Archive for Gaming

Desura – what Steam should have been

2011.11.12 at 14:00 · Filed under Gaming ·Tagged , ,

I like Steam. In a gaming world of ubiquitous DRM, Steam strikes a nice balance between functionality and nuisance. That is, Steam makes it dead simple to install and launch games, and the trade-off is that it does some fairly unobtrusive DRM. This is a good model, although I can think of several ways in which it could provide a better end-user experience.

At the very top of my personal list of improvements to Steam would be “native Linux support”. And I know, I know, I’ve heard all of the conventional wisdom: There isn’t a big enough market to justify porting it. Even if there was, there aren’t enough Linux-native games to make the service very useful. Everybody knows Windows is the OS for gaming.

But sitting here staring down that conventional wisdom is Desura. I’ve known that Desura existed for a while – the Frozenbyte Bundle and the Humble Bundle 3 both had options to acquire ‘Desura keys’, so it was obviously a Steam competitor. Until recently, though, I had just dismissed the product – obviously, I thought, any Steam competitor is going to lag far behind in available games and basic feature set, given Steam’s popularity. Faulty logic, but there it is.

So when a friend told me that Desura works in Linux, I was pretty stunned. I had gotten used to not being the ‘target audience’ for game companies. And now, a few hours later, I’ve got Desura installed, my humble bundle keys redeemed, and I’ve purchased Amnesia: The Dark Descent (which was on sale at the time, and I’ve been meaning to buy for some time anyway).

Desura’s (native Linux!) install is smooth and painless, and its (native Linux!) interface is pretty nice. It has some rough edges, to be fair: most of what it does is load websites that are skinned to feel like part of the interface (much like Steam does), and some of those pages are still obviously works in progress. On the other hand, everything works quickly and smoothly. The main options menu is accessed by clicking the Desura logo, which doesn’t look obviously like a button. So that’s a design flaw, but it didn’t take too long to work out. Redeeming gift keys is more streamlined than in Steam (once you find where to do it!).

Now, Desura certainly isn’t perfect, and it lacks very useful features that Steam has had for some time. One problem I noticed is that it lacks Steam’s resume-after-closing feature; I started to install Amnesia, absent-mindedly closed the client later, and it didn’t auto-resume after I opened Desura again. Desura doesn’t track how much time you’ve sunk into a given game. It also doesn’t have any way to access your save games from multiple locations (a la Steam’s cloud sync), and while their developer info mentions achievements, I haven’t seen any games implement Desura-specific achievements, nor would I even know where to look to find them.

Another feature that both Steam and Desura need are tags, or some sort of organizational system for your games. Right now all Desura has are ‘all games’ and ‘favorite games’. Steam has a categories system, but it doesn’t always save that information across accounts, and you can’t tag games with multiple categories. A proper tagging-based sorting system would be great.

So, Desura has a spartan interface, but it’s also still very young. And more importantly, it runs flawlessly in Linux, which makes it very appealing to me. If you game in Linux at all, check out Desura. It’s already a great service, and it looks like it’s only going to get better.

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D&D Post-mortem: Getting creative with your mage hands

2011.07.02 at 12:00 · Filed under Gaming ·Tagged , , ,

In D&D Post-mortem, I talk about my experiences running D&D 4e games, about 4e as a whole, and about collaborative storytelling in general.

Our most recent D&D session was pretty short – a small amount of cave exploration, and a single encounter. During that encounter, however, a few things happened that highlighted two fundamentally different approaches to roleplaying games. The scenario in question was this: the party’s Wizard wanted to use Mage Hand to disarm an enemy spellcaster. I had several objections to this idea:

  1. The enemy spellcaster isn’t likely to give his wand up without a fight. Assuming, for the sake of argument, that we want to make rules for this attempt, it seems reasonable to me that a Mage Hand would have a Str 2, and would have to make an opposed grab roll, with at least a -5 penalty for the act of snatching an object out of the opponent’s grasp.
  2. It sets a nasty precedent. If we allow such a simple and repeatable disarm, the game ceases to be challenging. Following this to its logical conclusion, well – the characters’ actions don’t happen in a vacuum. Word of this tactic would get around (indeed, if such a tactic worked, it would likely already be in widespread use). People would start creating defenses against it – locking gloves, magical barriers, whatever. It would necessitate an arms race between the setting and the character that would potentially alter the landscape of my setting in a way that’s not very appealing to me. I’m all for player characters leaving their mark on the world, but I don’t much care for this reactive manner. This would also make enemies with natural weapons fundamentally more useful, which would reduce the amount of variety in encounters. Which, I suspect, isn’t something anyone wants.
  3. There simply are no printed rules for disarming an opponent. More importantly, I believe this was an intentional design decision on the part of Wizards of the Coast. A disarmed opponent is effectively defeated; so disarming an opponent is something that you should only be capable of doing when an enemy is reduced to 0 hit points (as anything that is tantamount to defeat should only be possible when the enemy is actually beaten, i.e. deprived of hit points).

