Tuesday, December 07, 2004

Neverwinter Nights

Yeah, yeah, yeah. The game's a little over two years old at this point, and I'm only now getting into it with any seriousness. This is what happens when a person spends years of their life away from Western culture and Best Buy stores.

I just picked up the Platinum edition of the game at the Yongsan Electronics Market in Seoul, having chanced to run across it at the place that sells the import games. It was pretty reasonable in price, and since I'd been wanting it since before it was released, I picked it up.

Now, to be honest, I'm not a huge fan of the graphics. Really, I'd hoped that it would have been a lot more like Baldur's Gate, Fallout and Planescape in terms of atmospheric moodiness, but then again, I played those games quite a lot back in the day. (I still have yet to complete Fallout Tactics all the way through, but that's neither here nor there... I just note it since I'm one of the few that seems to have really liked that game.)

With that in mind, it's pretty neat. It takes some getting used to, as do all games with any sort of learning curve, but what interests me is the potential of what can be done with it. They've tried a lot to be able to replicate the tabletop D&D experience (or Vampire, for that matter, but I think that the efforts made on that front were largely ignored), and I can see where they've succeeded to a greater or lesser degree. While I've only played it for a couple of hours so far (having just killed the main foe in the prison, for those that are familiar with it...), I can see where it would be possible to branch things out to a point where coherent adventures would be not only possible, but really damned interesting.

Admittedly, I'm still waiting for the day when you can host a multi-player game in something more along the lines of Morrowind, but this is a solid start to things. (All right, my dream game would pretty much be multi-player Morrowind, only with a design interface like the Sims and the ability control events from a Gamemaster interface. And while I'm dreaming, I also want a pony. Why do you ask?) The suggestion that I put together a game module has already been floated by one of my old gamer friends back in the States, and I figure that I might as well do some experimentation on that front, just to see what comes of it all. I mean, it's not like I have a hell of a lot of other things that I'm doing in my spare time, since I have yet to establish a solid, weekly gaming group...

We'll see what comes of this. Right now, I'm not taking any bets, but a lot will depend on how much I can initially do with the interface, eh?

3rd Edition Mods?

I got into a discussion with Matt the other night, in regards to the nature of Dungeons & Dragons. I was in the middle of playing Neverwinter Nights when he called, in an oblique effort to make myself comfortable with the rules system. (On some level, it was a wasted effort, being as it's on the same level of Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, in terms of invisible rules. It seemed like I was more in tune with the rules of games like Fallout and Baldur's Gate than I really am with these games. Maybe it's a matter of perceptual skew... Who knows?)

In the middle of the phone call, he made an interesting point about 3rd Edition. Like me, he's not precisely thrilled with the way that 3rd Edition has gone, but he's a little more willing to deal with it than I really am. After all, he is the prime mover in getting a game going last year. (For the record, we didn't really get very far with that campaign, but still, it was something...) He's picked up a fair stock of the basic game books that are easily available here, but on some level, he's more of a GURPS guy anyway. (I came down against GURPS a long time ago, not because the games are bad or anything, but because I found the rules and the books to be uninspiring. I far prefer the card games that Steve Jackson comes up with...)

One of the books he was most enthralled with was the new version of the Unearthed Arcana. It's more his speed, in terms of rules variants and styles of play. (I'm not going to get into his long running obsession with trying to figure out how exactly darkness (both capital and lower-case "d" on that) works in the system, since that's something that, while I agree with his frustration, I don't have any real answer for.) Unearthed Arcana is one of those supplements that just strikes me as weird. When they tell you in the Foreword that you're going to have to ignore a sizable section of the book, you really have to wonder who they're trying to sell this to. Especially at the inflated pricetag that they affixed to the book. (Here in Korea, it's a solid 42,000 Won. The main books only run nearly $10 cheaper...)

But, as I say, this was one of the books that really interested Matt. The reason being that, if nothing else, Unearthed Arcana was a way to modify the rules of the new edition so that it was something a little more towards your tastes. So, while he's not so gung-ho about stripping the rules set down to basics and getting rid of things, he wasn't precisely satisfied with it either.

