Play Cycle

So, I'm going to talk a bit about the play cycle in Mistwardens.  I'm doing this as much to organize my thoughts as anything else, so this is probably going to end up being even more of a ramble than normal.

In your generic fantasy RPG, the typical play cycle goes something like this:

1.  The PCs encounter adventure hook.  This might involve traveling to a new location, or it may involve simply being at the local tavern at the same time as the mysterious quest giver.

2.  The PCs prepare to leave on their journey.  This is the step most likely to be skipped. It usually entails buying various adventuring supplies throughout town (what about a bit of rope?  You'll want it if you haven't got it), possibly hiring some assistants, and maybe doing a bit of preliminary investigation and rumor-hunting.

3.  The PCs leave their place of safety to follow the adventure hook.  The place of safety is usually civilization itself, but it needn't be - plenty of adventures are set entirely within an urban environment.

4.  The PCs reach the Dungeon and face its dangers.  This need not be a literal dungeon, as long as it's a place of danger where they can solve the problem to which the adventure hook pertains.  The thwarting of the dungeon's dangers may involve a single session, or it may be spread over several sessions.

5.  The danger thwarted, the PCs return to their place of safety to the spoils they find.  Typically, this means experience, wealth, and magic.  Often there is a bit of time spent dividing up the loot amongst the party, but this can vary from group to group and isn't integral to the process.

6.  Return to step one for the next adventure.  Repeat until the campaign ends.

Sometimes there are other steps involved, and sometimes one or of these steps may be skipped over - for example, some adventures are meant to begin in media res, thus completely skipping steps one and/or two.  Overall, these steps are largely informal.

Mistwardens is not going to be all that much different, except that many of these steps are going to be hard-coded into the rules.

1.  Receiving the adventure hook is more or less the same, though typically the PCs are in charge of a settlement and adventures will involve dealing with threats to that settlement.

2.  Pre-journey business in town will be more formalized.  PCs receive a certain number of actions they can accomplish before leaving on their journey, in which they'll purchase supplies, buy favors, hire henchmen, and so on.  This is meant to be a bit more abstract - your actions don't just determine how efficient you are at spending your time, but also how good you are at finding what you need in the time that you have.

3.  The PCs leave the safety of town.  Journeying is much less hand-waved than in most fantasy RPGs.  It's a matter of resource management, making sure you have the supplies and skills you need to make the journey safely, as represented by the Camp Building roll.  Wandering monster encounters are built right into the system, so that you only encounter them if you roll poorly (or, alternately, if you roll very well).

4.  The PCs reach the Dungeon and face its dangers.  "Dungeon" here is used even more loosely than in most fantasy RPGs, where it can include not just the decrepit tower that you're journeying to, but also the cursed swamp that surrounds it and the haunted forest in between.  Additionally, dungeon "levels" actually have a mechanical effect - the deeper into the dungeon you go, the more difficult it becomes by default.

5.  The danger thwarted, the PCs return to safety.  There isn't really any treasure-divvying in Mistwardens, since that's done as you play.  Experience points are still tallied and divided, though since they're a physical thing I suppose you could consider them to be "treasure."

Then there are four extra steps that Mistwardens has:

5B.  The PCs boast about their accomplishments.  The PCs are, by default, Big Damn Heroes, so every adventure ends with them boasting Beowulf style.  This has a mechanical benefit, in that it's the primary way to receive magical equipment.  Minotaur PCs have a special challenge here in that they have to walk a fine line - they need to claim the credit they deserve, but without overshadowing their masters, since failure to do either is considered a Shameful act.

6.  The Mists recede.  Maybe.  This involves a roll (still working out the mechanics of this one), and if successful you clear more territory for your settlement - and, thereby, the Empire.

7.  The PCs manage their town.  The default mode of play has the PCs in charge of a settlement, and this is the part where they manage it Civilization-style.  They have various resources that they spend to make their settlement safer and more prosperous, to make it stronger in resisting the Mists, and to build various facilities that give them advantages in adventuring (which is really what the game is all about).

8.  The Mists fight back.  The Mist, as a primal embodiment of chaos, doesn't just float idly by.  It fights back against the forces of civilization, always attempting to (re)claim more ground.  It's entirely possible to go through an adventure and lose as much ground as you gained in step 6 - or even lose more than you gained.  This just causes more problems to solve next time around.

