his primary stat, Wisdom, gives him a bonus on more skills than the barbarian’s high Strength.

At this point we seem close to even.

Avenger’s Divine Channeling is very cool, rather better I’d say than Swift Charge.

The Censure abilities look tricky to use, but generally seem more potent that the barbarian’s temp hp when defeating a foe.

Therefore, my estimation is that the Avenger is more powerful than the Barbarian. Not exactly by a lot, though, probably within the margin of error.

Player’s Handbook 2 – Classes

2009-05-05T18:26:00.000-07:00

Continuing my review of the Player’s Handbook 2. I’ll record my early impression of the classes, without going into precise comparisons.

First of all, I have to say that I really enjoyed the feel and the fun design of many of the classes. I had envisioned that Avenger would be an aggressive paladin and an Invoker would be an aggressive cleric. I like that they instead have distinct and interesting personalities. The avenger isn't a holy protector of the faith, he’s a homicidal religious fanatic! And I like how the Invoker is just gifted with raw divine power (sort of like a cult leader convinced he is personally chosen by God, as opposed to the cleric being the normal priest of an organized church). And the personality of the primal classes are pretty cool, the Druid, the Shaman, and the Barbarian are certainly pretty distinctive. The Warden is my least favorite, the one the most seems like "we needed to put in a primal defender class." However, even the Warden is not bad, taking on aspects of nature is a pretty cool superhero power.

Also, I really like the inventiveness with the use of game mechanics that make these new classes seem like they will play differently from the old classes. Here are my initial thoughts on the game mechanics and power level of each class:

Avenger: I think it is cool that they have all these funky tactical powers and restrictions – the idea that they ruthlessly hunt down and isolate their opponent, while trying to avoid other enemies, is creative and different from the classes in the PHB1.

When I first saw the powers, I thought, wow, these are incredible! They have the hit points and defenses of a defender (once they get an armor proficiency feat), and an amazing striker power that works really well with big attacks. And they have other cool side powers too (unlike, say, the rather featureless ranger and rogue classes). But there is a weakness. A perusal of the actual low-level powers of the class reveals that they are rather mediocre. There is no major striker-type at-will power akin to Twin Strike or Piercing Strike. And the encounter / daily powers don’t generally have big “on hit” effects that would combo powerfully with the Oath of Emnity.

Barbarian: I already analyzed this class in an earlier post. I like that the barbarian and the sorcerer are finally striker classes that don't have weird restrictions on the extra damage that they do. The rage power is cool. The only problem is that it is one of those daily powers you want to use at the start of the fight, so you always have to make difficult decisions about whether to use it or not.

Bard: Seems like a cool class. The panoply of Class Features strikes me as being better than the small number of class features of the PHB characters. The at-will powers seem pretty average. Strange but useful that they slide allies around instead of shifting them – the warlords are jealous.

Druid: This is the one class from the PHB2 that didn't seem all that great. They actually seem to have less impressive class features than a wizard – practically none at all. They do have normal hit points and armor, so that’s not so bad. But they need awesome powers to make up for having nothing else. The powers just don’t look that awesome to me. Especially the beast form at-will powers, which don’t look any better than the single-target powers of other classes that have far better class features. This makes the beast form seem rather unexciting. The idea of the beast form is cool, but I’m not so sure about the execution. I do notice that they have Wall of Thorns, which seems to be just like the super-strong auto-hit wizard walls. I had hoped they would stop making those auto-hit powers. At least this sort of thing seems toned down a lot in PHB2.

Invoker: Much more like a wizard than the Druid. Seems impressive – very slightly better at-wills than a wizard, more cool class features, and better armor class. The utility and encounter powers seem strong, but on the other hand I don’t see all of those ultra-mighty wizard conjurations.

Shaman: I like the idea of the spirit companion, it seems like fun to move around. But something seems very wrong with the balance of spirit companion vs. the new summoning spells like “Summon Angel of Fire”. The major feature of both seems to be the ability to occupy space and threaten foes with opportunity attacks unless they waste effort killing the construct. But the spirit companion is an at-will minor action, while the angel is a daily standard action. Either the companion is too strong, or the summon spells are too weak. I suspect both. The shaman, without the combat ability of the spirit companion, doesn’t seem all that much weaker than the cleric, so the spirit companion doesn’t have to be very powerful to make that shaman seem pretty good. But without playing, I have no idea how effective the companion actually is.

Sorceror: As mentioned above, I like the straightforward striker bonus. And the idea that the chaos sorceror is filled with dice randomness is fun.

The sorceror’s damage bonus seems rather better than Warlock’s Curse, but the other little class features may not be as good as those of the warlock. But I think the sorceror looks more fun, the warlock has such limited choices. My concern is that the sorceror seems to have a lot of area effects, for which his striker damage bonus works extremely well. Is he a controller in disguise?

Warden: Wow, they gave 7 hit points per level! The Font of Life is pretty formidable. Wierd, though, that it makes “save ends” powers actually less effective than powers that work for one round. I like the new defender ability, seems amusingly different. The effectiveness of the ability is not easy to judge, but it doesn’t have the annoying “lockdown” effect of the fighter, so I guess it isn’t as good. But you can mark more targets, so I guess it is pretty good. Hard to judge the Warden overall.

Player's Handbook 2 Feats Corrected

2009-04-30T11:51:00.001-07:00

After my previous post, it was pointed out that I overlooked the fact that the non-AC defense (I've seen this abbeviated as NAD) boosting feats are all typed "feat" bonuses except for the three Epic feats. This means that, at paragon level, you won't want to take the "+2 to one defense" feats if you take Paragon Defenses. Now, I always thought those feats were pretty mediocre anyways. But now what I see is that if you take Paragon Defenses in the early Paragon levels, it should bring your NAD's up to par, but they will still fall behind at mid to high paragon levels. But also, some characters will take armor specialization to bring AC even higher, and ensure that NAD's still fall behind. Once you reach Epic, everyone should take Robust Defenses, which at level 21 may almost make up the lost ground on AC. NAD's would fall behind again as you reach mid-to-high epic, except that you have those "+4 to one defense" feats.