To be honest, I haven't given that much time or effort towards Unearthed Arcana as yet. From where I'm standing at the moment, I'd do a lot better to play some more so I can tell just how much I want to modify the rules. I've always been the type of gamer that does better with the example of play than the dry, basic rules. That, and having a good standing of how things work in different situations would go a long way in letting me know what kind of details really annoy me in play. (This is a lot of the reason that I want to get rid of Attacks of Opportunity and the whole Critical Threat nonsense... These are things that take up time and add unnecessary complication.) Hence, on some level, why I was playing Neverwinter Nights.

Anyway, what he'd noted was that there needed to be some sort of system by which people could modify their games for specific purposes. Want an action-oriented game? Use these specific rules tweaks. Want something a little more horror-driven? Well, here's what we suggest for modifying your game along those lines. How about horror? Romance? Comedy? (Well, okay. That's a little more than just rules tweaks, I guess... It's hard to make a rolling system reflect slapstick.)

This actually made a lot of sense to me. Right now, I'm in the midst of looking more closely at the underlying theories of Eberron, with its Action Points and so on. In a lot of ways, Eberron seems to be trying to get away from some of the main conceits of D&D, bridging the gap to the more action-ready, skill-based games of the mid-90's. (And no, 3rd Edition Dungeons & Dragons cannot be considered skill-based, even now. Sure, it's a lot closer than it ever was, but that whole level thing is still in there. And yes, I've gotten into minor arguments about that...)

It seems to me that what needs to be made is a concise listing of the variant rules and how they could be applied to games. Ideally, it would include some sort of commentary about how this or that rule would change the feel of the game, but that's over-reaching for my purposes at the moment. Included, of course, would be a section on my own experimentations with getting rid of the entire miniatures-based combat rules, which would take a fair amount of time to cull down to a reasonable system. (At least, I assume so. Again, this is something that would require a fair amount of research and time, rather than the casual moments that I've devoted to it while at work. Perhaps this is something that I can undertake on the plane back to the States in January, should that come about as planned...)

Amusingly enough, I already have a notebook set aside for the purpose. Originally, it had been a way to track the progress in my teachers' class, but the low turn-out ended up having the fool thing consolidated with another class and taught by the other foreign teacher here. (Sort of. Actually, my class stayed prtty static in size, where hers shrunk to minimal levels. Since she's the one that is technically required to teach the class, she gets to teach the gestalt. But that's boring, real-life stuff that has minimal place in this set of notes.) Now, I just have to sit down and dedicate myself to researching rules systems and how to mangle them.

Wednesday, November 24, 2004

Interesting note, if nothing else

In digging through the most recent of White Wolf's catalogues/news magazines, the White Wolf Quarterly, I came across an interesting note in the section on the new Everquest II RPG that they're publishing. Apparently, they're re-writing the pen & paper RPG to go along with the launch of the new MassMOG. Either it's opportunism or a good idea; neither of which I can fault.

To quote:
"In the same way that EQrpg was compatible with 3rd Edition fantasy role-playing, EQIIrpg runs quite easily alongside v.3.5 game rules. But the game as a whole uses a more streamlined, sleeker rule-set.We’ve eliminated a number of things — like attacks of opportunity — which have caused no end of confusion at the gaming table in the last few years."

I picked up most of the first edition of the game last winter, when White Wolf was running a massive sale on the books, figuring that, if nothing else, cheap games are a good thing. I didn't have a hell of a lot of time to read through the rules before I packed them into storage and came back to Korea, but there was one thing that I found really interesting in my brief perusal. (And I have to hand it to the guys responsible; these books are pretty hefty. Well worth the low, low price that I put out for them.)