Now, I brought up the first objection during play, and the player countered with ‘well, the enemy spellcaster would be surprised by the Mage Hand suddenly appearing’. By that logic, it seemed to me that arrows from a concealed target should always hit their targets, and enemies should likewise be able to surprise and completely defeat the PCs with a good stealth check. That doesn’t sound like a good logic to use when running a combat to me. In a combat situation, everyone involved is, to borrow a quote from Alexandra Erin, “exceptional combatants trying very hard not to get killed”. I didn’t raise the second objection directly, nor did I think of the third until I’d had some time to think about it.

And it’s the third point that I really want to focus on, because it highlights, as I said above, a fundamental divide in how one approaches gaming. On the one hand, you have an approach that focuses on simulating a realistic world (albeit with high fantasy-style magic and other trappings of the genre) in as much detail as possible. This is called (or, at least, I am calling it) simulationist roleplaying.

Simulationist gaming systems tend to be heavy on rules. A game with rules that govern everything a player can possibly do is accurately described as simulationist. This is the style of gaming that leads to damage location, rules to determine exactly where missed arrows end up (and whether they break), and a very precise set of rules governing how magic works in the setting (and categorizing it, explaining how different types of magic do or don’t work together, etc). Simulationist games give you rules for how good your character is at any skill common to the game world, from fighting to cooking, or, gods help us, crafting. If you haven’t spotted it yet, I’m culling all of my examples from D&D 3e, because it is a heavily simulationist game. Earlier versions of D&D were also heavily simulationist.

Simulationist games tend to encourage attempts to find creative loopholes. Because there is a rule for nearly everything, and everything is spelled out in as much detail as possible, it naturally supports the sort of thinking that leads to “well, the spell doesn’t say it can’t do this…”. This, to me, is one of the biggest downsides of simulationist gaming, because it turns the game into a meta-game. Instead of playing a Wizard wandering through the world, destroying your enemies and impressing your friends with your magic, you’re playing a game where you carefully read the spell description to see if you can twist the words to use the spell in a new, advantageous way.

The other style of roleplaying, which I will refer to as narrative roleplaying, involves a greater focus on the narrative of the game, and on the broad themes of the world, without getting bogged down in detailed rules that ensure the game is carefully confined by a rule. In a narrative game, there is not likely to be a table to roll on to determine the quality of the bread baked by a local baker. Narrative-focused game systems tend to be as rules-light as possible, defining the areas that require arbitration (such as combat) and getting out of the way otherwise. Narrative systems also have a tendency to encourage reinterpreting the rules in ways that don’t effect their mechanical structure. D&D 4e and the entire White Wolf canon are good examples of games with a narrative focus.

The interesting thing about games with a narrative focus, or at least D&D in particular, is that there is a disconnect between the rules and the diegetic game world that doesn’t make sense from a simulationist perspective. For example, look at Second Wind. Second Wind operates diegetically on the principle that you take a moment to center yourself, to quickly bandage a wound, or to just take a ‘breather’, and thereby gain the stamina to keep fighting. Notice first that any of those things could apply narratively – you might do one or all of them, or something else that is analogous, as the situation warrants. But more importantly, you can only do this once per battle. Why? What makes bandaging a wound the first time extend your ability to keep fighting, but bandaging a wound again ineffective? It’s the same action; shouldn’t it have the same consequences?

The reason is that the rules account for things outside your character’s control. A battle is chaotic, and you don’t get many opportunities to step back and take stock of the situation and get your feet back  under you. Such a chance comes rarely – let’s say only once in a brief struggle of 10 rounds or so. Using Second Wind doesn’t simply represent an action that your character takes – it also represents your character taking advantage of things that are beyond her control, such as an ebb in the rhythm of the fight, to take a quick break and recover some stamina. As the player, the rules are giving you a limited ability to control things that are beyond your character’s control, for the sake of the narrative.

Encounter and daily powers work the same way. The ranger power Split the Tree is a daily power. The simulationist model would suggest that this doesn’t make sense unless the ranger has some sort of mystical ability that they can only tap into once per day that gives them the power to fire two arrows at once. The narrative approach gives us a way out, though: the ranger could fire two arrows any time she likes, but she doesn’t get an opening, or time to line up the shot, every round. That sort of opportunity only comes once in a while – hence, a daily power. The player gets the ability to decide when that opening and free time show up, but it can only happen a maximum of once per day. This is completely an arbitrary restriction imposed by the rules; for the sake of game balance, you can only do these things a limited number of times within the framework of the narrative. It is a concession to drama over realism.

This is especially noticeable in the rules on magic item daily powers. No matter how many magic items you’re carrying around, you can only use 1 magic item daily power per day (at the heroic tier). This isn’t because the magic items share a pool of magic; rather, it is because the narrative and the game balance demand that these things be used sparingly. A warrior who relies on his magic items and shows no sign of actual combat prowess is, well… Tony Stark. And Tony Stark is a tool.