I'm also pondering a step somewhere in between steps 1 and 3 involving swearing an oath related to the adventure hook - some goal you intend to accomplish, one that is distinct from the adventure hook itself.  This would play into the boasting at the end of session, making it easier for your equipment to become enchanted.

Condensed some more, I suppose I envision the typical play cycle as Town-Travel-Camp-Travel-Camp-Travel-Camp-Dungeon-Travel Home-Camp-Travel Home-The End.  Ideally, I'd want all of this to take place in a single 5-6 hour session, though it may sometimes involve several sessions (or even several trips to and from town) to clear out a single dungeon.

Really, it depends on how the rolls go.

* * * * * * *

Since my last update, I've written about 3,659 words, plus about three hundred words in random, condensed hand-written notes.  My To-Do list has expanded quite a bit, and looks like the following at the moment (anything with a question mark is something I'm not sure I actually want to do):

-Make a solid cost list for Network, Wealth, and Gear.

-Finish the unfinished skills.

-Figure out a way to pay hirelings.

-Write up attitudes towards rivals for factions/races.

-Figure out a way to increase your Network.

-Rules for buying Network with Wealth.  Where?

-Figure out Faction and House XP.

-Eldritch creation rules.

-Mutation rules.

-Helping rules.

-Finish rules for creating Wildlings.

-XP cost chart.

-Alternate magic systems:

       -Geomancy

       -Golemancy

       -Curse Magic

       -Trap Magic

-Revise Magic Damage.  Based on Will?

-Starting racial equipment. (Different shields, etc.)

-Finish the advancement rules.

-Faction Influence rules.

-Oaths and oathbound artifacts?

-Status Cards for:

        -Helpless

        -Hungry

        -Poisoned

        -Diseased

        -Paralyzed

        -Blind

        -Sleep

        -Bleeding

        -Mute

-Write a note about time measurement

-Adventure-making advice/system (Randomly generated dungeons?)

-Reputation Rules?

-Rules for fleeing

-Rules for Maps-making?

MtG, Versus, and Good Game Design

I've been playing a lot of Magic: The Gathering lately, and this has had me thinking about good and bad game design and the things that makes Magic almost maddening for me at times.  I figured I'd rant about it a bit, since learning from the mistakes and successes of others is important when designing a game.

My experiences with CCGs are mainly with three games:  Magic: The Gathering, Yu-Gi-Oh, and Versus.  I did, at one point, have a Pokemon deck, but the game didn't really appeal to me (I learned the game to impress a girl, believe it or not).  I also briefly played a limited-run CCG called Wyvern that I recall I very much enjoyed, but I don't remember much about it so I won't talk about it here.  I remember only a little about Yu-Gi-Oh except that I always enjoyed hamming up the cards in my best Yugi voice when I played them.  So, instead I'll focus my comparison on Versus and MtG.

Of course, MtG came first; it is to CCGs what Dungeons and Dragons is to RPGs (how fitting that they're both owned by Wizards of the Coast these days).  Much of what we think of as "collectible card games" these days are essentially informed by the rules that MtG established for the genre back in 1993.  And to be fair, it got a lot of stuff right.  I'm going to slag on it pretty hard for a few things later on, but there's a lot to recommend the game.

Seriously.

For example, in an MtG game there's very little downtime.  By this I mean, you're constantly paying attention to the play environment even when it's not your turn, adjusting your strategies and decisions according to the things your opponent does.  This goes double if you have untapped mana and some cards in hand, because then you're looking for openings to actively change the play environment when your opponent is at his weakest - and if that happens to be on his turn, then so be it.

Really, that's pretty impressive.  Contrast that to, say, chess, where you can really just zone out until your opponent makes his move and then just reassess the board when you make yours, and you're looking at a much more involved game.

MtG also did emergent strategy really well.  Actually, in the early days it was kind of bad - winning was about getting some of the Power Nine cards and then just blasting through your opponent.  But before long they started designing the cards so that each individual card was okay, but they really shined when you figured out synergies between the cards and built a play strategy around supporting those synergies.

Now, for the bad things.  Well, there's a lot of them.  Most of them are minor, however - dumb decisions in design that took them forever to fix (like Necropotence, a vastly overpowered card that they just didn't want to ban from tournament play).  I'm not really going to talk about any of them.  No, I'm going to talk about what is, in my opinion, a singularly terrible design decision that is the basis of MtG gameplay.

Mana.

Now, in my mind a good game design is one which allows all the participants to not just have fun, but to do the activity that the game is purportedly about.  In a competitive game, you want both players to have all the resources they need to win (theoretically speaking, anyway).  If you were to play a game of chess where players have to roll randomly to see which pieces they get - if they get any at all - this would lead to some very uneven games.