Namely, these books aren't 'officially' D20. As you can see with the above quote, they go out of their way to mention anything like a Dungeons & Dragons brand name. Now, I'm not familiar enough with the licensing arrangements on the OGL, but I get the feeling that they went over the legal stuff specifically to find a way to keep from having to hand any power over to Wizards of the Coast with this stuff. (My assumption is that, were they to trumpet it as being D20 or Dungeons & Dragons based, they'd have to cut out the Character Creation rules that WotC wants you to buy their books for. By cutting such logos off their books, they don't have to advise people to buy other company's games... Again, this is the assumption that I'm left with.)

What intrigued me with this snippet is that Attacks of Opportunity seem to be a royal pain in the ass to other gamers. A little further web-browsing shows that Wizards has set aside a page or two just for the sake of dealing with these questions. (Recently, too, seeing as they were posted in the last month or so...) Most of the hits on Google have to do with trying to clarify these rules, being as it's apparently one of the major sources of confusion with the game. Being as 2nd Edition came out before internet discussion groups were a mainstay of culture, I'm left to wonder if there was anything nearly as confusing in that edition. Hells, THAC0 was a walk in the park in comparison, from the look of things...

In the end, this is going to make me go back and look at the EQ RPG in a little more depth. The initial reading had me confused, mainly because I had expected (erroneously, as I soon found out) that it was just another plug-in for the monolithic D20 machine. If it's that much different that they eliminated such a cornerstone of 3rd Edition, I'm intrigued.

Of course, the problem that I have with Attacks of Opportunity is that it's the main thing in the argument for using miniatures in a game. And when I initially was running 3rd Edition for a group back in the States, my intention to cut out the whole AoO aspect of things to cut down on the bookkeeping, I was greeted with what ranged from incredulity to borderline hostility. Looking back, I was denying the powergaming munchkin from being able to min/max his character... Not a great loss there...

Monday, November 22, 2004

I'm beginning to see the problem...

Okay, I'll admit it: I've spent a lot of time with what I'd term the Third and fourth Generations of RPG's; namely the games that were popular during the gaming renaissance of the mid-90's.

For those of you playing at home, I break gaming into several different eras, based on what was readily available at the time. The first wave of games included the industry classics that have either survived until present day or have been re-invented -- Dungeons and Dragons, Gamma World, Call of C'thulhu, etc. The second wave corresponded roughly with the games that filled the landscape of the 80's and have largely vanished since then -- Star Frontiers, Villains & Vigilantes, Marvel Superheroes (the TSR version), DC Heroes (the Mayfair version), Traveller, Star Trek (the FASA version) and so on. The third wave (which may actually be able to be split into two parts, were I to do any research at all...) consisted of the games that hit in the late 80's and early 90's that tried to go in completely different directions than their predecessors. These included Star Wars (the WEG version), Paranoia, Vampire, Cyberpunk, 2nd Edition D&D, yadda yadda yadda. The fourth wave was what came in the wake of the gaming revitalization that was prompted by Magic, with games like Deadlands, All Flesh Must Be Eaten, Star Trek (the Last Unicorn one), 2nd Edition Vampire, Legend of the 5 Rings, and others. We're now in the fifth wave of gaming, which is marked primarily by the implosion of a lot of the gaming companies that prospered in the wake of Magic, only to be summarily killed off by the rise of D20. Sure, we have a number of interesting products, like Exalted and Decipher's Lord of the Rings RPG (not to be confused with ICE's tireless MERP), but by and large, everyone ended up trying to be yet another D&D supplement, which hastened their demise. I mean, Deadlands and 7th Sea were two of my favorite games since their inception, and I had to sit by and watch them wither away to nothing in the face of becoming D20-based games. As I noted before... Dungeons & Dragons is a great game... but not everything belongs in a dungeon, guys. Cowboys and pirates, just to pick a couple of examples...

