My Favourite RPG

When I wrote about Eschalon, I mentioned that I have never finished Betrayal At Krondor. I would imagine this is strange, since pretty much all my life I have stated that it is the best game ever (until Space Rangers rolled in). So when I finally played through Bastion (not much to say there. Good use of narration, great music) I needed another game to play through. And that’s when I decided to finally finish Betrayal At Krondor, my favourite Role Playing Game, and also provide some analysis.

Image via Wikipedia

Until I found myself in tvtropes reading Krondor’s entry, I had believed that Raymond E. Feist had written the story and the text in the game. Well, apparently this is a myth. Still, it does not invalidate the fact that Betrayal At Krondor is well-written. Almost everything in the game is represented in prosaic text. There is a screenful of text before a fight, after a fight, when you click a house, when you use an item in the inventory… The game world and characters feel very alive, and there are many details that would have been impossible to present otherwise. And the events can be quite humorous.

The game’s story starts when Owyn, a young noble’s son and a magician patches up an injured Seigneur Locklear, who we learn is escorting a Moredhel prisoner named Gorath (an evil elf) to the kingdom’s Capital, Krondor. After an assassin is killed by Gorath, Locklear unchains him and takes Owyn with them, as the boy might reveal their destination. And then the player is set free, with one objective: Get to Krondor. Despite the story being very linear, the game world is quite open, and the player can potentially explore the whole map. The game does not keep track of sidequests, so the player must pay attention to the things people say in order to actually find quests. Most of them are simple ones: A ruby was stolen, a jeweller might know something about it, he says he sold the ruby to a noble, and the noble gives up the ruby if you fix his sword. But they feel very rewarding, since there is not a great arrow pointing at your destination.

Combat in Krondor is turn-based, and pretty standard. You can do two melee attacks, block, pass turn and regenerate health, use inventory and attempt to escape. There are few interesting things, though. All characters have Health and Stamina. Whenever they take damage or do a heavy attack, they take Stamina damage. When it runs out, they start taking Health damage. All of the characters’ stats lower by the percentage of their health, meaning that if they have 75 % health remaining, everything they do is at 75 % efficiency. This makes combat quite unpredictable: If you can get the first solid hits, the opponents won’t be able to push back. And if you take a beating first, getting back on top will require some hefty maneuvers, or health potions, which are semi-rare. Blocking an opponents hit leaves him open for a counterattack, something that is only explained in the manual, like a lot of game concepts and mechanics. No tutorials here.

Mages use Stamina to fuel their spells, which can only be cast when the enemy is not adjacent. One solid fireball can potentially incinerate one enemy and injure others, assuming it hits, but it will drain about three quarters of the mage’s Stamina. It’s an interesting tradeoff. Most of the offensive spells are quite situational; Fireballs do area damage, which makes it difficult to use in close quarters, lightning attacks work only outside and require the opponent to be carrying metal. And other spells I haven’t stumbled in yet.

Combat is also brutal, especially against monsters. It takes only a couple of solid hits to take away your Stamina, which turns the difficulty way up. Krondor features the now-standard unconsciousness mechanic. When a character runs out of Health, he goes unconscious and revives after the combat. But in Krondor “revive” is a very gracious way to describe it. After combat, an unconscious character has 1 health, and a status Near-Death. Near Death cures extremely slowly, and the character does not heal when he is Near-Death. It might take as much as two weeks of in-game time, more if you do not have healing herbs. Another annoying status is Poison, which either requires expensive and rare detoxins, or constant medication. If not medicated, the character will constantly lose hit points, even while resting. Which leads to Near-Death. Both statuses can be cured in a temple, but it is expensive. Very expensive.

Speaking of money, while it is easy to become filthy rich, the player still has constant expenses. Armor and weapons degrade and must be repaired with whetstones, Aventurine and armorers’ hammers. The characters eat. Sleeping outside only cures you to about 80 %, so sleeping in an Inn is a good idea from time to time. And it costs money. True, most of the enemies carry some rations, and whetstones are quite common. But one will have to buy food from time to time. A week’s rations for one person costs about 4 sovereigns. A week goes surprisingly fast if you need to rest for a night or two after every fight. A sword you might want to buy costs about 500 sovereigns. Dragon Mail (the best in the game) costs 1000 sovereigns. Spells are from 150 to 400 per piece. A better staff for your mage? 1400 sovereigns.The most money I have hoarded was about 2000 sovereigns. Things are expensive. And I like it.

Exploration is pretty fun, since there are lots of hidden stuff-filled holes and Moredhel word chests lying around. The latter are unpickable, and can only be accessed by answering the riddle on them. But I must admit that those were a lot more fun back in the day before Internet. I remember having one game magazine with most of the answers in it, and I treasured that magazine.

Betrayal at Krondor is old, but good. Many of the mechanics and ideas it wields are working. They are light enough to not make the experience dreary, and engaging enough to make the game more than just hacking and slashing.