These are at the point where it is unclear whether the players will take none, some, or all of them. My analysis of the monster manual was that at heroic level, monsters attacks are approximately 70% AC, 10% Fortitude, 15% Reflex, and 5% Will. I haven't had a chance to analyze higher tiers. Informal perusal suggests that non-AC attacks are more common at higher tiers, but AC is still probably as important or more than the other 3 combined. So +4 to one defense isn't necessarily better than +1 AC, which I think of as a solid but not overwhelming thing to get from a feat. Except that +4 is big enough that you may start becoming awfully hard to hit at all, which can be quite tactically useful. So it will depend on the character's design and how good other feat choices seem to be. But if you do take a +4 feats, that is a huge difference. If everyone takes all 3, they will be short on feats, but they will have extremely high defenses in the "strong" areas that match with their statistics. If only some characters take the +4, and only in some areas, it seems like the numeric chaos of high level combat will increase even more, where monsters may auto-hit some characters and be less than 50% to hit others. This is disappointing, I liked the way that, at least at lower levels, 4th edition tries to make sure your chance of hitting almost always falls into a reasonable range.

Player's Handbook 2 - Feats

2009-04-27T10:19:00.000-07:00

Starting my discussion of the Player’s Handbook 2 proper, I first discuss the new feats introduced.

Paragon Defenses and Robust Defenses are clearly designed to compensate for the increasing discrepancy between armor class and other defenses as you gain levels, as I noted back in a previous blog entry. It does appear that they've got the math correctly, and that the +3 to all defenses that you get from taking both feats is about what you need. The main problem here (aside from stealing feats from the players, which I shall discuss later), is that the Paragon Defenses feat is good but not so outstanding that players would take it in preference to the wide and ever-increasing variety of other interesting feats. Combined with the fact that the bonus is small, it is likely that there will be very little relief for the problem at paragon level, when the discrepancy is already very large and noticeable. Then, at epic level, there will be a sudden shift towards better non-AC defenses, which could potentially be very pronounced if the characters also take the epic feats to improve specific defenses.

Weapon/Implement Expertise is the other huge fix. It is clearly meant to cause the accuracy of the characters to scale more closely to the monster defenses, and in particular to correspond to the bonus defenses earned by light armor wearers with masterwork armor. I have to say, I hadn't realized that this was an unintentional mistake. I had thought they might have done this to compensate for the various abilities high-level characters have to increase their chances of hitting. But apparently this was a mistake and they are fixing it. I’d tend to say this is a good thing, my limited experience with high-level play was that trying to hit the target was annoyingly difficult. The other thing this feat does, in addition to compensating to giving you the +2 accuracy you need to fit the mathematics, is to give you an additional flat +1 accuracy. I'm not sure whether they actually wanted to increase the accuracy of all characters in the game, or whether they simply felt compelled to do it this way in order to make the feat “look” like a normal feat.

Aside from the mathematics, the fact is that they chose to implement these fixes by providing feats that all characters must take in order to fix the mathematics. Therefore, it essentially reduces the number of feats available to the characters for actual interesting abilities. Admittedly, a number of the classes were starved for interesting feats before, and this spares them the annoyance of having to pick between a wide assortment of unwanted feats. But other classes in character types had way too few feats for what they needed, and they will really suffer. What I really dislike is that a lot of flexible characters, who already had too few feats for what they wanted, are now double punished because they have to get both Weapon expertise and Implement expertise separately.

You can see why they would do things this way. Changing some of the basic rules of the game is a troublesome process that makes a lot of people upset for various reasons. But if they sneak the change into a feat, they can maintain plausible deniability, it is “just a new option” and everyone knows that new books have new options. But from my vantage point, I'd rather this was done a bit more openly. At least some designers notes – “by the way, we inserted some new feats that all characters are required to get at high-level.”

Anyway, the obvious fix for this is to simply incorporate these fixes directly into the game. One method that I was already using for my own game is to have master work bonuses for Neck items: increasing the defense bonus by +1/+2/+3 for neck items with enhancement bonuses of +3/+5/+6. In other words, a “+5 magic amulet of protection” adds +7 each defense. Or you could be more direct and give a +1 bonus based on your level (perhaps +1 every 8 levels). Of course, none of this will fix the fundamental problem that your defenses become more and more different from each other as you gain levels, but that issue is baked much more tightly into the design of the game.

For the expertise, the simple solution would be to give, essentially, expertise in everything to all characters for free.

Another 2 feats which struck me as highly important were Distant Advantage and Vexing Flanker. These make ranged rogues much more practical, which may be a good thing because I've had a lot of trouble with rogues getting beat up a lot. They also seem to make ranged attackers of all sorts generally more powerful, as they can now arrange to get the flanking bonuses that melee characters get. This might, perhaps, improve the fairness of the game, or it might take away an important advantage of melee characters, I'm not sure which. But what I don't like is that it encourages focused fire even more. Flanking is cool because it encourages movement in combat by rewarding you for moving around. But when a ranged character can get flanking without having to do anything, I don't find it very interesting, just annoying that the ranged character is now compelled to attack the same target as the melee characters.

Melee Training, on the other hand, I think is just great. It is really nice that it is now possible for non-melee characters to learn how to fight to some degree in melee combat, and it is possible for characters without a high Strength to learn how to charge and make opportunity attacks. I guess the only question here is whether charisma paladins, artful dodgers, and the like should have been able to make effective opportunity attacks before. I'm not sure what the answer to this is. It seems I kind of an amusing balance factor between the classes that some can make charge attacks effectively and some can't, but on the other hand it is sort of annoying and weird that monsters almost invariably have effective opportunity attacks while many characters have little or no "zone of control". I often wonder whether the monsters are supposed to know or guess that they don't need to be too worried about opportunity attacks from many of the characters they are fighting.