Now, CCGs aren't about perfectly even battlefields.  Someone who's better at designing decks and strategies is going to have an advantage.  But should a match really be considered worthwhile if only one player's deck actually does what it was designed to do?  In these circumstances, this isn't exactly a battle of the minds.  It's just a battle of luck, and a frustrating one at that.

And yet, MtG depends on lands to provide mana to play the cards.  This is the core of gameplay.  If you don't get the mana you need, you don't get to play the cards, simple as that.

I don't know what the kids are calling it these days, but back in the day we used to have a term for mana-related problems.  We'd call it being "mana-screwed."  This could be when you have to spend the first six turns trying to play with a single land.  It could also mean drawing nothing but land for five turns in a row.  Both result in victory for your opponent, but in both cases it's a tainted victory.  I don't enjoy winning that way, and I especially don't enjoy losing that way, because in either case it's just dumb luck.

Pretty early on they introduced a mulligan rule, where you get to discard your opening hand and draw a new one if you didn't get any land to start off with, in order to minimize this mana-screwage.

Problem is, this is a rather awkward fix for a fundamental game flaw.  Frankly, there's no reason the game couldn't be designed differently so that such things don't happen.

When I started playing Versus, this is the main reason it was such a breath of fresh air for me - there was no mana.  Instead, there's a constant, steady progression of power available to either side.  You can play 3-cost heroes on turn three, or 8-cost creatures on turn 8.  It's not about whether you're lucky enough to get the resources to actually play the game, it's about whether or not you've played well enough to survive that long.

Versus was not a perfect game, of course.  It had all the same little problems that magic does in terms of bad individual card design, and I dislike the way it handles affiliations, but it solved what I felt was the biggest flaw in MtG.  I'd probably still play it if the community didn't dry up.

I try to keep this in mind as I work on Mistwardens.  If something isn't working as intended, instead of going for the easy fix, I try to determine in every case whether or not the problem needs tweaking of if I should just discard it entirely and start over.  In game design, it's super important to get the fundamentals down right, otherwise you may discover you've built your game house on a foundation of sand and it's too late to go back and do it over again.

* * * * * * *

Wrote 1,440 words since last update.  Doesn't sound like a whole lot, but they were important, manly words that don't take no guff from anyone.

Where's My Castle?

I broke my gaming teeth on D&D - not AD&D, but basic D&D, specifically the Mentzer version.  Cracking open those pages for the first time was a moment of wonder for me...  I'd long been fascinated by fantasy, and the idea of a game where I got to be a hero like in the fantasy novels that I'd read?  Wow.

I'd played the little solo adventures at the beginning of the red book, and they were a lot of fun.  My ten-year-old self was pretty taken by Aleena the cleric (pictured left - the foxiest cleric of them all!), and to this day I still hold a grudge against the evil wizard Bargle for killing her.

I didn't really get to play those games much.  While I did get a lot of my friends of the time into RPGs, most of them turned out to be far more interested in Palladium or Marvel Super Heroes than good old D&D...  And I enjoyed those games too, for a time.  But there was just something about D&D that held an allure for me.  Often I'd end up playing the game by myself, buying a solo module every once in a while or rolling up wandering monster encounters for my fighter to battle.

Despite not playing the game often, I still bought the Expert rules set when I felt I was done with Basic.  Then, when I was done with that, the Companion set, and the Masters set after that.  Never bothered with Immortals, and the concept didn't interest me much.

Since those days, I've played in plenty of campaigns (nothing recently, but that's by choice rather than circumstance), most of these being 2nd edition AD&D and 3rd edition D&D.  They were fun at the time, until they stopped being fun, but I did notice regretfully that they had different assumptions than the boxed rules sets that I started with.

See, in the Mentzer sets once you reached name level, it was expected you would be able to get a castle.  This came with the ability to acquire/hire followers, staff, and land which you'd administer.  And frankly, I fell in love the idea.  It even came with an entire set of rules (pretty much the thrust of the Companion rules) for managing your domain, battles between armies, etc.  Looking back, the rules were somewhat poorly designed and arbitrary, but I still loved the idea behind them.  Still do, in fact.

Strangely, this assumption that adventuring would naturally lead to becoming a ruler was almost completely absent in the advanced version of the game to which I later migrated.  Frankly, it was always something I really missed, even though I never really got to use them with my basic set either.  Something about the idea just really appealed to me.