Also, I just realized something. Both in Bastion and in Betrayal at Krondor, there is an instance of the game justifying the player’s choice. In Bastion, the narrator has a comment for almost anything the player does. In Krondor, at one point I was supposed to go to east, to Romney. I found myself in high north. One person asked where we were going, and the leader of the party at that point, James, answered “We’ll see. We figure if we don’t know where we’re going, then the enemy won’t”. That was a pretty nifty justification for my wandering.

 

Prebaked Adventure

There was a time when I scoffed at prewritten adventures in roleplaying games, especially in D&D. The point of the Game Master is to create their own setting and plot and let the players experience what you want them to experience. Using a premade adventure is going to take that point away, and most likely the adventure will suck due to its rigidity/vagueness/difficulty. I went and created my own worlds, my own plots and my own encounters. Only fools used premade games. Then Dark Heresy happened.

Dark Heresy is a roleplaying game that takes place in Warhammer 40k-setting. The players are Acolytes of an Imperial Inquisitor and take roles such as a Techpriest, a Psyker, an Arbitrator or a Cleric, amongst others. While obviously marketed at people who already know all about 40k, I imagine there might be a few people who don’t know anything about it and still want to try out Dark Heresy.  These people are confounded with a new system, weird character classes and only a vague idea what the game is about. One could read the enormous background of the 40k setting, but that would probably take a long time. A better way to instantly get to know the game would be a some kind of tutorial. Like a premade adventure.

Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition’s Dungeon Master’s Guide has a short, introductionary adventure at the end of the book. It consists of a village with some important people characterised and a simple background plot: A group of Kobolds living in an old manor have raided a wagon caravan, and someone needs to retrieve the cargo.  The section is followed by a simple dungeon with kobolds, traps, terrain features and a boss monster in the end. The adventure tells the DM and the players what the game is about: Heroes going to interesting places, getting a quest, going to a dungeon and fighting monsters. It perfectly illustrates what the Intended Game Experience is.

Same thing with Dark Heresy. There is an adventure in the book to introduce the players to what the game is about: Going to wretched places, meeting mutants, fanatics and heretics, finding out eldritch secrets and then dispensing Imperial judgement to the heretics and appropriate mutants and fanatics. The game is harsh and someone, perhaps even everyone, will probably die. The adventure was not the thing I was expecting, as it was rather rigid. And that was the moment I realized that every roleplaying game should have a premade adventure somewhere.

Bliaron, a game that my friends made recently and a game I analysed, did not have a premade adventure. It had several pages of game ideas, sure, but not an adventure. A single, prewritten adventure would have given a focal point to which attach all the other information the book contained. And yes, I know that Bliaron is meant to be a setting where you can try anything. That is not an excuse. Then you just put everything in your adventure.

An example premade adventure: The players are newly discovered mages and have been brought to join one of the three Sahens (mage cults). Before they are given a rank inside the sahen, they must prove themselves by fulfilling three tasks: Retrieving a thingamajig from a monster-infested cave (treasure hunt and monster-slaying), settling a labor dispute at a nearby magic-stuff farm (politics) and investigating a strange ruin filled with ancient secrets (myths and mystique). Meanwhile their instructor is acting somewhat suspiciously, and if the players investigate further, he is revealed to be a black hand (rogue mage), who is plotting the downfall of their sahen (conspiracies and mysteries). Even if the quality of the adventure isn’t very high, the players and the GM can still identify the most fun part of the game and keep doing that.

The moral of the story is: A premade adventure is a tutorial to the intended playing experience of your game. Always provide one for your roleplaying game.

Perfect Mayor

I slept on my last blog post (for many nights), and realized that the concept introduced was not as subtle as I had intended. It was more like a movie where someone is explaining explicitly his stance on some matter. While it was still present, the thought I was driving at was that a game should express its message via gameplay and interaction. The most powerful tools of a game. Let’s examine another angle.

I once played Sim City 2000 with my old laptop. While I was trying to find out relationships between different buildings and making my city better, I got frustrated and went to the kitchen to vent. I found some cookies, and a thought: Despite everything, I was the perfect mayor.

Imagine that you had a machine beside your computer. When playing Sim City, you can pay 100 € (because we’re in Europe) and the machine makes you a potato chip. There are no reprecussions for that, except the loss of virtual money in your virtual game. How long would your treasury last? Would you just make a new game and empty your treasury over and over again? Or would you design a self-sustaining small city that just prints out money to set you up for life? (And make a real living selling those magical chips?)

Using gains from an insiduous stealth warfare to fund an insiduous stealth warfare. Not exactly a corrupt process.

Corruption. When have you ever been corrupt in a simulation game? You have always had full access to the treasury, all legistrations and other governmental elements. No-one can touch you. Everyone obeys your commands. In Civilization V, I have always used my every resource for the good of my civilization. While I have foreseen wars, famine and unhappiness, those have been secondary goals to the expansion of my territory and the advancement of science and culture. Same thing with Theme Park. Sim City. Star Wars – Empire at War.