Restful Healing I do not like at all because it exacerbates the I mentioned in a previous blog entry, that spending healing surges in combat is wasteful if you play in a game in which healing surges are important (and if you aren’t playing in such a game, Restful Healing is irrelevant). It also very powerful compared to Durable, which I thought wasn’t such a bad feat to begin with. I won’t be using this feat.

Since this entry covers feats, my last comment is on the multi-class Avenger feat. I thought a lot of multi-class feats were awfully good for the price before. But boy, does that Avenger feat seem over the top. If you are tired of missing with those daily powers, here is the feat for you!

Power levels: Baseline vs. Minimax

2009-04-22T08:31:00.000-07:00

I have a passion for game balance, and I often evaluate games in considerable detail to determine which things are more powerful than others. After buying the D&D Player's Handbook 2, I naturally started looking things over to determine what the power level was and to determine whether there has been "power creep", the tendency of games to print new things with every expansion published that are more powerful than the old things, so that people playing with the new expansions are more powerful than people playing with the old stuff. But first, I thought I would mention something that often comes to mind, which is why my own opinion of the "power level" of various things in the game does not always seem to match up with what would appear to be the "online consensus" that one might tend to pick up by skimming popular forums. I think that my temptation is to analyze the "baseline" power level of a game, but that most people who evaluate the power level of a game are more interested in evaluating the "minimax" power level of the game.

For instance, in a theoretical sense you would expect the various power choices available at each level for a D&D class to be approximately equal to each other. But in practice, they are not equal. I often get frustrated with the way that powers can be so blatantly unbalanced that it is immediately obvious they are not equal - what were they thinking? But even if you make a serious attempt to balance the powers, you are bound to make mistakes, it is just too difficult a task. So you have a bunch of different abilities, some of which are more powerful than others. Which abilities represent the "power level" of that class?

From the power-gaming point of view, the answer is clearly the very best powers from each class level. Moreover, the focus of discussion is on using these powers in combination or in situations in which they are most powerful. This "minimax” power level seems to be the most often talked about, likely for the reason that is the essence of power-gaming. And by “power-gaming”, what we are really talking about is traditional competitive game playing. Surely just about every chess book ever written is written from the "power-gaming” point of view, the desire to analyze what the best way to win the game is. Who writes chess books about fun ways to just move the pieces about? The fact that role-playing games can allow, and encourage, non-competitive playing is the unusual new paradigm.

This, however, is more like the paradigm from which I view the game. The "baseline" power level is the level that appears to represent how powerful the game designers intended to make each ability, under the assumption that they thought they were making balanced powers. Mixed in with this is a dose of how good the powers would have to be in order to make the classes equal. Also, in many cases, what I tend to look at for the “baseline” power level is what would be the average power if you ignored all the powers that were so weak and useless as to be boring, and ignore all the powers that were so mighty and broken that I would want to modify or ban them.

An illustration here is Magic: The Gathering. I go in and out of phases of playing this game, but my passion is always for making decks that are fun to play and balanced against each other rather than trying to make decks that will beat other players’ decks. When looking at the various sets of magic cards published, if you look online, you might see a lot about how many of the cards in the original “alpha” edition of the game were completely broken, like the infamous moxes, which could make just about any deck better, and how this was corrected in later sets. You don’t see so much talk about what is interesting to me, which is that the vast majority of the cards in the original edition were extremely weak compared to the average cards in later editions, and the power level of the average card seemed to keep moving up and up in later editions. If you are interested in competitive gaming, it isn't terribly interesting how powerful the average card is, since most cards fall into the category of "useless cards" anyway. But when I'm trying to make decks that are balanced against each other, it is very significant to know how powerful the average card actually is. To a competitive discussion, the “correct” power level of a card is to be equal to the best cards currently played with that aren’t banned or restricted; to me, the “correct” power level of a card is the typical power level you might get if you built a deck from random cards.

On a related note, the question of how "broken” a card is also varies on your perspective. A “mox” is considered totally broken because you pretty much want to have in every deck, as it is strictly better than the alternatives, not to mention the possibility of including it in evil combinations. But from my perspective, when constructing "normal" decks, a card like "Moat” is much more broken. The "normal" deck wins by attacking with creatures, and Moat can potentially shut down certain decks completely so that they cannot attack at all. Moat isn’t the sort of thing that is considered powerful in competitive play, since you aren't using "normal" decks at all, and even if you are using a deck that would be affected, you could easily make sure your deck can deal with the problem, and because so many decks can deal with the card, nobody will bother to even put the card in the deck at all. But I find this card very broken because it is fairly easy to play, and once it is played the other player, if he is using the wrong kind of normal deck, may be totally helpless, or may be stuck trying to draw the one or two cards in his entire deck that could deal with the situation. Putting a mox in one of my normal decks would seem tame by comparison; it wouldn’t break the game to draw a single mox, it just makes the deck more powerful.

This reminds me somewhat of web discussions on the “Orb of Imposition” wizard ability in D&D. It is easy to find discussion about how broken this ability is - which is certainly true when you reach very high levels or combine it with unfortunate combos. But my first impression about this ability is how depressing limited it is at low levels. There are only a tiny handful of daily powers with which this can really be used, and the effect isn't that much. You pretty much have to take the sleep spell if you want this ability to do anything, and even then it is just a modifier to a roll by the GM once per day. Pretty disappointing compared to most real class features. The real story with this ability is how broken the scaling is, it starts off weak and grows disproportionately rapidly with levels.

Well, back to the original point, while I haven't really had the time to do a deep analysis, my impression of the PHB2 was that it increases the "baseline" power level, but doesn't have as many "broken" powers, and is probably better balanced in general. So it probably doesn't increase the "minimax” power level, except insofar as the new “mandatory” feats make every class in both books more powerful.

I'll continue this discussion in the next blog entry.

Skill Checks, part 2

2009-04-17T09:38:00.000-07:00

Neubert had some good questions about my group skill check system, so I thought I would go into it further.