Anyway, back to my point. Okay, so I started back in the early 80's, when the stores were still selling the AD&D hardcovers with the pre-Easley art on the cover. And that's what I played throughout middle school and high school. But most of the games that I spent serious time with during my college days were things like the aforementioned Deadlands and 7th Sea. I played a hell of a lot of D6 Star Wars (somewhere in the area of eleven discrete campaigns, most of which I ran, and a number of basic one-shots that I don't need to really count in the total...), quite a bit of Torg, the occasional Werewolf and Star Trek (Last Unicorn) games, and even an ongoing Top Secret game that lives in infamy. There was a Cyberpunk campaign in there, along with some Bubblegum Crisis and Mekton, and so on. You get the drift. Sure, I played D&D here and there, depending on time allowances, but it wasn't the end-all and be-all like it had been back in the day... back when there really wasn't much else that was available.

The thing of it is, there's one thing that stands out in my mind from all of the gamebooks that I read through during these years of massive and constant gameplay: It always seemed like, in some manual or another, there was a note to the Gamemaster telling him that the enjoyment of the game was paramount; if you don't like a rule or a style of play, change it. Granted, this is a mainstay of White Wolf's books, which I've read my share of, but it seems like it showed up in a number of other games as well. (Even some old D&D books, for that matter...) Generally, the supplements were something less than iron-clad. If you wanted to change things, alter the flow of events to accomodate players or discard rules as you wanted, go ahead. Most of the published stuff was there to as a suggestion, not a directive.

While reading through the 3rd Edition manuals, that feeling is diminished. Sure, there are all sorts of 'variant rule' sidebars, but nowhere is there any sort of suggestion of what to do with a playing group that just isn't all that hot on miniatures combat. In fact, entire sections of the Dungeon Master's Guide are devoted to tips on how to set up battles according to 'squares' and the idea of finding a miniature to properly represent your character.

To be honest, this is a little boggling to me. I mean, I remember the 2nd Edition AD&D books pretty well, and mini's seemed to be fairly unimportant to the basic flow of the game. Sure, there was a section in there dealing with how to incorporate them into the session, but they were just a play aid, like dice and character sheets. There was always the impression that, if you really wanted to play with miniatures, take a look at Warhammer. In the meantime, we've got a game to run over here.

And that's what I had gone into 3rd Edition expecting to find. Sure, Wizards of the Coast were seriously hyping their new miniatures line as things went along (as much a means to keep up with WizKids and their various incarnations of MageKnight), and the new version of ChainMail was something that got some space in the news... but to me, that seemed like a clear indicator that the two games were supposed to be separate. It didn't wake me up to the fact that you were supposed to invest further money in lead or plastic just to make the game playable.

I guess that's the thing that really irks me. Back in 6th grade, the thing that amazed me so much about D&D was the fact that it was something that could take place inside your head, using the tools of your imagination that had been developing all through your time in elementary school. Yeah, given, a lot of the things that we imagined were probably pretty far out from the original intent of the adventure, but as much of this was due to things we hadn't learned about as anything else. (Everything in 1st Edition, looking back, was written as though you had a working knowledge of all things from medieval architecture and society to mythology and literature... Not knowing Russian Folklore made BabaYaga's Hut indescribably weird... And that's just the instant example I can come up with...)

But now, we have to have miniatures. We have to print out our dungeons to put them on. We have to run all combat as though it were wholly and completely tactical. Okay, I played my share of BattleTech back in high school, but it wasn't something that I was nearly as interested in as Dungeons & Dragons. Why? Because that actually required imagination, people. And taking D&D back to its roots as a tactical game cuts a lot of that out...

Friday, November 19, 2004

Actual Things What Relate...

It's sad. In theory, this is all supposed to relate to D&D Rules and my serious attempts to re-write them to my own liking. And so far, there's been nothing more than general noise and the like. Perhaps I should post some sort of quiz to tell me what Star Wars character I most resemble. Sheej...

Anyway.

The first problem that I ran into with the new version of Dungeons and Dragons is that the experience rewards are simply nonsensical. And for some reason, nobody seems to be aware of this.

(Actually, this wasn't the first problem that I ran into with the new D&D... Having to buy miniatures just to run combat with all the new minatures-centric feats and rules was the first problem. And I'm still irritated at this particular charge of things...)