Whenever I have started wars for my amusement or built a gigantic hill on top of which to put the Mayor’s Office, it has always been my choice. Just like in roleplaying games, where being Evil is my conscious choice (Hmm, how loose morals should I have today?). In only very few games have I noticed that I had exploited a position of power for my personal gain. Most of those games have been made by Bioware.

Let’s take a famous example: Baldur’s Gate. In the series you create your own character, who is then given a background. Like in many other games, you are the chosen one who will gather an entourage of party members and defeat a great evil. In those games, for every character there is a small screen containing a simple line: ”The strongest enemy killed”. I always get insanely jealous when the line for my character reads ”Ork Archer” and someone else reads ”Adult Red Dragon”. I’m the hero! I’m supposed to administer the killing blow! Also, if there is a character who uses a same type of weapon and armor as my character, guess who gets the first pickings?

This is a very minor point with no real gameplay value… in its current form. Imagine if you get a greater share of experience for dealing the final blow to an enemy. Your character would climb through the levels while others would remain behind. Most likely this would not matter, as you would rely more on your godlike main character and keep the others safe. But what if you couldn’t?

Let’s imagine a simple, turn-based roleplaying game in the style of the old Final Fantasies. You have a good control of the combat and there are little or no random rolls, besides damage. The character who kills a monster gets all the experience for it. No-one else gets anything. Every character uses their own weapons and armour, which are not interchangeable. Equipment is very expensive, and the quality cap scales with the strongest item bought.

Now, every side character has their own personal quests. In these quests they will face challenges where the others cannot help. And if they are not on high enough level, they will die. The game won’t stop, however. The others will mourn every death. Morale will take a hit. Some might start to question your status as the Hero of the World. If you cannot keep your own allies alive, perhaps they should find someone who can. They will look at you, brandishing your star-forged sentient crystal sword and lightmantium armour and their thoughts will return to their own wooden swords and rusty chainmails. Meanwhile, your own challenges are always faced with your friends, so having those flashy attacks and gear are mostly just excess.

And at the first death, people will realize that the game does not keep saves. It just has the latest autosave, taken at every time the characters finish a dialogue or enter a new area. So no, you can’t turn back time. This is who you are. An egoistic bastard who got his friend killed. If your indulgneces cost the life of your teammate, the final boss will call you out on it. He will taunt you on hogging the experience and gold, reminding you that you did not get the perfect ending. Yes, he has meta-knowledge. And if you did keep your team in fighting shape, the King will congratulate you and everyone gets a happy ending.

This is what corruption is. Stroking your own ego at the expense of everyone else. Using the king’s stipend on the best available sword for yourself. Eating chips while struggling to make the ends meet on an irrelevant digital city that exists only to print out potato snacks for yourself. And what is a better way to show this to a person than to give him power and a mirror.

29% Odds of Success

Image again via Wikipedia.

I admit that I am a quite morose character. I have a chronic existential crisis, and I spend some time every day pondering the purpose of not only my existence, but the existence of existence. Games are a great refuge from that: In games I have a clearly defined purpose which I can accomplish. These ponderings have made me very philosophical.

That is why Eschalon: Book I left me quite engrossed. The game is an isometric, old-school roleplaying game. As I have no real memories of old-school roleplaying games (except Betrayal At Krondor, which I shall finish one day), I did not have my nostalgia glasses on. The game was annoyingly short on explanation of its mechanics, its combat was insanely frustrating due to the random nature of the game and the plot was explained in boring text blocks. But still it had some lure and I completed it.

Let’s get the conventional analysis out of the way first. The game is ingenuously entirely turn-based. Every action or movement takes one turn. But the turns are so speedily calculated that there are no seams between your and the others’ turns. When you take a step the enemy takes a step. And when there are no enemies, you can just hold the mouse button down and run like in Diablo. The system works wonderfully.

I have gotten used to scaling combat. In D&D and many other roleplaying games, your character gets automatically better at fighting at level up. In Eschalon, leveling up gives you three attribute points and three skill points. And the skill points are divided between combat skills and non-combat skills. Whenever I leveled up, I took the skills that were most interesting. Alchemy, Cartography (enables and improves the mini-map), Stealth skills, Mercantile… There are dozens of skills, and more or less every one is useful. But my modern sensibilities led me astray, and soon I was hard pressed to kill even a single enemy with my bow before it attacked me in melee. And as I was specialized in bows, every mistake cost me one arrow. And if there were more than one enemy against me at once, I didn’t have a chance.

The interface. You can probably figure out a lot by yourself.

In the end, after investing in an armour skill (it takes three skill points to acquire a new skill) and pumping my Bows skill to 15 I became the deadly hunter I had envisioned. But that meant that in order to merely survive the insane combat of the game I had to skip a lot of more interesting skills. And in the end, it did not matter at all: By the end of the game I had more money than I would ever need and the final boss was pretty much a pushover.