The math: First we ask, what is the average skill bonus of a L1 character? If an L1 character has stats 18, 16, 13, 12, 11, 10 (after racial bonuses), the average stat bonus is +1.5. The average character class has 4 skills, but some characteres may have feats or classes that give more, so assume 4.25 skills, which is ¼ of the total number of skills. This gives an average skill bonus of +1.25. And the average race has +2 in two skills, an average of +0.25 per skill. This gives an average skill bonus of +3.

How this is divided among the party will vary, but let’s assume +8, +5, +2, +0, +0. This means the chance of no one making a DC 20 check is 55% x 70% x 85% x 95% x 95% = 30%, so the chance of success is 70%.

The actual DC chart:
Characters should almost always succeed: DC 16
Characters should usually succeed: DC 18
Characters should succeed more often than not: DC 20
Character success is 50/50: DC 22
Characters should fail more often than not: DC 24
Characters should usually fail: DC 26
Characters should almost always fail: DC 28

The rules I gave for group skill checks are only for the most common type of skill checks, checks in which a success for one person is a success for everyone. Examples:

Almost all Knowledge checks (Arcana, Dungeoneering, History, Nature, Religion, Streetwise)
Noncombat Perception and Insight checks to see if the group notices something

I also like to use it for social skill checks (Bluff, Diplomacy, Intimidate). While you might argue that it is more appropriate for one diplomat to make all the rolls while everyone else stays quiet, I prefer to be a bit more abstract and allow everyone to contribute. I imagine that the charismatic types are contributing more, but the better everyone is at social skills, the more chance the party as a whole has of succeeding. You might imagine, for instance, that the “special effect” of the surly dwarf succeeding in a group diplomacy roll, is that he managed to refrain from saying something rude that would have ruined the negotiations.

Skill checks in which everyone has to succeed – in which only the worst performance counts – are a totally different animal that my rules were not meant to cover. This is a much trickier problem. In practically all traditional skill systems, it is impossible to make a group stealth check, since lots of people are rolling and someone is bound to screw up, especially when that someone is clumsy and wearing plate mail. An idea I’ve been considering is that everyone rolls, and everyone has to succeed, with one change. For every 5 points by which a character makes his initial skill roll, he allows one reroll for one other character. I think this will have the feel I want – the weak link is certainly a weak link, but everyone makes a difference and having some experts in the party helps out a lot. The math for this system is decidedly non-trivial and I haven’t had time to work it out, but I’d estimate DC 10 or 11 would be equivalent to a DC 20 best-roll skill check.

Example: The rogue, ranger, paladin, fighter, and wizard are making a group stealth check at DC 10. The rogue gets a 22, the ranger 17, the paladin 6, the fighter 9, and the wizard 12. The rogue and the ranger have earned 3 rerolls between them, so they give one to the paladin and one to the fighter. Now the paladin gets a 4 and the fighter gets a 20. The fighter does not earn any rerolls (this isn’t the initial check), but there is still one reroll left over from the ranger and the rogue. The paladin rerolls, gets a total of 11, and passes the check. The group is stealthy!

Skill checks in which each person succeeds or fails separately (such as, roll an Endurance check or lose a healing surge) are straightforward and easy to do. The only thing to remember is that such a check is much, much harder than a group check. DC 10 would be about equivalent to a DC 20 group skill check.

The system doesn’t envision “opposed” skill checks, as I’ve been using it for skill checks baked into a scenario. In general, I don’t normally roll the monsters off against the players, I just set a difficulty for the players. This puts more control into the rolls of the player (all that rolling for the monster does is make the difficulty number for the players unpredictable, so sometimes the party fails with a good roll or succeeds with a bad roll). If I’m making the scenario, I don’t really need to look at the stats of the monsters, I just set the difficulty based on the situation. If you need to make an impromptu check, a DC of 12 + monster skill bonus seems reasonable if you want to players to succeed more often than not, the equivalent of a DC 20 group skill check.

Skill challenges are a whole different ball game that needs its own article.

Note that physical skills are slightly harder if the characters are wearing armor, so you may want to make them one point easier. Also note that “trained-only” checks are more difficult, so you would want to make them around DC 16 to be equivalent to a normal DC 20 check.

One thing I forgot to mention last time: I don’t use passive skill checks. Passive skill checks guarantee that nothing matters except the character with the highest skill, and I am trying to avoid that. And rolling dice is more fun for the players.

Neubert asked about converting skill checks from modules. The difficulty with this is that when the module says “DC 21 Religion check”, there is generally no telling how difficult the writer wants the check to actually be, in terms of whether the writer expects group skill checks to be much easier than individual skill checks, and how often the writer wants to party to fail. Even if the writer does nothing but look at the charts in the DMG, everyone can interpret Easy, Moderate, and Hard in different ways. You have to look at the style of the various skill checks in the module.

However, if the difficulty is taken from the errata DMG (which seems to put DC 10 as Moderate), and you assume that “Moderate” is a typical difficulty, then group skill checks will be 10 points too easy and individual skill checks will be right on. I took a look over the adventures in Dungeon 164, and based on those, it appears that if use my system and allow everyone to roll the check, and you want the party to have a decent chance of failing, you should add 5 to the DC of all the group skil checks.

As far as checks in the book with fixed DC’s – I myself don’t often use the listed DC’s, I prefer to rely on my own judgment and just pick a DC based on how hard I think the check should be for the average party. Looking at the skill section of the book, I see that the Arcana checks are pretty harsh already, no need to make them worse. Most of the other group-oriented checks have fixed DC’s, which I don’t normally use. Given the wacky way in which D&D characters become experts in all skills just by gaining levels, I figure that high level monsters should correspondingly be harder to hear, harder to track, and harder to obtain useful knowledge about. I’d need a whole blog article to describe how I’d specifically handle various types of skill checks.