Here’s another way to explain the fundamental difference between the two approaches: in a Simulationist game, the rules encapsulate the character. In a Narrative game, the rules encapsulate the narrative. And having said all of that, I’m still not certain I’ve made my point, which is that I prefer games like D&D 4e precisely because they encourage dramatic narrative thinking instead of simulationist thinking. The narrative approach gives you two important freedoms. First, you can make a balanced game without having to jump through contortionist hoops to explain why wizards and rogues have roughly the same level of power. Second, and more interestingly, they give the players a lot more room for creative expression – you can slap any narrative description or explanation on top of an existing rule, and as long as it doesn’t change the mechanics, you have nothing to worry about.

If you want to learn more about my homebrew setting of Yord, or follow the antics of the PCs, check out my campaign at Epic Words.

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Rambling Review: Braid

2011.06.22 at 12:00 · Filed under Gaming ·Tagged , , , , ,

The Rambling Review is a series where I review games, books, movies, and TV series, both new and old, in a rambling, disorganized style.

“Can video games be art?” is one of those questions that has been discussed to death. Of course, the problem domain of defining art is a notoriously snare-laden landscape. But by almost any definition, it is clear from nearly the beginning of the game Braid that it is a conscious attempt to argue the case that video games can be art. At the very least, it is aesthetically compelling, with strongly cohesive sprites, backgrounds, music, and animations. But I would argue that it is more than just aesthetically interesting, and that it passes muster as a piece of art by almost any definition.

But more than that, the art direction reflects the themes and mood of the story, to say nothing of the symbolism encoded in the art. And the story emerges from and is intertwined with the gameplay. As Phil of The Nintendo Project recently observed:

[In Braid,] the story extends from the gameplay. It’s a story about the passage of time, memory, and regret, but all of the aspects of the story are simply thematic meditations on things about the gameplay. When the game introduces time-locked objects, the story introduces the idea of mistakes that cannot be undone. When it introduces the ability to have a shadow Tim carry out one set of actions while Tim carries out another, it introduces the idea of regret for lives unlived.

This is something that no other game in my memory has ever done. Coupling the gameplay not just to the content of the story (such as it is), but with the emotional and psychological themes of the game. Now, every game, however devoid of life, contains emotional and psychological themes. Everything we interact with does, because our minds are founded, by definition, in psychology. We approach the world by interpreting it, even if we do it on an unconscious level. Even pong can be discussed in terms of boundaries, liminal spaces, conflict, and the repetition of actions for an arbitrary and meaningless rewards.

However, games like Braid are different. They are written purposefully to draw out certain themes. They are intended to have emotive content rather than simply being circumscribed by our emotional reactions to them. Another insight of Phil’s, and the topic I really want to talk about with Braid, is this:

The thing about Braid that I think a lot of people miss, despite it probably being the most important thing about the game, is that it is one of an increasing number of games to operate in a lyrical mode as opposed to an epic mode. Implicit in this, of course, is the idea that the nearest textual medium to video games is poetry. And so Braid, instead of telling a narrative story about rescuing a princess, instead offers an extended poem in which video game mechanics, growing up, the apocalypse, and love are all intertwined into a… well… braid.

So, let’s start with something pretty basic. Phil is discussing here a dichotomy between poetry and narrative. Now, obviously he doesn’t mean poetry as an art form generally – after all, narrative poems certainly exist. Rather, what we’re talking about is a difference between two modes of writing – that is, two different things you can do with the written word. You can tell a straightforward story in which the narrative flows directly – in this mode, regardless of whether your story is allegorical or contains deeper meanings and metaphors, there is a surface level of actions that are related in some basic order. This mode, which I will call the ‘narrative mode’ for simplicity, is how most stories are told.

Another mode, though, and one that is associated in many people’s minds with poetry in general, is what Phil calls a ‘lyrical mode’. Narrative story is thrown out in favor of suggestive imagery and implicit connections. It is harder to tell a story in this mode, because we think of stories as following a single cause-and-effect sequence that we call its narrative. However, stories can be told like this, and Braid does so.

The result is a story that, while clearly a story, doesn’t have a single narrative in it. There are certainly many interpretations of Braid, but the only one I’ve seen that does them justice is the one quoted above. The story is not ‘a metaphor for the development of the nuclear bomb’, as one interpreter suggests. The development of the nuclear bomb is certainly a clear theme, but it is not the one correct interpretation of the story. Rather, there are many interpretations of the story that are all true, simultaneously. And the writer probably didn’t intend for all of them to be there – the interesting thing about writing in the lyrical mode is that you can make connections, while writing, that you weren’t consciously aware of, and that others can make connections from the symbols you use that you didn’t intend. It is a way of using language (and art, and music) that would seem messy to anyone who insists that a sentence only have one correct meaning, but the result is a beautiful and moving piece of art about regret, love, and the inevitability of loss.

Final Score: Yes

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Duke Nukem Forever should not exist

2011.06.15 at 17:30 · Filed under Gaming ·Tagged , , , ,

Today’s post was going to be a review of Braid. But Duke Nukem Forever was released yesterday, and, well… I have comments. So, next week: Braid. Now: Angry Feminist Rant.

Trigger Warning: descriptions of rape and violence ahead. Please do not read if these things may be harmful to you.