On the other hand, Eschalon is pretty much the only game where I could really be a ninja. The enemies rely on two senses: Sight and sound. If they hear the player walking, they will home in to the square they heard the sound coming from. And if they see the player, they attack. There are skills called Hide in Shadows, which makes you invisible in the dark, and Move Silently, which silences your movement. I had one point in Hide in Shadows, which meant that if I were standing next to a wall or a forest in complete darkness, enemies couldn’t see me. Except when I attacked them and hit. Then they would see me. But the kicker is, if I moved to a dark enough square, I would become invisible once more. In effect, this meant that combined with night-vision spell/potion, I could strike from the shadows and hide back without fear of retaliation. While this sounds like it would possibly break the game, it merely gave me a fighting chance against the deadly enemies. And it was insanely awesome. I dare any other rpg to give me as utilitarian stealth mechanic as Eschalon.

And now the thing about philosophy. While I played Eschalon, cursing at the impossible-to-hit-enemies, I realized that the whole game was a statment of sorts. Everything was randomly rolled (except the map, which would have required too much work, I guess). It made the game seem quite fatalistic. ”If you aren’t the master of your field, don’t even try”. As the most probable outcome of a fight is death if you didn’t put all your points in your chosen weapon skill, it feels like the game forces you to conform to its vision of the world. A person who wants to experience something else than combat won’t last past the first game area. Without save/loading, the odds of surviving the experience are nil. And just before the final boss you are given a choice: Stand by your quest to save the kingdom and face an extremely difficult fight, or give in to your greed and apathy and leave the kingdom with a hefty amount of gold. Mechanically, this is one of the most depressive games I have played in a while.

And I understand that I might be reading too much into a light-hearted game riding on nostalgia. But the important thing is, I am reading into it. That means the game experience as a whole can be used to convey ideas and philosophies as readily as a movie or a book.

Fantasy Saga Abridged, part 1

I like the new D&D’s Tier system. The first ten levels are known as the Heroic Tier. In the Heroic Tier the characters are typical fantasy heroes, killing goblins, looting dungeons and saving the local city/village/community. Heroic Tier is the most realistic, and probably the most relatable one. After defeating the evil wizard or finding the artifact they were questing for, the characters enter Paragon Tier, which spans the levels from 11 to 20. At Paragon Tier the characters are so awesome and full of magic that mundane things cease to be significant. Barbarians and fighters can break through wooden walls and toss huge boulders aside. Mages can command powerful magic and rituals, and death becomes a surmountable setback. Travel no longer happens via horses and feet, but by griffins and flying. After stopping the demonic invasion or slaying the beholder commanding an army of drow and their monsters, the players enter Epic Tier. At Epic Tier, the characters are nigh gods. Mages can destroy armies with their magics, knights can charge through stone walls and archers no longer need petty things like line of sight or effect for their arrows to find their marks. Physical distance ceases to matter as the most efficient way to travel is to rearrange reality to simply be there. Almost every character can cheat death somehow. The final quest would most likely involve the destruction of a god-like entity or a feat whose implications can be felt throughout the world.

The tier system gives a narrative framework on the story, and I would like to use the idea more intensely, rather than just having it be an option at the start of the game. Also, I talked about a structured campaign system for A Better Star Wars Roleplaying Game with my friend. That system felt potential, so I’ll expand it here. Let’s start making the Fantasy Saga RPG. The core idea of the game: A framework for an epic, sweeping fantasy game playable in a couple of sessions. It will need to break a lot from the usual roleplaying methods, since so much will have to be done in so little time. The system will probably be a joint storytelling game, rather than a standard rpg.

Let’s have the whole game happen in three sections: Heroic, Paragon and Epic. Each of these sections are divided into three acts: Acts I, II and III. In the first act, the players and the GM describe the players’ characters normal lives; Where they live, what they do and how they met each other. Towards the end of the first act, the GM gives the players their main quest for the section and establishes the major players in the game. In the second act, the GM describes the adventures the characters will encounter and the hardships they will have to overcome. They seek for magical crystals of power, try to hold off orcish scout parties while uniting the kingdoms or try to do good deeds. And in the third act, the players will finally put their hard work to use and face off the villain in a climactic showdown. This act structure is also applied in the larger sections: In Heroic Tier, the elements of the world and the things the characters wish to defend are introduced. The heroes gain their first knowledge of the threats beyond the ordinary. In Paragon Tier, the gods and extraplanar entities begin to take interest in the world and unleash their schemes. The heroes will have to use all of their skills to survive and grow in power. And in the Epic Tier, the biggest evils and villains who have been foreshadowed in the previous tiers finally show their unimaginally powerful faces. But the heroes have also become legendary heroes and demigods, and they will have to complete their final quest to stave off apocalypse and defeat the evil gods.

So this is the structure of the game. Three times three acts means that there are 9 atomic parts of the game. If each of them took one session, the whole thing would take 9 weeks, assuming once session per week. That’s a lot faster than normal D&D, and if the players are ambitious, they can try to make the whole game in three sessions. Next, we need some mechanics (or rather, I need some mechanics).