With regards to making combat stealth checks, the new stealth rules are a great improvement over the (lack of) rules in the original players handbook, but I still don't completely understand how the designers intend stealth to work. The rules are quite understandable if there is one player trying to be stealthy against one monster, but what happens when there are multiple monsters is not clear. I've been playing that you make only one stealth roll, but you apply that roll separately against each monster, and you can be hidden against some monsters but not others. In that case, it is not too hard to hide successfully and ambush some monsters. These combat skill rolls have a very different meaning from noncombat skill rolls, and I haven't really played with them enough to have an opinion on whether they are too easy or too difficult.

I thought a little about the progression of skill rolls with levels. You get +1 every 2 levels just from the level bonus. You gain 11 points of statistics every 10 levels, which is about +1 to every skill for every 10 levels. Looking at the book, I see that most of the feats and utility powers than improve skill checks are low-level, more like something to factor into the basic numbers than something you gain with levels. You certainly can gain skill bonus magic items with levels – but you probably only are wearing about 1 even at the highest level. So whether you get a lot of bonuses at high level depends on whether your game encourages your high-level characters to buy hordes of cheap magic items and swap them about before performing each check. If not, you probably won’t gain even as much as +1 in every skill by 30th level.

You will, however, become more polarized – better in your best skills compared to your other skills. This is statistically advantageous. So if your bonuses are +29/+23/+18/+16/+16 at 30th level, your chance of failing against DC 38 is (40% x 70% x 95%) = 27%, pretty close to the same. This works out to increasing the difficulty by 0.6 per level. Not too far from the rate of progression in the DMG, which is 0.66 per level.

D&D group skill check rules

2009-04-11T22:47:00.000-07:00

In many games, there are clear rules for making a "skill check", but the rules for how skill checks will really work in the game in terms of who makes what roles how often in what situations are not fully specified and are left up to the GM. In fourth edition Dungeons & Dragons, it is not always clear what method the game master should choose to have the party make “group” skill checks, in which anyone could potentially make the check and the entire group will benefit. Since I'm planning to put one of my adventures up on my sidebar, I thought I would describe how I've been playing group skill checks.

The method I have chosen is to have every player roll a single skill roll against the listed DC of the group skill check, and if any player succeeds in the skill check, the party succeeds in the skill check. The typical DC is 20 for a level 1 check. Here are the reasons I chose this method:

1. I decided I wanted having skills to be very useful even if you don't have the highest skill level in the party. In many games I've played, having a skill is pretty much useless if someone else in the party has a higher skill level than you. This isn't much fun if you are the one with the second-best skill. This is especially so in D&D, now that the party will have more total skills than the total number of skills in the game, so some of the skills will definitely be doubled up. Also, in D&D you basically have no control over how good you are in a skill unless you take rare feats like skill focus; if you take a skill, your ability and that skill depends on your statistics, and your statistics depend on your class. It is already not very efficient for a fighter to take a skill he won't be very good in, like Streetwise; why compound the problem by guaranteeing the skill won't be useful if the party has a higher charisma character who has taken the skill. Hence, I did not want to allow only the highest skill character to try the challenge.

2. Also, when I first saw the rules, I noticed that the bonus for training in a skill is rather small compared to what you would expect in reality or fiction. If the check is so hard that you have only at 50% chance of succeeding even with training, you still have a 25% chance of succeeding even without training. I decided that this is part of the “fun is better than simulation” aspect of the new D&D rules, and wanted to reflect this spirit in the use of my rules by allowing everyone to participate in the skill check, allowing the barbarian to occasionally get lucky and know more about arcane knowledge than the wizard.

3. The game has rules for “aid another”, but I decided not to use those rules. First, the rule is broken because the DC is fixed, meaning that once you reach a certain level the aid action becomes automatic and your level of skill no longer means anything at all - an incompetent helps just as much as an expert. This is a minor quibble because it could easily be fixed by setting the aid DC to equal the skill DC – 10. My real objection is that even if you do this, the skill level of the aiding players has a rather small effect; the skill bonus of the lead player is 10x as important as that of anyone else.

4. In some campaigns, only characters who declare that they are trying the skill get to roll. But if I'm going to allow every character to make a skill roll, I think it is much more fair to simply have everyone do so rather than give bonuses to players who talk more.

5. DC 20 gives the average party about a 70% chance of making the roll, and I like making the characters successful more often than they are unsuccessful. And this isn't one of these "by average difficulty I mean easy" averages, this is an average difficulty. Characters are certainly highly successful in combat, they should have a good shot in noncombat too. I never understood games where any task interesting enough that a hero would want to do it, is so hard he has about a 25% chance of success. That just isn't a lot of fun.

Also, DC 20 is a nice number because it means that checks are generally not impossible, a one point difference in you skill almost always makes a difference. A skill bonus of 0 is better than a bonus of -1 and worse than a bonus of +1. This wouldn't be the case with DC 24, since the roll would be impossible in all 3 cases.

At high levels these various numbers won't work out too well anymore, but I'm not worried about high levels yet. I haven't yet figured out a good formula for how quickly the skill checks should rise. Clearly skill checks rise more slowly than hit rolls, since most of them are based on statistics that do not rise every 4 levels, and magic items that improve skill checks are fairly rare. But characters occasionally get utility powers or possibly feats that improve skill checks, so figuring out the expected rate of progression could take a fair amount of analysis.

Barbarian class comparison

2009-04-05T08:57:00.000-07:00

I was discussing with my friends my impression that the classes in the D&D Player’s Handbook 2 seemed to be more powerful than the original players handbook, but not in the sense of trying to be better than the best things in the previous classes, but more like trying to be equal to the good classes and options rather than trying to be equal to the average classes and options. Anyway, I felt the barbarian was better than the melee ranger, so I started trying to write down an exact analysis so everyone could look at my analysis and either agree, or if not, what exact point of comparison they disagree with.