First, the backstory – Duke Nukem Forever was released after a decade of anticipation and shifting release dates, with the game being dropped and picked up by development houses and publishers along the way. And now that it is out? Almost every review of Duke Nukem Forever has been negative. It has an abysmal metacritic score (although higher than it deserves, it seems to me). Many of the reviews have pointed out, in addition to poor graphics and boring gameplay, the blatant misogyny that fills the game in place of interesting content. Even Destructoid, which doesn’t have the best track record when it comes to sexism, lambasted the game for its immaturity and offensiveness.

The game doesn’t just support rape culture incidentally by propagating misogynistic tropes, though; it absolutely revels in it. According to the Destructoid review:

…at times, the game’s attempts to be funny come off as downright horrific. One level in particular takes place in an alien nest where Earth’s women are being inseminated by giant penises. The women writhe and moan in a fairly humiliating fashion, and they regularly sob with no small amount of implied misery. In essence, the women look like they’re getting raped. In fact, they are. That’s the big joke of the level. The aliens are raping the women to create babies… By the time Duke Nukem finally makes a “You’re fucked,” joke, which he makes in front of two girls who are about to die in the process of getting sexually assaulted, Duke does not come across as cool, witty or likable in the least. He comes across as a vile, callous, thoroughly detestable psychopath.

I was speechless after reading this. This is simply heinous. It completely falls flat as humor. Even for people who are regularly amused by harmful, offensive humor, I suspect this just isn’t funny. It’s sad and disgusting that the writers of this game felt the need to use violent sexual assault as a setup for an excruciatingly bad joke.

In light of the bad reviews, The Redner Group, the PR agency responsible for sending out review copies got angry and lashed out on twitter, saying:

too many went too far with their reviews… we are reviewing who gets games next time and who doesn’t based on today’s venom

So, if someone writes a massively harmful misogynist game that includes the premise ‘rape is funny’, and you have the audacity to point that out, you deserve to be punished by losing access to review any game from that publisher. I mean… look. While Feminists often talk about the silencing tactics that people use to keep rape culture intact, we don’t usually get such a blatant example. You’re blatantly saying “if you speak out about this, we will blacklist you”. It is a direct threat to damage the career of anyone who calls you out for your misogyny. If nothing else, Redner Group, thanks for such an illustrative example.

The Redner Group isn’t the only group that has issues with the negative reviews. We have some fine apologetics going on over here on Kotaku. One user in particular, with the outstanding handle of 0LunarEclipse0, had this to say:

Just because you can’t handle shock humor does not make it not funny. Everything can be funny. I’ve laughed at some of the most racist and disgusting jokes. Maybe that makes me a horrible person… Just because something pushes you to far doesn’t mean it pushes everyone to far… Nothing should ever be off limits. If we sacrifice freedom we sacrafice [sic] life.

The very fact that this offends you is more truth that it should be defended. Because you want it silenced. Censored. Well freedom means free. Regardless of how much something offends you, we can say and do what we want. Because your feelings don’t matter.

I don’t support rape and this joke goes a little to far even for me. But I beleive [sic] in freedom. So nothing ever should be off limits.

Okay, 0 (can I call you 0?). There’s a lot wrong with this – it’s basically a giant mess of privilege denial – so let’s take it a piece at a time. Frankly, I don’t care whether you’re offended. Offense is not the point. When I say that Duke Nukem Forever should not exist, I don’t say that because I think it is offensive. I say it because it will cause material harm. It reinforces – undeniably and strongly – the cultural narrative that rape is acceptable. Because when something is made into a joke, it is normalized. It is established as a set part of our culture. This will inevitably make it seem more reasonable, or justifiable, because it is normal. That is what rape culture does – it makes rape seem normal, inevitable, and by extension, acceptable.

So let’s lay out what we’re really talking about here. Duke Nukem Forever normalizes rape. It contributes to and propagates rape culture. To defend this game is to defend the act of rape. So no, I don’t care who is offended by Duke Nukem Forever. I care about who it is going to hurt.

On to the next premise: “freedom means free”. First, I don’t know what Randian faux-Utopia you live in, but in the reality I’m accustomed to, society puts certain limits on freedom. For instance, you are not free to kill another person. But i digress – let’s talk about what’s really on your mind. You’ve erected a strawman argument here that suggests the game’s detractors are trying to say the game should be pulled from the shelves, or banned, or something similar. I don’t know if reviews have been suggesting that – I can’t find any that have. I, at least, am not going to suggest that.

Certainly, the case could be made that this game should not be allowed to see release. My discussion of its harmful nature above edges in that direction. But I would rather err on the side of letting something harmful be created than that of censoring something worthwhile. So, I’m going to say this: Certainly, 2K games is free to develop and publish a game with this content. But I stand by my assertion in this post’s title, as well: the game should not exist. The world is not made a better place, in any way, by its existence. In fact, as I have suggested above, I hold that the world has been actively made a worse place by this game existing. It should not exist in the sense that decent human beings should know better than to create something this full of hate. But none of that is to suggest that the game shouldn’t be allowed to be released, or should be banned or censored, which is what the strawman argument says (although I would suggest that, if we’re going to have a rating system at all, the ESRB’s rating of M is dismissive of the seriousness of rape; this game should absolutely be AO). Rather, I’m suggesting that it is a negative mark for our entire society that we produce people capable of producing this game.