The core unit of a D&D is an encounter. Most of the time it is a combat encounter. The end results of an encounter are typically defeating the opponents, gaining treasure and experience, advancing the plot and losing temporary resources. Encounters tend to be stringed together to form a progression of challenges. This progression usually tends to advance the story: The heroes enter a dungeon, fight the guardians and gain an item they were searching. As encounters eat up a lot of game time, they will have be shortened a lot. Let’s have one battle be one die roll, so that an encounter string takes about 3-4 die rolls.

That’s it for now. I need to write some actual work and think about the mechanics a bit more. And possibly play some Dungeon Siege III.

The World Sword

Roleplaying has always been about campaigns to me. One-shot sessions are the nondefault choice, they are played when there is no time for a proper multisession game. D&D, with its level-based character advancement struck its claws in my mind first and I suspect no amount of weird indie games will dislodge that idea.

My first proper campaign that was actually finished was World Sword, a D&D 3.5 game that saw the players’ characters advance to the 20th level. The campaign was born when my friends asked me to make a D&D game where you could overclock everything and make as overpowered characters you want. I, stealing ideas from at least the Sands of Time-series and Chrono Trigger, devised a grand, time-travelling epic. To summarise the plot:

The (original) heroes came to their home continent from a long ocean journey. Their nation was engulfed in war, and they were sent to an oracle to see what was going on. The oracle, an evil vampire, created a vampire out of one of the characters and teleported them to a distant castle. From there, the heroes ran from a Marut, ten levels tougher monster that chased the vampire. They ended up in Underdark and got back out to find themselves in a desert. Helped by a friendly dragon, the heroes learned of an evil cult who were opening a portal to the Negative Energy Plane. The heroes went to stop it, but a great interplanar portal went unstable and exploded. They found themselves hurtled through time by an amulet they found into the distant past, still pursued by the Marut.

In the past, they encountered a wise wizard, who told them grave things: Some mysterious event would divide the Timeline into two parallel lines: Chaotic Evil, from which the heroes hailed, and Lawful Good. Both sides would try to open a permanent portal to Positive and Negative energy plane in the future, and the metamagnetic currents of these events would draw the lines together and annihilate them, bringing with it the destruction of the entire Universe. Only with the tool of Creation, the mythical World Sword, could this division be repaired. But alas, the World Sword was shattered into four aspects coinciding with the four alignment extremes, all in their respective timelines.

The heroes then undertook the quest to find the sword and unite it. Along the way they stopped a demonic invasion in the Ice Ages, seeked out magical outlets strong enought to propel them through time. Every one of the original heroes died, but new ones joined the quest. They even encountered the Lawful Good timeline versions of themselves, bearing an aspect of the World Sword they had found (the parallel one to which the actual heroes found while in their past/future. Confused yet?). Finally, they brought the united sword to the past, faced off the Day of the Dragons, an event where the Dragons came to the world, sent their Warforged companion to the core of the Universe where he witnessed a being who had travelled through the Multiverse to their universe and disrupted it with his presence. The warforged fixed the tear with the sword (?) and saved their universe. In the end, the Oracle whose Chaotic Evil version had started them on their quest, told them that there was nothing more this universe could offer them and offered them a chance to journey to another one, where new challenges might have awaited. The heroes chose to do just so.

That was one of my best roleplaying game campaigns I have ever done. And now, as other aspects in life cut off chances to play such grand games, I miss them. I miss the sagas of epic proportions, which see the character grow from young adventurers to heroes who rival gods. This longing merely intensified as I read another campaign idea from Game Master’s Guide 2. Then a thought entered my head: Is it possible to condense a plot of epic proportions into a few games, or even into one game session?

Tabletop stealth

Deus Ex Human Revolution has one type of gameplay I always kind of liked: Stealth. I’m not very good at it because I do not have patience to plan my whole inflitration. But I like sneaking, because I overhear interesting stuff, find holes in defenses and most of all avoid interacting with people. Sneaking makes me feel cunning.

After pondering what kind of a roleplaying experience I would like to play but what has never been done well, stealthing is my first answer. I have yet seen a system that handles stealth well. Granted, most systems do not allocate a lot of rules for infiltration. Since small, focused roleplaying games are all the rage right now, let’s add one to the world.

The usual dynamic for an infiltration is that first you take a gander at the building/area layout. Entrances, objects, guards and so on. Using this knowledge you plan an optimal route. Then you execute the infiltration by crounching low, hiding behind objects and timing your movements to the guards’ movement. Then you either

A) Pass unnoticed

B) Get noticed

Getting noticed results in three typical events: Total alarm, which results in game loss, local alarm and a lot of reinforcements, or a fight with the on-site guards. The local alarm usually shuts down if you can hide somewhere for a while and the guards resume their patrol routes. Not very realistic, but it’s a way to keep the game going.