Obviously, the comparison is going to depend on a lot of assumptions. Assume around level 6, primary stat +4, secondary stat +3, magic weapon +2, weapon focus. Ranger with urgrosh does 17 damage with twin strike. Barbarian with execution axe does 18.5 with howling strike. Barbarian rampage (free basic attack after each critical) is worth about +1 damage. But hunter’s quarry is worth almost 4 damage, so ranger is ahead by 1.5 or so. But barbarian can charge for full damage, so they are perhaps evened out.

Ranger has higher Dex – more initiative and reflex defense. Barbarian has higher Con –more hit points and healing surges. I think I like Con better, but it is close.

Aside from this, rangers get an extra +2 AC or so for higher Dex, while Barbarians get +1 AC and +1 Reflex inherently. Advantage Ranger. But barbarians get +2 inherent healing surges, bringing the advantage back to the barbarian. One extra skill for the ranger balances this out.

Barbarians get rageblood vigor, Con temp hit points when they defeat a foe. This seems like plenty of compensation for the extra feat of the ranger.

Barbarians have some very useful bonuses for the entire combat when they enter a rage. But rangers can fight pretty well in ranged combat, even if they are a melee ranger. And rangers are better against minions.

Rangers get +1 AC for the urgrosh and have an extra skill. Barbarians can switft charge as a free action after defeating a foe, once per encounter.

Barbarians have some pretty scary daily powers.

So it seems to me, so far, that barbarians are at least comparable to the melee ranger. But we haven’t added the last bit:

Barbarians have defender hit points.

So I think barbarians are better than melee rangers.

Not included in the analysis is that str/dex rangers have a rather more limited selection of powers, due to the low wisdom. Or that they didn’t have double weapons when first published.

But I've usually thought of melee rangers are one of the weaker striker classes. But then again, that impression was before double weapons came out. So let's compare a melee ranger to an artful dodger rogue with a double sword:

Rogue with sly flourish does 14.5 damage, adding 2/3 of sneak attack gives 19 damage. But double sword is +1 to hit, so this evens them out with rangers.

Rogue has at least +1 AC for having Dex as a primary rather than secondary stat (and this benefit is much larger when minimaxing with the point system). If we count this as +1.5 AC, and add the rogue’s extra skill, it cancels the ranger’s extra feat, and the fact that the rogue must spend a feat on melee training to be decent at charge / opportunity attack.

Ranger gets hide proficiency for free. Rogues get First Strike, which is probably better.

Both classes have good ranged combat options which are hard to compare – ranger has to use two hands, but has prime shot, a bigger weapon, and hunter’s quarry is much easier to use from range than sneak attack, but has to use a secondary stat to attack. Rogue gets the better initiative and skill bonuses from Dex/Cha vs. Str/Dex. It is hard to say who has better encounter/daily powers.

Ranger is much better against minions, while rogue gets his artful dodger feature, the bonus AC against opportunity attacks.

So I’m thinking the artful dodger is at least equal to the melee ranger, perhaps between the ranger and barbarian. But a brutal rogue using piercing strike is better than an artful dodger rogue – the extra damage with high accuracy is quite formidable, possibly even making the class better than the barbarian (although personally, I’d rather have the barbarian with his huge number of healing surges, as opposed to that annoying rogue who always get pulverized and runs out of healing surges).

You can also try to compare the barbarian to the Str/Con great weapon fighter.

Hit points are equal.

Fighter has +1 to hit and reaping strike, but this is only about equivalent to 20 damage, a little weaker than the standard set above for strikers.

Fighter has about +2 AC and +1 armor skill modifier and +1 healing surge. Barbarian has +1 Reflex and +1 speed. Definitely we now have distinct overall advantage for the fighter.

Barbarian has rageblood vigor and swift charge. The barbarian has useful bonuses when raging. But the fighter has the mighty combat challenge / superiority ability.

The powers are where it gets tricky. The barbarian’s rage powers are better than the fighter dailies in general. But if the fighter gets to take a rain of steel, that is just broken and makes up for an awful lot – thought Vengeful Storm Rage is pretty scary.

So these classes seem hard to compare, it depends on which powers they take.

Assigning specific roles to character classes

2009-03-29T18:42:00.001-07:00

Fourth edition Dungeons & Dragons has adopted the MMORPG idea that character classes are specialized to perform certain roles in the party, namely defender, leader, striker, and controller. I've been pondering my impressions of how this works out.

I'm comparing this in my mind to traditional role-playing games of the past. In particular, Champions comes to mind is a great tactical role-playing game, since the idea of roles seems to be a rather tactical idea. In Champions, it is traditional to describe characters as being “bricks”, “martial artists”, “mentalists”, and so on, each of which is assumed to have certain characteristics. But these are just labels - there is nothing that constrains you to make characters that fit any of these niches, and even if you do, the roles don't really dictate what your actual purposes in a fight, they are more like descriptions of what you tend to be good and bad at, from which your purpose might be inferred. In Dungeons & Dragons, each class has strong specific powers to perform its specific role, and there is a clear idea of how the different roles are supposed to work together in combat.

What I think I like most about the roles is the idea of the leader role, a character who specializes in making the party work better as a whole rather than in making individual attacks. The main reason this appeals to me is that it allows certain character conceptions to work much better. I've created a number of character conceptions in the past which are based on the idea of being leaders or support characters. Certainly in fiction, the idea that someone can be a great leader is considered very important and meaningful. But in game terms, this typically had no effect, or very little effect. And trying to be a character who offer support in other ways was typically boring, ineffective, or not well supported by the game system. The leader classes allow you to make this character type interesting, effective, and fun to play.

The defender role is also fairly interesting and had a lot of potential. In a game like Champions, a character with high defenses would often try to suck up attacks by going one-on-one with the most powerful opponents were standing in the middle of the toughest situations, but there wasn't really anything in the game rules that specifically made this work. Adding in special abilities to make this work as part of the game is fun because it allows you to better implement the purpose of your character, and having more types of useful abilities makes characters more distinctive and thus more interesting.

In 4th edition Dungeons & Dragons, not only do they create these new powers to represent the various roles, but they make sure to specifically give each class powers that strongly place them in a given role, so that each character is a specialist in one role, rather than having a general assortment of various powers. The idea is that the party forms an interlocking whole, with each character participating in their own way (as in World of Warcraft, which I've heard about but never played).