Sometimes, I'd play in a game where my character would eventually achieve some sort of rulership:  They'd become leader of a tribe of lizardmen, or conquer a city in a rebellion, or whatever.  The Burning Wheel game I'm playing in has my character in charge of a multi-racial town.  But these always seem somewhat handwavey in practice, and even when rulership is the focus of the game it's always felt like an afterthought at best.

I think it's interesting that this legacy of domain-managing rules has since been adopted by other games, particularly of the retro variety like Adventurer Conqueror King. They, like the Mentzer set I pored over so long ago, assume that this is sort of a natural progression.

I'm not a fan of having to grind through nine levels to get to this stuff, though.

* * * * *

Been working busily away at Mistwardens in preparation for another playtest this weekend, when a friend is coming by for a visit.  I hope to have the Retinue rules ready by then, at the very least, since they're almost finished.  I also intend to revise the rules on monster design to make them even easier to build on the fly.

It would be awesome if I could have mutation rules done by then...  But it's not looking likely, not if I also want to have something to actually run on Sunday.  We'll see, though.

One thing I know for sure I won't have ready by then, sadly, are the domain management rules.  Oh, well.

5,321 words written since my last update.

To Do List

This is my current to do list:

To Do:

-Revise the area effect spells.

-Retinue rules.

-Firm up costs for Network, Wealth, and Gear.

-Write up attitudes for orders.

-Write up attitudes for houses.

-Eldritch creation rules.

-Mutation rules.

-Alternate magic systems.

-Starting equipment costs and racial equipment. (Different shields, etc.)

-Finish the advancement rules.

-Faction Influence rules.

-Oaths and oathbound artifacts.

-Time sequences (1 round = 30 seconds?)

-Adventure-making advice/system (Randomly generated dungeons?)

-Reputation Rules?

This is, of course, subject to further changes and additions, but these are the items that have my most immediate attention.

Wrote 2,920 words today, most of which was related to racial attitudes.  Next I'm going to do the same thing for Houses and then for Orders.

Too Many Rolls

I've never been one for short-term campaigns.  Pick-up games that last a single session, for the most part, have never really interested me.  I'll make an exception every now and again, often just to see a new rules system in action, but in order to really grab my attention a game has to be able to have room to grow.  I enjoy watching my characters develop relationships, concoct plans, and grow in both personality and power.  I really love empire building, too.

There's a problem with this, though.  Most games have a breaking point where things just stop working well.  The rules just get so darn heavy that they really get in the way of the game itself.  For some games, this occurs very early on (Palladium, I'm looking at you), but I've yet to play a system that doesn't have this problem, excepting those games that side-step the issue by not having any sort of growth/experience mechanic at all.

3rd Edition D&D in its various incarnations tends to start feeling this problem when characters reach their early teens.  Things get really bogged down and combats start moving at a snail's pace, and if you continue progressing in levels the problems just keep getting worse.  The reasons for this are many, but one of the biggest is the fact that there are simply too many rolls involved in a single round of combat, and this is largely because most of the rolls are useless.

It starts with the initiative roll.  Most systems with combat have some sort of initiative mechanic (though lately I've seen a few that don't have any initiative rules, such as Marvel Heroic Roleplay, which I'm currently running), but when you stop and think about it what is this really for?  You roll initiative so you know when you get to take your action.  In most cases, taking an action is going to involve one or more rolls, so really you're rolling dice to determine when you get permission to roll some more dice.  Broken down like that, it's kind of silly.

Rolling for initiative breaks down the flow of play, too - even if you, like most groups I've played in, only bother rolling for initiative at the start of a combat rather than at the start of every round, it delays the actual meat of the combat while you're getting everyone's roll down and figuring out turn order.

You can sink multiple feats into this initiative roll.  Character concepts can be designed around getting as big a bonus on this as possible, trying to be the fastest gun (or sword, or bow, or whatever) in the West(eros).  But a bad roll makes those feats largely irrelevant, at least for that combat.

But it doesn't end with initiative.  When your turn comes around in the initiative order, you usually end up making some sort of roll to see if your action goes off successfully, an attack being the most basic and most often-used example.  But an attack may or may not strike, and even if it does it doesn't mean you struck well.  Hell, you could roll a critical, which involves another roll to confirm that yes you really did roll a critical, only to roll poorly on damage.  A lot of exciting build up just for a big disappointment.  So really, the important roll is not the one you make to attack, but the one you make to deal damage.