Moreover, you are applying your freedom conspicuously in only one direction. If the developers should have the freedom to make this game, why shouldn’t reviewers have the freedom to express their opinions about the game? It seems more a little hypocritical to complain about people exercising the freedom you’re so insistent on. So which is it? Do we ‘believe in freedom’, or not? Or does that freedom only apply when it lets you laugh at women being raped to death, and not when people suggest that maybe that’s a little bit fucked up?

One last thing I’d like to talk about is this claim:

I don’t support rape

By defending this game under the guise of ‘humor’, you do support rape. You may claim to have taken some abstract stand against rape, but you are contradicting that claim with your words. The same goes for anyone who would argue that this game has any redeeming value. The game contains content that is tantamount to hate speech against women. You are free to purchase and play Duke Nukem Forever – as you say, freedom is an important thing! However, if you do choose to support this game, you are supporting rape culture. So just, you know, keep that in mind.

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D&D Post-mortem: I wanna cast ‘magic missile’!

2011.06.12 at 14:00 · Filed under Gaming ·Tagged , , , , ,

In D&D Post-mortem, I talk about my experiences running D&D 4e games, about 4e as a whole, and about collaborative storytelling in general.

When D&D 4e was launched, I was highly skeptical. I joined the vocal legion of gamers who saw it as a move towards MMO-like game mechanics and immersion-breaking shallow gameplay, and as little more than a money grab by Wizards of the Coast. However, after reading several posts by Alexandra Erin on the subject, I decided to give it a try. Her insight into the game’s design decisions convinced me that there might be something worth trying.

As I began playing around with the rules, creating sample PCs, NPCs, encounters and sketching the rough framework for several stories, I began to see that 4e had a lot of promise. I spent a good deal of money buying source books, and started looking to get a game together. I finally got a game going, albeit with a very small number of players (only two of them!). I set this game, as I do all of my D&D games (dating back to 2nd edition), in my homebrew setting of Yord.

So, we finally got together and played what I am going to affectionately refer to as our first two gaming sessions. In practice, this was actually four shorter sessions, but I digress. Here are some impressions of 4e, and things that I learned from these first sessions.

I don’t really know how to structure skill challenges. My character-driven approach to running games means that building skill challenges in advance is difficult, at least early on before the story has begun to take shape. Building them on the fly is difficult, too, and they tend to end up feeling contrived and kludgy, not to mention a bit of a slog to get through. Hopefully designing these well will become easier as I gain experience with the system.

Combat encounters, by contrast, are a joy to design and to run. It is easy to scale back encounters to account for fewer PCs, and encounter design in general is faster and less haphazard than in previous editions. It gives me more time to focus on making interesting tactical scenarios, place difficult terrain and other interesting aspects of the encounter.

I also love the game’s focus on making traps and hazards into part of an encounter. Lone traps always seemed tedious more often than they are interesting, and this makes it easy to put in the requisite traps to make a dungeon feel like a dungeon without leading to the depressing “disarm the next pit” slog. Interesting traps that deserve time to allow the PCs to pore over and tinker with them can still be encounters of their own, but most traps can now be seamlessly incorporated into combat, where they actually make things more interesting.

Another thing I love about 4e, and this is something that D&D has needed for a long time, is the concept of Power Types and Combat Roles. The roles neatly encapsulate what the ‘core four’ classes have always done – fighters look big and dangerous so that the fight will concentrate on them, rogues slip in to deal tons of damage to single targets, clerics provide buffs and healing, keeping the party alive and together, and wizards mop up the smaller targets so that everyone else can focus on the bigger threats. Someone at Wizards finally realized that these four roles, while important and useful, were somewhat arbitrarily tied to their class concepts. In 4e, the ‘Power Type’ has been divorced from the Role, so that there are classes that encapsulate the cleric’s healing and buffing abilities, but are rooted in martial or arcane themes.

This makes it a lot easier to create a character concept first, and then implement it according to the game mechanics. The general effect is that 4e makes it very easy to provide your own flavor without affecting the game balance – in general, the de facto rule is that ‘anything that doesn’t affect the game mechanics is fair game, unless your DM disapproves’. This encourages much more creativity and narrative flair than previous editions.

And yet, for all of the flexibility and useful decoupling of combat roles vs class theme, the system excels at ensuring that a given character is basically functional, and has a cohesive set of powers. This is something I noticed while running battles; they did a pretty good job of making sure everyone can be useful in combat. No more ‘I was a wizard but now I am tired’ effects, to steal a quote. This is an advantage over more piecemeal systems like GURPS, Savage Worlds, or D&D 3e – it’s pretty hard to build a useless character.

So, those are my general impressions of 4e after a couple sessions of play. Now let’s look at some anecdotes from my session.

During character creation, both of my players settled on Arcane classes – a Wizard and a Warlock. I rounded out the party with a DM-controlled companion character; a gnomish Arcane Leader. He is basically a Bard, but I chose his powers to play to the Gnome Illusionist trope. This party seems to work pretty well; I used a kobold raid on the town to test-drive the combat system, and things went well. I then used the companion character to drive a simple story – he offered looting rights in exchange for helping him recover a statue from some nearby goblins.