So from a game design perspective, the question that comes to my mind is whether specializing each player into a specific role works better than my previously preferred character generation style of giving each character whatever powers seem appropriate for their conception, even if the powers do not synergize together to implement a specific role. After playing Dungeons & Dragons for a while, I feel that having a party which consists of an interlocking group of characters, each of which sharply implements one of the 4 roles, works well but isn't particularly any more (or less) interesting or desirable than a group of characters with fuzzy roles.

First of all, each of the 4 roles seems optional and the party is still interesting without each one. While having a defender in the party is certainly useful, the opportunity attack mechanic seems to do a pretty good job of tying down monsters in melee combat with the characters, and the defenders mostly just tie down the same monsters even better. Just like in any other game, the way the damage gets spread out among the players ultimately depends on who the GM decides to attack. The striker role is really just better at the “default role” of all characters, causing damage to single targets, so removing all strikers wouldn't really change much. The controller certainly has a big impact on how effective the party is vs. large groups of monsters, but I've played with and without a controller, and although it changes the feel of combats vs. masses of monsters, the combats are just as fun without a controller as with a controller. The leader class is the only one that is absolutely essential, but that is just because the existence of healing powers in the party makes the damage system work much better. If you look at the “leader” aspect of the role, the ability to give bonuses to other characters in the party, this is interesting and certainly useful but the combats seem like they would also work okay without a character dedicated to these powers.

It is probably more interesting to have a variety of the different types of powers (certainly I think it wouldn't be that great if everyone was just a damage dealer and no one in the party had tactical powers), but it doesn't seem essential that these powers be given to characters of the corresponding role.

The downside of strongly identifying each class with a specific role is that can be a definite nuisance when trying to create exactly the character you want to create, because it forces the character to have or not have abilities in a way that may not match the "role-playing meaning" of the class. The problem is subtle, but quite noticeable to my perfectionist eye.

For instance, the rogue class has a very powerful sneak attack ability to fulfill its role as a striker. However, the "color" of the class makes it appear that a rogue can be a wide variety of dextrous, skillful, lightly equipped martial character types. You can be thief, a swashbuckler, a ninja, a bold explorer, or lots of other things, and the powers and paragon classes seem to support this. But ultimately, the characters you can actually create are more limited. You can be a thief who is obsessed with gaining combat advantage, a swashbuckler who is obsessed with gaining combat advantage, a ninja who is obsessed with gaining combat advantage, a bold explorer who is obsessed with gaining combat advantage, and so on. The idea of playing a character who is obsessed with gaining combat advantage is pretty interesting, but it is a little monotonous that all rogues must be built this way.

A similar example is the fighter. It sounds like the most basic fantasy archetype you can have, just a heavily armored martial warrior. But ultimately, you can't just make a heavily armored mercenary. You have to be a heavily armored mercenary who immobilizes his opponents. This is a cool idea, but it is odd that every fighter has it. What I've seen is that when players who aren't too familiar with the rules make a fighter, they tend to envision that they are making a heavily armored warrior with a strong defense and powerful offense. The idea that the character class has this very strong ability to immobilize opponents is just kind of weird, they aren’t necessarily all that interested in having this ability as compared to something more straightforward.

A final example is the warlord. The idea of the great leader who gives benefits to his troops is really cool. But from a role-playing perspective, which you usually envision is a great warrior with strong leadership abilities. Having every single power, without exception, be based on teamwork and leadership, can feel somewhat restrictive.

I think there is actually a lot to be said for making sure that the characters have distinctive powers and capabilities, so that each character adds something to the party which no one else does, and the characters do not overlap. However, I do not think sharp role delineation is necessary to achieve this - in fact, it seems to get in the way (characters of the same role tend to be pushed towards more similarity with each other than they might otherwise prefer).

Actually, now that I think of it, the striker role is so generic that my issue with the rogue can't really be with the role, but more about the very specific implementation of striker power that they have. If the rogue was simply allowed to pick a different striker power, you could probably make a swashbuckling fencer just fine. But what if you wanted to make a fencer who could sometimes attack fiercely, sometimes inspire the party with his charismatic leadership, and sometimes tie down the opponent with a defensive fighting style? This is the sort of thing that I think would work just fine if allowed, even though it is spread out over multiple roles.

Focus Fire

2009-03-22T11:32:00.000-07:00

The topic of my blog today is focus fire. This is the tendency of games to encourage all of the attacks on one side to be directed against a single opponent on the other side, instead of being spread out among the opponents. Focus fire is number 1 on my list of hard-to-fix problems with classic game mechanics; the problem is omnipresent in many games of many kinds, and I have been thinking of ways to deal with it for a long time. But this article is mainly about describing the problem.

Focus fire is a major problem on 2 fronts - it is not fun, and it does not simulate the source material or reality. For the first point, focus fire definitely is not fun when it is performed against the players. The effect on the game of encouraging focus fire is to cause the characters on one side to be "whittled down" one at a time. Being taken out of the fight is not fun for a player. If the player is only controlling one character, he is out of the game completely at that point. Game mechanics that encourage this sort of thing to happen are very directly anti-fun.

4th edition D&D helps deal with this problem by making different rules for players and monsters, and making it very difficult for players to be permanently knocked out of the combat. But even still, having one character be the focus of all enemy attacks is still boring, because the other players don't have a chance to use their powers and abilities to defend themselves. Although making attacks is certainly more fun than taking attacks, it is quite common in many games for characters to have powers and abilities that help them defend, powers that they want a chance to use.