For those of you who are unaware of how badly skewed the experience base is with 3rd Edition, below is a simple sort of comparison, based on 1st and 2nd Edition rewards for killing the most basic of monsters. Orcs.

In the earlier editions, orcs were worth somewhere around 20 exp. per kill. (Specifically, they were calculated as 10xp + 1/hp or 15xp, plus the various gold and so on.) If you figure that it's going to take the average 1st level character approximately 2,000 exp. to get to the 2nd level (I figure this is fair, seeing as we have to accomodate the fast ascent of the thieves and the slow progression of magic-users), it's going to take somewhere in the neighborhood of 100 orcs, per player, for a character to advance in levels. Okay, this is some work. It's going to take a while for the characters to advance in levels. If you figure that you've got a group of 4 characters, this translates out to a solid 400 orcs, give or take.

Let's compare this with the underlying theories of 3rd Edition, with the various Challenge Ratings and Encounter Levels. Orcs are 1/2 CR, which translates to being 150 exp. per thing. With 1,000xp per level, that's 7 orcs. So, for a party of four, that's a whopping 28 orcs. Not only are the orcs worth far more, the levels are far easier to attain, and the result is that advancement is bizarrely easy and fast.

(What's funny about this is the weird contention in the Dungeon Master's Guide that characters should level after 13.3 encounters. Taking this by 3rd Edition, that means that four characters should face off against 2 orcs at a time, 14 times, in order to level. Taking this by 1st Edition, this means that the same group of four characters needs face off against an average of 30 orcs at a time to keep with the same number of encounters...)

There are more logical variant rules available in the Dungeon Master's Guide (namely, setting the experience according to how difficult the encounter is, rather than following a solid scale), but these seem more applicable to higher level characters. (I have yet to calculate how it would function beyond the low levels, seeing as I'm trying to balance the low end before I try to monkey with the upper registers.) If you use this system, however, it still ends up being notably faster than 1st Edition. Sure, you end up handing out about half the experience, if done right, but that's still eight times faster than what we used to deal with.

At the moment, I'm still working on what kind of experience scale to work from, but it's becoming increasingly evident that the existing advancement scales are unworkable for anyone that wants to keep a game going for any length of time. (Yet another thing to grumble about in another post at a later point...)

Mutterings...

It's weird, the kind of things that will crop up to mess with me. I started a blog (two, actually) for the sake of recording my thoughts on a public forum, since there was nothing similar. I figured that it would be a way to while away the time at work when I was done doing the basic things that are required of me and was left with time to kill.

As a sort of redundancy, I've been posting these first bits on two sites, Bloglines and Blogspot. In some ways, I prefer the formatting options on Blogspot, but I can see other advantages inherent in Bloglines. Since I'm not all that comfortable with blogs in general, I can hardly claim to be an expert with how things are done, so I'm still working out what will function best for my limited purposes.

What's caught me is that, for whatever reason, I can't access a preview of my posting on Blogspot from the computers here at the school. I can access everything except the front page that everyone else sees, and while that's not a terribly big deal, it's annoying. It would be nice to be able to see if the formatting of a given post looks like hell or not, even though I'm pretty sure it's fine.

I don't figure that this will change the way I do things a whole hell of a lot, but for the time being, it's able to confound and annoy me.

Thursday, November 18, 2004

Background

I suppose it would help to note exactly how I'm approaching this specific set of musings. First off, I'm an English teacher at an elementary school on the outskirts of Seoul, working with 3rd and 5th grade students in a public school. It's not a bad gig, all in all, and more than likely, a lot of the updates that will go into this blog will happen when I'm at work. (Go figure. I have a fair amount of free time when I get done with classes for the day... Therefore...)

This is my second year here in Korea, having spent the previous year at a hellish place to the south that's better left unmentioned at present. Once you've done your year in the trenches, for whatever reason, you can then go on to a far cushier public school job and relax.