An aside on my DMing style here: I play a heavily character-driven style. Where some DMs would railroad the party for the sake of the story, I will sacrifice the story for the sake of the party’s actions. If they had chosen to turn Mim down, he would have gone his way while they continued on theirs. This DMing style has its disadvantages (notably, it requires a lot of improvising!), but it has some strong advantages as well. It creates the feeling from the outset that the characters’ actions actually have an impact on the story. I build the story around those actions, largely in terms of causal consequences. I do begin to practice a subtle railroading as the story develops – it often becomes easy and logical to put the story in front of the characters, and then simply observe how they deal with it. At any rate, most people seem to like this style of game, based on the feedback I’ve gotten in the past.

So, our next combat encounter occurred at the entrance to the goblins’ den. A few goblins were guarding the entrance; the party fought them off, but at least one escaped into the complex. Reasoning there was probably at least one other entrance, and that the bulk of the goblins would be through the main entrance, the party Wizard decided to blast the cave ceiling with magic missiles until it collapsed. This was my first serious blunder as a DM in 4e, I think – I said no to this idea. In retrospect, it was narratively interesting, tactically interesting, and there wasn’t a terribly good reason to say no. Given the imminence of goblin reinforcements, it was actually a great time for a skill challenge – Arcana and Dungeoneering checks to bring the cave down. After realizing this, I (much later) retconned the encounter and allowed that the cave had been partially collapsed.

These first couple of sessions were promising, and 4e looks like a system that is well-designed. It leaves a lot of room for creativity without being so free-form as to lose its sense of cohesion.

If you want to learn more about my homebrew setting of Yord, or follow the antics of the PCs, check out my campaign at Epic Words.

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Tabletop Roleplaying over the Internet

2011.06.08 at 14:00 · Filed under Gaming, Technology ·Tagged , , , ,

I have been playing tabletop roleplaying games since a fateful day when I was 13. I had gone with a friend to play Magic: the Gathering at a local video game shop that also happened to sell Magic cards. One of the players mentioned a gaming group starting up at the local Media Play.

Curious, my friend and I got a ride over to Media Play. There, I found a pretty large group of people playing Magic. I also saw an interesting sight: some people with books, funny shaped dice, and little painted figures arranged on a square grid. I watched for a few minutes, and quickly got the gist of what they were doing. I asked if I could join. The response? “Sure, we need a cleric.”

Thus began a hobby that has spanned half my life and cost a great deal of money. I have played a number of systems: World of Darkness, Cyberpunk 2020, Shadowrun, Rifts, Call of Cthulhu, Star Wars (the older edition that used d6s), homebrew systems created by various friends. But I always come back to D&D. It was my first system, and it remains my favorite through three editions of the game. In a lot of ways, it has grown with me.

In the last few years, though, I haven’t had many chances to play D&D. I was skeptical of 4e at first, and then spent a lot of money buying 4e books after Alexandra Erin convinced me of its merits in her repeated, impassioned blog posts about it (all of those links are excellent reading, even if you already know you like 4e). I sat on these purchases for months, planning games, even getting some people to make characters. But no game formed; the other players either didn’t have free time, or I didn’t have free time, or we were too far away.

The Search for a Gaming Table

Eventually I found a little free time to bring a game together, and since I couldn’t solve the problem of my friends’ lack of free time, I started looking to solve the problem of people who had free time, but were too far away. So I started looking for a solution to playing D&D over the Internet. Namely, what I needed was something known as a virtual tabletop. I started out with simple requirements: free is good, open source is even better. Since there was no good overview or comparison of the existing virtual tabletop options, I decided to make one. I’ll describe, briefly, why I didn’t pick each one (until I get to the one I *did* pick, of course).

OpenRPG – frustratingly deprecated

Years ago (about 10 of them), I tried using WebRPG as a virtual tabletop. I remember it having a somewhat cumbersome and over-engineered interface, and being frustrated with it on many levels. Still, it was the first thing in my memory, so it’s the first thing I looked up. Turns out it went open source a while back, and is now called OpenRPG.

Unfortunately, this was a non-starter. OpenRPG is written in Python (yay!), but doesn’t work with Python 2.7, which is the de facto standard in Fedora. I didn’t want to maintain a separate Python install for just one program (this is possible, but would be a pretty big hassle to set up), so OpenRPG was a bust.

Screen Monkey – expensive and cumbersome

The next program I discovered was Screen Monkey. Once again, Alexandra Erin was instrumental in this – she mentioned using it for her online games. Screen Monkey has one big advantage – for the players, it is browser based, so only the DM needs to install any client software. Unfortunately, that software only runs in Windows. So, I found an old install disk for Windows XP, and installed it as a virtual machine using KVM. Then I installed Screen Monkey Lite.

More bad news, though. Screen Monkey Lite turns out to be rather light on useful features. The biggest problem is that you can’t save your work – you have to buy the $35 version of the program to save and restore a session. The tools for hiding what the players can see was also fairly awkward. Awkward, in fact, is the word I would use to describe the program’s feeling as a whole. NBOS are terribly proud of their software ($35 proud) only to be outdone by multiple free and open source competitors. Sounds like some other software companies I know.