In a role-playing game where one side is controlled entirely a game master, the question of whether it is a fun to have the monsters be whittled down one at a time is much less clear-cut. Defeating foes one by one can give a sense of progress and accomplishment, and if players can do it but their opponents can't, it provides a way to have good dramatic pacing where the villain seem very powerful at the start but eventually they get weaker and the players come from behind and win. But I'm not sure focus fire handles this in the right way. What you really want dramatically is for the players to become more heroic, start outfighting the monsters, and defeat them in a climactic blaze of glory. When the monsters are whittled down one at a time, what you get is that they become less and less dangerous, but even after the characters know they have won the fight because they have defeated the most dangerous monsters, it takes a long time to chew through all the hit points of the undamaged remaining monsters. Focus fire tends to mean that scary, interesting monsters get killed very quickly, so the monsters become less interesting and capable as the fight progresses. Of course, you can sometimes lessen the problem by having the monsters run away when the fight becomes less interesting - but this isn’t always practical or desirable.

Also, when the characters know that focus fire is incredibly effective, it greatly constrains their actions. Instead of attacking the target that seems most interesting or most appropriate to attack, or who is most vulnerable to whatever power or tactic they plan to use, every character must attack the same target. Of course, a tactical game involves making some decisions better than others, but this isn't a very interesting tactic. It is monotonous to concentrate fire on the same target all the time, especially because it usually isn't very difficult to do.

Focus fire also isn't generally consistent with the source material for the genre of the game. Most fictional characters and units just do not focus all of their fire on one target at a time. Instead, they “engage” and matchup against individual opponents, though often the engagements are ever-shifting in the confusing excitement of a general melee. This sort of excitement is fun, but it doesn't exist in a game where everyone is clustered around the target of the moment, concentrating on beating in one head of the time. Compared to the exciting action of fights in movies and comic books, a fight with focus fire seems “dorky” - repetitive and out of place, more reminiscent of a mindless computer game than a story.

The fundamental source of the focus fire problem is the game mechanic of hit points, a tried and true game mechanic going all the way back to first edition D&D. When using the classic hit point game mechanic, each attack has a chance of causing some amount of damage to the character, and the main or only effect of damage is that when the total damage reaches a certain level, the character is defeated. This is a simple, reliable system that works well in many ways, but it adds a certain artificiality that creates the focus fire problem.

Specifically, the problem is that an attack has no effect on the target or anything else unless it is the final attack that brings the opponent over the threshold and defeats them. The only way to gain any tangible benefit in the combat is to knock out or kill you foes, and the best way to do that is to concentrate your fire on one target at a time. Spreading your attacks out over multiple targets simply means that none of them will be defeated until it is close to the end of the fight. In most games there is very little that controls your choice of targets, so this becomes the overriding game mechanic.

This key element is one of the elements that makes focus fire seem so unrealistic. With the classic hit point system, you know with certainty that making an attack against an opponent who hasn't been attacked before can't possibly have the slightest effect on them. This doesn't seem to correspond well to many real or cinematic fights. When you attack someone with a sword, you expect that the attack poses a serious threat to them. Characters in the movies don't "know" that sword attacks aren't allowed to hurt the opponent unless the opponent has been attacked many times previously.

Also, in a real or cinematic fight, many things are happening and you have to pay attention to defending yourself and making whatever attacks you can get away with amidst the chaos of the fight. You aren’t just sitting there launching one attack every 5 seconds against a target of your choice. Role-playing games try to manage the havoc and complexity by breaking things down into simplicity, and they need to do this in order to make the game playable. But an unfortunate side effect is that they don't model “engagement” very well - in a game, it is awfully easy to ignore the guy standing in front of you and attacking you with a sword, so that you can run somewhere else and attack the most efficient target.

It is interesting to compare how classic strategic wargames typically do not have the focus fire problem. In real life, "concentration of forces" is a valuable goal, and classic wargames give you a major bonus for concentrating your forces, which might seem like it would create a greatly magnified version of the focus fire problem. But in a war game, concentration of fire really means getting a lot of troops in one area, and the reason this is interesting is because the game provides other incentives that make you want to spread your forces out, such as the desire to conquer or hold territory. In a classic war game, even if you are allowed to make yourself unbeatable by putting all of your forces into one city, the enemy will simply ignore you and destroy every city except the one you are in, and thus win the game. The problem with many tactical and role-playing games is that concentrating your fire or your forces is encouraged by the rules and is trivial to do, so the proper tactics degenerate into merging all of your forces into one homogenized glob.

There are 2 very simple alternatives to the classic hit point mechanic that remove the focus fire problem, but neither is practical in a typical role-playing game.

The first is to make the damage stateless, so that the effect of a hit does not depend on the number of previous hits. Most often, this means that a hit has a chance of defeating the target, and if it does not, the target is completely unaffected. This works well in games involving one player controlling large numbers of units, none of which is terribly crucial. Hypothetically, it is fairly realistic for certain types of combat, such as gun fights with on unarmored combatants. However, it is much too simple, random, and sudden for the important heroes and villains in a role-playing game.

The second approach is to make the offensive capability of the character proportional to the number of remaining hit points. This also has a certain amount of realism, and is more practical to do in a role-playing game. In fact, many games have tried some version of this, giving attack penalties to wounded characters. But in order for this to really be effective to prevent focus fire, the penalty has to be quite large. I recall playing games with such large penalties, such as MERP, and the rule was generally loathed by the players because it made them ineffective when badly wounded, and it just isn't fun to be ineffective. The general feeling was that it was better to be knocked out completely then stumble around the combat is an invalid. Role-playing games are about heroes, and heroes are supposed to fight even more bravely when wounded, whether it is realistic or not. So this rule isn’t practical. However, when trying to make more entertaining rules, it is interesting to compare the effect they have to this "mathematic ideal".

Many games have other rules which explicitly encourage focus fire, such as many-on-one bonuses, or implicitly encourage focus fire, such as limits on the number of parries a character can make in a single turn. Such rules are typically added for greater "realism", but I generally dislike such rules because they make the focus fire problem even worse. In theory, some of these rules could be interesting if there were other rules that made it tactically difficult to concentrate fire on a single target. But because concentrating fire is so easy, I prefer to ignore rules that give you extra bonuses for doing so.