The thing with Korea is that, despite a nearly ubiquitous presence of such things as Diablo and Warcraft, the idea of pen & paper role-playing is nearly unheard of. I've actually seen specials on the 'bizarre trend' of such games played without benefit of a computer. (Of course, this was on one of the video game networks, which are devoted to following championship games of StarCraft or similar... I wish I was making this up...)

So, with this in mind, it's nearly impossible to find other gamers of any sort. Teaching English in Korea is hardly the first choice of your standard gamer geek. For one thing, it requires a bachelor's degree just to get over here in the first place and to hear a lot of the foreigners I've met here, if they were gamers before, that was a hobby they got out of after college. (Apparently, I'm just the type of person that never grew up... Not a huge surprise there, but still...) And well, with the cross-pollination of anime and gaming, there's a better chance of meeting people who game in Japan.

What this is leading up to is that, despite any leanings I might have towards other games, I'm running with a smaller pool of gamers. And with less people, the result is less of a selection of potential games. And what's the most popular game of recent times, to the point that it's come close to killing the gaming industry again?

Dungeons & Dragons, of course.

This is not to say that I dislike D&D. In fact, it was the first game that I learned to play, back in 6th grade, so many years ago. I've played through 1st and 2nd Edition, which were my favored games in middle and high school. In my opinion, Ravenloft is one of the finest products to ever be published for any system. I've paid my dues; I've got my cred.

The thing is, Dungeons & Dragons is just one of a universe of games. And despite what Wizards of the Coast would have you believe, D&D is really only well-suited for playing, well, D&D. Even they admit it. The D20 rules are best suited for dungeon crawls. That's the default setting for their game, and to be frank, trying to shoe-horn a dungeon into science fiction or contemporary genres is a problematic thing.

But that's a complaint that I can explore better later on. For the moment, we'll suffice to say that, while I like the game, it's not the only game I'll play. And if I'm going to run a game, there are other systems I'd rather use. But to my basic annoyance, this is the game that other people want to play.

One other note: My degree in college was in writing, which was actually an outgrowth of my interest in running games, as the plot contruction and development has certain sorts of parallels. As such, while I like playing games as well as the next gamer, I really prefer to run them. I've spent a lot of time perfecting certain aspects of my games, and to me, it's a lot more fun to plot out a game than play.

So, with this in mind, I've spent a certain amount of time here in Korea looking for a group to run games with. And wht I've ended up with the understanding that most of these guys want to play D&D, even if I'd rather run something like Deadlands or Exalted or ... hells, Torg. And to be honest, I haven't spent a lot of time with 3rd Edition Dungeons & Dragons, if only for the fact that it was coming out about the time that I was getting out of college and leaving the States to come to Asia.

Yeah, sure... It's not rocket surgery or anything, but if I'm going to be running a game, I want to know a game pretty well before I delve into it.

And that's another problem that I have with the game that has been suggested most recently: Of the people that want to play, I'm the most likely to run the damned thing while simultaneously being the least experienced with the new ruleset. And the last thing you ever want to face in a gaming situation is having your players offer to help you with rules. Trust me on this.

Anyway, with a lack of options open to me, I'm going back and reading through the 3rd Edition rules again, with the idea of altering the game to my own preferences. And well, this is the outlook I'm taking when I'm sitting down and monkeying with this blog as a means to publish my notes on the process.

And well, being the sole voice of dissent on a topic such as this is amusing.

Initial Notes...

To be honest, I've never been a huge fan of blogs in general. To borrow from Sluggy Freelance, the problem with them is the same as nude beaches: No quality control.

Anyway, continual pressure has pushed me to do something. I'm just trendy that way, I suppose. Therefore, since I'm in the midst of working together something resembling a Dungeons & Dragons game, the two things can coincide accordingly.

Now the thing is to see if I actually keep up on this for more than a couple of entries before my interest wanes or I find something else to do with my copious time on the net. I'm not taking any bets, either way.