Gametable – RIP

Gametable looked promising, but doesn’t seem to be actively developed (there was a sourceforge project available a while back, and remnants of it are here, but it seems to be dead now), and it didn’t work very well for me.

Fantasy Grounds – pretty, but overpriced

Next up is Fantasy Grounds. I didn’t even try the demo once I saw the price tag – $40 for the DM-capable client, and $24 each for the players’ clients. One of my hard requirements is that my players not have to spend any money on the solution, so this one was right out. For a more affluent group, though, it might be a great solution. I will concede that it is gorgeous, and looks very well polished. Certainly a better contender for your money than Screen Monkey. And it has acknowledged, if unofficial, plugins for various game systems, including D&D 4e.

MapTool – the right balance

Eventually, I found MapTool, one of the applications created by the RPTools team. MapTool originally didn’t impress me – it seemed cumbersome and unwieldy. After working with it for a while, though, I found that most of its design decisions make sense, and that it is very powerful. Like most powerful toolkits, it is subsequently pretty complicated, and using it effectively took some practice. However, once I got the hang of it, it’s unbeatable. It’s more stable than any of the other open source offerings, and it runs well out of the box. It lets you use fog of war, individual player views (based on available light sources), and it lets you make maps in advance but have them hidden from the players until you are ready to show them.

Also invaluable was Dorpond’s 4e framework. This is a set of configuration settings and macros that work together to make MapTool work well with the D&D 4e rules. I have modified his macros a bit to fit my particular play style (notably, I prefer to let players roll their own initiatives), and am continuing to do so as I playtest them. You can find my latest version of the framework here.

Also, three caveat with maptool:
1. The network functionality doesn’t work with OpenJDK. Linux users will want to install the Java JRE instead. In Fedora, I just installed the jre RPM from Sun’s website, then edited MapTool’s startup script and added ‘export JAVA_HOME=/usr/java/default’ and ‘export PATH=\$JAVA_HOME/bin:\$PATH’ near the top of the file.
2. When starting a server, if you do not select ‘Use Individual Views’, the GM will not see an accurate version of the player’s view.
3. When you have tokens in the initiative list, players can only move their token on their own turn. Trying to move when they don’t have initiative will send them into an annoying endless loop of NullPointerExceptions. I’m hoping this gets fixed soon by the MapTools team, because it’s an obnoxious bug. Luckily, MapTools is Open Source – I may take a crack at finding that bug myself.

D&D Virtual Table – still cooking

Wizards of the Coast has recently announced a beta version of their own virtual tabletop – called, simply enough, D&D Virtual Table. It is only available to select D&D Insider subscribers. And, since D&D Insider is not worth the price for me personally (a topic worthy of an entire post unto itself), I have no idea whether it is any good. It would also certainly require every player to have their own D&D Insider subscription, so it breaks my stated rule. Still, it might be something to keep an eye on.

Adding Voice

So, now that we had a game table, we needed a way to talk to each other. Luckily, there is a readily available, cross-platform solution to this: TeamSpeak. Now, TeamSpeak isn’t open source, and it is not free if you want to host multiple teamspeak servers on one machine (or have more than 32 clients connected). But it’s great for a D&D game, which would never need those resources. It’s dead simple to set up the server in Linux, and the permissions management is very intelligent (and again, dead simple).

Let’s look at the options I didn’t choose for voice chat: Skype relies on a central server, and has a history of iffy privacy practices. Ventrilo offers a Linux server, but no Linux client. And the voice chat available in various Instant Messaging programs is either unreliable, or doesn’t work in Linux either. So, TeamSpeak it is, and it works great.

Passing Notes

The last thing I needed was a way to present textual information to the players. I do a lot of world-building and writing background material, and I want to make sure that is available to the players (at least, the publicly revealable parts). I also want to be able to give them things like notes that they might acquire, and possibly conduct some roleplaying between sessions if a session ends during downtime.

There are plenty of ways to simply share files, and these would be adequate. Dropbox could be used, especially for image files. Google Docs seemed like a pretty good way to share documents with players. After considering it for a while, I discovered a site called Epic Words. Epic Words gives you a journal system, so players can post in-character summaries of game sessions; this also works well as a means to deliver chunks of story-based text such as notes, riddles, etc. in a way that the players can easily access and remember.

Epic Words also has wiki-like functionality, and lets you define “references”, including NPCs and places, that will be linked automatically when mentioned in a blog post. This is an especially useful feature, because it lets me, as the DM, add content to the players’ writings without actually changing their creative work. It also gives you a private forum, which is perfect for the kind of between-session downtime roleplaying I have in mind.

Epic Words’ biggest problem is that it only allows you to run a single campaign without either upgrading, ‘retiring’ the existing campaign, or deleting it. And even with the upgrade, there doesn’t appear to be a way to share references / wiki content between campaigns (I don’t know this for sure, because I can’t really test that, but it appears to be the case). If I were running multiple campaigns, there is a slew of generic world history and other setting information I would like to share between campaigns. If you could make wiki pages independent of campaigns and then ‘link’ them in, that would be ideal. As it is, I happen to only be running one campaign at the moment, so I will have to cross that bridge if and when I come to it.