This is the main thing the system needs to simulate. Staying unnoticed and dealing with failing that. D20 games usually have one Stealth-skill, which is rolled when a character wants to stay out of sight. There are specific rules on when you can stay hidden, but those usually rely on a detailed environment, something I would rather avoid. And due to the lack of normal distribution in d20, the player has about 25 percent chance of failing any stealth check. This, combined with the rigid combat system almost guarantees that the player cannot stealth again. One solution would be Skill Challenges, in which the player needs to garner X amount of successes before Y amount of failures. However, this tends to reduce the stealthing to a die-rolling race, which in turn reduces roleplaying. So it seems I need to deviate from the traditional roleplaying systems.

First of all, I would like to once again eliminate uncertainty from things the characters are good at. And since this is a stealth game, that would be sneaking. But if you automatically succeed at being stealthy, won’t this be a boring game? Not if we autosucceed in normal sneaking. In Deus Ex, finding the most direct route to your objective is quite easy. But there are usually store rooms, computer terminals and all sorts of interesting places sprinkled around. The promise of experience, interesting tidbits and loot usually overrides caution, and breaking into those places adds to the risk. Let’s use that. Moving from an area to another is easy, but doing things unnoticed in those areas is not.

Roleplaying is traditionally done in groups. Infiltration is traditionally done solo. This would imply a fundamental conflict, but only if you look at it from a narrow perspective. In Metal Gear games, the main character is in almost constant contact with someone with access to the facility blueprints. Same goes for Deus Ex and Splinter Cell. By making the other character an eye in the sky with access to information processing tools, we can add another role into the game.

And at this point I realize that I’m making a mechanic for a very specifically defined experience. That thought fills me with uncertainty. Is this a good idea for a roleplaying game, or rather for a board- or card game? I will think upon this and return with a decision.

God out of the human revolution!

Because it messes up the clockwork.

I planned on writing more on ABSWRPG earlier this week, but then I decided to try out the new Deus Ex. Suddenly I finished the game and two days had passed. And just as I was starting to write the rest, one of the creators of Bliaron came by. We talked about ABSWRPG and now I’m redesigning it in my mind. Great. So instead, I’ll write about uman Revolution.

First of all, I’d classify Deus Ex as a good game on the sole merit that I could play it in a marathon session. Unlike a certain other roleplaying game that I have yet to finish, I never got frustrated with anything in Human Revolution. I never had to enter a fight without my consent (except in bossfights which were manageable and one that I could have avoided had I used my eyes). Exposition was given in manageable chunks, sneaking was not too reliant on perfect timing and hacking was fun. In whole, it was a sleek, functioning game. But let’s look at the components a bit closer.

Combat. I really never fought any real combats, except for the aforementioned bossfights. Those were of the usual modern cover-based kind. I mostly snuck around and eliminated opponents with the satisfying instant-kill-button. Or rather, instant-stun-button. I’m a sucker for cool animations, it seems. Sneaking past enemies is both my preferred method of conflict resolution, and it fits the main character. So about combat I cannot say much.

On the other hand, the game environments are created for sneaking, and it shows. There is always an obvious stealth route (what?) in a mission area. Air ducts, conveniently arranged furniture, ubiquitous cardboard boxes and stupid patrol routes make sneaking easy. Add the momentary invisibility and cone of vision upgrades and it is even easier. Although it might be a bit too easy and straightforward for someone is looking for patrol route optimization and planning, it confers the essence of stealth inflitration well enough.

There are few parts in the game where you need to persuade someone to do something. These parts are quite fun; You need to make a quick analysis on what the person is like and select one of the three possible answers to his ranting. I think the Social Pheromone Upgrade (which was my first augmentation) helps too much by making the analysis for you. The first persuasion situation in the game (a hostage situation) where I did not have the upgrade was more exhilarating than anything else in the game. There are also minor persuasion situations where you need to pay attention to a blinking meter while talking and select the appropriate choice when prompted. These are a nice add-on, but do not add anything substantial.

The plot and theme of the game are slightly… off. As the game has ties to both our modern world and the previous Deus Ex-game, I couldn’t look at it without taking those to account. And compared to Deus Ex, the game looks too futuristic, although that might have something to do with the graphical limitations. But the city-on-a-city, the religious fanatics of Humanity First, the grande conspiracies, they all feel too off amongs the very realistic representation of a near future. Also, there are four endings which can be described as ‘Reasonable’, ‘Slightly less reasonable’, ‘Why would anyone want this’ and ‘Why am I even given this option?’. The boss fights also stood out like an ancient bronze sword amongst modern assault rifles.

I categorized upgrades in two categories: Enablers and Helpers. Enablers enable you to go to places and access equipment. Hacking level upgrades, the go-through-walls-upgrade, jumpgrade and heavy lifting are enablers. These are no-brainers: With them you can experience the full content of the game. The helpers help you do stuff, like sneak, shoot or survive bullets. After upgrading the enablers and hacking-associated helpers, I ran out of things to upgrade. Everything else was useless to me. Hitting level cap is an unfortunate experience. At this point I will mention that you can purchase inventory space, but that might not be necessary because the pick-upable objects are quite limited. There is minimal inventory management.