All these rolls are being made to see if you get permission to make the rolls that actually affect things, the ones that you actually care about.  At low levels, this isn't a particularly big deal...  But when you start getting characters who get four or five attacks every time their turn comes around, and who are powerful enough that they need to be challenged by multiple creatures with four or five attacks themselves, then all this rolling starts to become a problem.  This was one of the things that really killed 3rd Edition D&D for me.

Burning Wheel was a hugely influential game on my approach to roleplaying games, whether playing or designing, for a number of reasons.  The reason relevant to this rant is this:  When you make a roll in Burning Wheel, it always matters.  There are no extraneous rolls, and (almost) no rolls-that-you-make-in-order-to-get-permission-to-make-another-roll.  While designing Mistwardens, I've been trying to keep this design strategy in mind.  Every roll should matter, and when you roll well, it should have a significant, measurable effect on gameplay.

* * * * *

Wrote 1,350 words today.

The Dragon in the Room

Walt Whitman was the American poet.  Note I said "the," not "an."  Walt Whitman's works were so massively influential in the world of American poetry, and had such a wide-ranging influence on the American psyche, that you can see signs of his influence in basically every American poet who has written since then.  If you're an American and you write poetry, whether you realize it or not, you're taking part in a conversation that he effectively started.

Most other poets of our neighbours to the south write their poetry as a response to his poetry, whether to agree with his statements or to contrast against them.  Many do so consciously, but even the ones that don't are still talking to Whitman through their work, because they speak from a space that he had a huge hand in defining.

These probably come across as bold, sweeping statements to those who are unfamiliar with the world of American poetry.  They are, and there are some exceptions to this rule as to any other.  The point is that it's hard to underestimate how huge an impact Whitman's works had on his culture.  In many ways, while he wasn't the first American poet, he was the first to produce distinctly American poetry.

So what does this have to do with RPGs?

Well, much like the vast majority of American poetry is written (consciously or not) as a response to Whitman's works, most RPGs are written as a response to Dungeons and Dragons.  And I'm not just talking about fantasy games - I mean all RPGs, even video games, though they stand outside of the point I want to discuss today.

It's not that these games don't have interesting ideas or have interesting things to say.  It's just that D&D, for better or worse, defines the industry.  It was first, it was the biggest, and the space that these other games inhabit were created by TSR back in the days of Gygax and Arneson.  There's no shame in this, and recognizing that fact - embracing it, even - gives you a great deal of freedom creatively.

Once you've accepted the mindset of "Yes, this game is a response to Dungeons and Dragons in many ways," you don't need to worry about trying to create something wholecloth, ex nihilo.  Which would be impossible, anyway.

My game is influenced by D&D.  Of course.  How could it not be?  When I design a rule about initiative or spellcasting, I'm making that rule in contrast to their counterparts in D&D.  When I approach rules design with a particular philosophy in mind, I'm doing that because I think the approach that was taken in designing this or that edition of D&D didn't work and I need to do things differently.  Or perhaps I think it did work, and I want to build upon those lessons and successes.

It's all part of the ongoing meta conversation of game design.  There's no point in being anxious about these influences, because they are literally unavoidable.

* * * *

Wrote 520 words today (so far).

Alpha Tests (parts 3 and 4)

Last weekend I had two alpha tests (one more than expected, but I caved to peer pressure).  Both were fairly successful, in that the game did pretty much what it set out to do and everyone had fun.  Spells were still kind of wonky during the first session, but I think they're pretty balanced at this point.  Still a lot of fine-tuning to do on various perks, techs, and spells, of course, but that's going to be the case for pretty much always.

I badly need a phonetic pronunciation guide for basically everything.  With a strong Greek/Roman/Persian influence, there's lots of confusion over how you say stuff.  I don't think I heard "House Achenea" pronounced the same way twice in a row during either session.

I've got a to-do list done up.  It keeps getting bigger rather than smaller because for every thing I finish I find three more things that need attention, but I expect that will be how it goes until the rules system gets pretty deep into beta.

I'm not sure how many more alpha tests I'm going to need before I can say I've gathered the information I need to gather, but off the top of my head I want to:

-Run an all-Fenrir game, just to see how broken a Fenrir pack is by the rules as written.
-Run a game of higher levels, say 4-5, to get a better idea of how the rules scale up.
-Run a short 3-session campaign to get a feel for the domain management rules.

So, that's at least five more before Beta proper.