Final Thoughts

In the end, I ended up using three tools to interact with my players: MapTool, TeamSpeak, and Epic Words. I like this solution because it is very Unix-philosophy friendly – each tool serves one purpose. MapTool acts as our tabletop, TeamSpeak is how we communicate, and Epic Words gives us a handy place for wrap-up/reference/between-session play. The overall experience is pretty excellent; this is a good way to play D&D. It is better than I was hoping for, and even surpasses actual face-to-face play in some ways (I would love to find a way to use MapTool with a projector for face-to-face play).

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Rambling Review: Portal 2

2011.05.31 at 14:00 · Filed under Gaming ·Tagged , , ,

The Rambling Review is a new series where I review games, books, movies, and TV series, both new and old, in a rambling, disorganized style. It will contain scores, but they are absolutely and utterly meaningless. It is nominally inspired by Phil Sandifer’s Nintendo Project, but it is orders of magnitude less ambitious by design.

This post contains spoilers for Portal and Portal 2. Please do not read if you have not played these games and intend to.

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Heavy Rain

2010.02.24 at 15:51 · Filed under Gaming ·Tagged , , , ,

So, Sony released a little game for the PS3 yesterday called Heavy Rain. Having already played the demo, I ran out and nabbed a copy. I got home, popped it in. I thought I would play for a little while, just to see the intro, you know?
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Scratching the itch

2010.01.08 at 12:06 · Filed under Gaming ·Tagged , ,

I thought about titling this post “Eve and Vendetta in the THUNDERDOME”, but sanity prevailed. You win this round, sanity.

I played through the trial run of Eve Online. It worked without much complaint in wine. Let’s look at the things I think are cool about Eve Online, and the problems and realizations that came from the trial.
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Vendetta redux, Eve Online, and the MMO bug

2009.11.03 at 11:58 · Filed under Gaming ·Tagged , ,

So, I’ve been playing Vendetta Online for a while now, and the shiny factor is starting to fade. My neophilia guarantees that I will like any sufficiently shiny thing for at least a couple weeks. However, the game underneath the shiny is lacking, and it may be lacking in too many ways for me to justify playing it.

The biggest problem, by a long shot, is the player base. 60 players seems to be the absolute upper bound at any given time, at least while I’ve been playing. This is abysmal for an MMOG; there are FPS games that support larger numbers of players at a time. I might even be happy with this player base, if they did anything other than hang out in Sedina B8 PvPing. It doesn’t really feel like an MMO at this point, it has the feeling of a social dogfighting game.

A lot of noobs seem to appear, play for a few weeks, and vanish. I can see why. The player base seems a little cliquish, though not overly much. But you get the feeling that Veterans will always be Veterans, reminiscing about the glory days, and noobs will always be noobs, struggling to make a few credits in the face of vastly more experienced and skilled pirates. Of course, that’s when you find pirates at all. I’ve flown across have the game’s universe trading and never been pirated. Like I said in my previous post, it’s a ghost galaxy.

The numerous buggy things and realism-breakers are a turn-off, too. Capships in convoys don’t carry any cargo, so they’re worthless to both escorts (who get a “share of the profits” for their pay) and pirates. The cargo is simply an unlimited stream of widgets moving back and forth across the universe, with no great purpose in life. The convoy missions don’t always work, either; I’ve had several simply fail to end, giving me nothing and forcing me to abort the mission.

There is not a lot of variety in missions. After playing through the few available mission trees, the missions are all one of a few boilerplate missions. Fly out, kill some stuff, you’re done. Take this here, bring that back. Mine for lots of foo, get paid. Nothing more elaborate than that, which is disappointing.

I’m not cancelling my subscription yet. I’m giving the game a little more time to impress me. But at the same time, I’m going to try out Eve Online. You see, the MMO bug has hit me, and now I want a large, persistent universe full of people that I can fight with, trade with, and just generally game alongside. The space theme is more appealing to me than fantasy MMOs have ever been (fantasy has been done to death, is what it comes down to).

As far as roleplaying backstory goes, the science in Eve is surprisingly non-squishy, with a lot of modern scifi concepts making an appearance: quantum entaglement-based FTL communication, consciousness hot-backups, etc. Sure, the spectre of “jumpgates” (replace with “wormholes” at leisure) makes an appearance, but I can accept some foils for the sake of the story.

While I love twitch-based gameplay, I am a lot better at tactical/strategic combat. I think on my feet pretty well, but my reflexes suck pretty hard. I would probably find the combat in Eve more enjoyable, as a result.

If you ignore the combat layer, Eve has a lot of awesome features that would make VO great: player-owned systems, player-run economics (the materials you trade actually seem to come from a player at some point), and player-designed ships. All of these could have an analogue in VO, and if features like these were present, I would probably enjoy VO a lot more.

Of course, there’s also Jumpgate: Evolution. It’ll be interesting to check that out when it launches. We’ll see.

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