Hacking. Oh, hacking. There is a ton of things to hack. Terminals, doors, safes… Hacking gives one experience, so I naturally took every opportunity to hack. But the act itself is quite repetitious. And I never did anything with the rewards. Money is irrelevant as long as you can afford the useless upgrades and the endless amount of email text is, well, endless. Had I read them all, I would still be playing the game, and wouldn’t stop anytime soon. So actually my dislike of hacking came from the fact that I couldn’t stop. I might need professional help.

But in the end, Human Revolution is a good game. It is possibly too nostalgic for my taste, but it does not screw up anything. And in the end of the day, isn’t that all we can ask for?

The answer is no.

Concepting process

Here’s a glance into my concepting process; I’m going to define my vision for the Champions of Ilea, reborn like a phoenix.

As I revealed, my first instinct was to create a game system to simulate the world. This is the wrong way to do it, as the best simulator is the Game Master. Designing a world simulation system is like designing a hefty, flat surface to hammer nails in that is attached to an actual hammer. The system was a conflict resolution mechanic that worked like Dominion. The concept failed, because it did not support my original vision. And the reason for that is that the vision was vague. I just wanted to attract the same lightning that struck last year in my Pathfinder campaign. I still want to do that, but let’s define it a little better.

What do I want from Champions of Ilea? I want the players to find unconventional methods to solve prejudice-based problems without bloodshed. I want the game to be slightly humorous, but still taken straight-faced. I want the characters to remain consistent. I want them to do their best to serve Ilea.

Based on this short description, we see that character consistency and sticking to the game theme are important, and thus supporting them with gameplay is imperative. Everything else can be handled by the GM.

In Star Wars Saga Edition, there is the Dark Side Point mechanic. Every time a player character does something that is morally unacceptable (killing a person who can’t fight back, for example), the character gets a Dark Side Point. Get enough of these and your character falls to the Dark Side, becoming an NPC. There is also a Destiny mechanic, which gives rewards to characters who strive to achive their Destiny and penalizes those who fail to do so. These mechanics drive the player towards a certain narrative and reins the players in. Rather than world simulation tools, they are narrative tools.

Let’s make something similar. Penalizing never raises motive to do anything, so let’s try to reward the player for doing something we want him or her to do. Staying in character is one thing. As we want to support all roleplaying techniques, let’s not focus towards the execution, but the intent. Every player has a certain amount of character Features. These are the character’s most common and visible personality traits. These can be positive or negative: Analytical, Hopeful, Hesitant, Pessimistic, Brash… The traits function a bit like Vice and Virtue in the Storyteller system: By exhibiting the chosen trait (and therefore playing your character), the player gets a mechanical bonus. This would incentivize the players to stick to their character concepts.

Then, the thematic driving force. Since we’re going for a very specific type of experience, let’s ”limit” it further. In every game, the players are champions who represent Ilea. They are chosen by it’s queen, Vanessa, because they share some of her ideals. As the players go around the world, they meet rulers of the lands and common people. Every one might have a different take on how to solve a problem. The Queen wants peace and unity, the rulers (generally) want prosperity and order, and the people (generally) want freedom and peace. The players can garner Goodwill, which is a mechanical bonus, from these factions. It can also represent how the communities respond to the characters: For example, getting the people to accept a werewolf in their midst might require some amount of Goodwill from the people before it is possible. Gaining a pass for a noble gala event might require Goodwill from the rulers, and getting funds for a powerful magical artifact might require some amount of Goodwill from the Queen. One can gain Goodwill by serving the faction in question, and depending on what they want the players to do, it might lower other Goodwills.

So now we have a strong mechanical narrative drive. The players will want more power, which is achieved by doing what they are supposed to do and roleplaying. The actual dynamic of the game would be “problem of the week”. Every session there is a new place and a new problem, which is first described to the players as they explore the area. As they become familiar with the problem, they will try to fix it somehow. They form a plan, execute it and see what happens. Some problems might be more extensive and require more than one session to solve.

The actual game mechanics aren’t clear yet. I have some card- and playing card-based ideas, but I don’t feel them yet. I’ll think about it for a couple of days and see if the solution presents itself. But for now, we have a vision of the game’s purpose and it’s dynamic. As long as the mechanics support them, the whole will feel consistent.

Bliaron – Legacy of the Kalthans

I ‘received’ a copy of Bliaron – Kalthanien Perintö. It is a finnish tabletop roleplaying game book co-written by my old friend. I decided to read the book through, and give it as uncompromising assesment as possible. So without further ado: My thoughts on Bliaron – The Legacy of Kalthans, a modern finnish indie roleplaying game.

The book is in hardcover, blue with golden adornment. The front cover is stylized, with only the name and the subtitle, but it does not evoke anything specific. What is Bliaron? Who are the Kalthans? What actually is this book? The back cover reveals more information. Based on the blurb, it is a fantasy roleplaying game about magic in a harsh and sparsely populated land, Bliaron. The players are apparently mages and can craft all kinds of spells, but the purpose is not elaborated. To fight the evil Sahens, who control the usage of magic with an iron fist, perhaps? The text, and the whole book, is written in finnish. It’s a political decision which I will not delve in. Suffice to say that I’m sceptical about the market for a (relatively) expensive finnish roleplaying game book.

Onto the contents itself! The book introduces us to roleplaying in a typical d20/storyteller/d6 fashion: What is roleplaying, how is it done, what is the role of players and the Game Master, an example of play etcetera. So far so standard. But then we are immediately plunged into the rules. About ten full black-and-white pages of explanatory rules text. After that is character creation. As I understand, the general convention is to first have character creation chapters, and after that the rules. I would like to know the reason for the decision to have rules up front, since the rules have no framework around them, making it a tad disheartening to read and understand them. Having a ‘Do this and you’re ready to play!’-chapter would have been nice.

The rules themselves? I was actually surprised by them. Bliaron has the typical Attribute-and-Skill-setup, but instead of having both numbers just add up, it treats them differently. In skill checks, the character’s Attribute (Strength, Dexterity, Charisma and so forth) defines the number of d10’s the player rolls, and Skill (Acrobatics, Concentration, Speech…) adds a bonus to the highest one. The result is compared to a difficulty number, and higher one is a success. The system requires little arithmetic and having skill matters in a different way than just being strong/fast/intelligent. High Skill means that you won’t get low results and high Attributes gives better chance to score higher results. I like the dynamic; It makes the characters and situations varied.

Most of the rules are quite abstract and easy to improvise, which (probably) enable speedy roleplaying without being bogged down. The whole noncombat skill check system is explained in three pages. Combat simulation, however, has seven pages of text. This catched my eye. Since combat situations are defined in greater detail, does the game assume a lot of fighting? Based on my vague knowledge on the motives of the writers, the game’s focus should be on roleplaying and discovering magical skills. While I agree that situations where the character’s death is imminent should have clear structure, I think that a game’s rules should support the game’s main theme. Having detailed combat rules brings about the temptation to use them. To dissuade players from unnecessary bloodshed, I would probably condense combat into a single skill check, with a gradual success threshold. (Example: Difficulty is 6. Rolling 6 means you win barely and will probably have to tend to your bruises and cuts, 9 means you emerge victorious and without damage at all, 4 means you escape slaughter with a deep gash in your arm and without your weapon, 2 means you get to see your ancestors today.)

Also, an important point: The most important rule in the game is written in the introduction, rather in the rules: ”Following the rules is suggested especially in the beginning, but as playing the game becomes more familiar, they can be freely changed and evolved”. The typical ‘in the end these rules are just guidelines to fun’-message is important to emphasize, for it enables the most literal-minded among us to consider house ruling or winging, rather than looking up every obscure detail in the book. Like some overtly curious game designers.

The character creation chapter is well-defined, and every step is explained in adequate detail. Though I would like for a summary of the mechanical aspects: The allocatable starting points and whatnot are written inside the text blocks, making hunting them a tedious task. A minor note: The world is not elaborated very well so far, so the reader must skip ahead to get inspirations for his character. The problem is alleviated by having a Game Master helping in the process, though.

Then comes the setting. History, Magic, etc.. Most of the text concerns the setting, which I am not the right person to analyze. Suffice to say that I would explore it mostly out of curiosity, and only if someone would explain. However, for some unknown reason the entire rule set for magic is hidden between descriptions of magic and mage organisations. Seeing as the players are most likely mages, I would be more interested in it and it’s application rather than endless pages of history and culture. The magic system should be immidiately after the basic skill check rules, before combat, so the rules would also reinforce the focus on magic.

The magic rules themselves are a bit more detailed than the basic rules, but still manageable. In short, you can add effects and magnitude to your spell by making the appropriate skill check harder. But I will say that the text is unfocused, many concepts are explained only way after they are introduced and everything really needs a summary. Everything is in big, reader-unfriendly blocks of text which must be completely absorbed to be understood.

The magic is followed by magic group descriptions and creature statistics. And in the back of the bus are campaign ideas and help with GM:ing. I liked the campaign ideas, for they make the setting concrete and give the GM (and players) an idea of what the game is going to be about. I don’t know how, but that section should really be highlighted somehow. I won’t analyze the art or the rest, since I have no expertice and I know the creators were working with a budget and probably couldn’t do anything about it.

To summarize my thoughts:

+ The rules system is intriguing and wonderfully light, and probably supports the intended playing experience. The Attribute/Skill-dynamic is a refreshing change from the usual fare.

– The formatting is clumsy and makes forming a coherent image of the whole difficult.