I realise its basically just an advert for a book.  But its a really well done advert for a book.

blog.TheIlluminatedEngineer.com is expanding to be my main personal blog. I’ll post anything about work, technology, holidays and my photography there. If your a member of my family that’s the one you want to follow. Any software projects I work on will also be covered there.

As part of this I’ve moved most of my image hosting on to Flickr which should make it easier for me to upload larger numbers of images. Keep an eye on the recent pictures widget for new photos that don’t warrant a post of their own.

blog.TheCircularSnake.com will be reduced down to just geek and gaming topics. It’s where I’ll cover rpg and computer games, movies, comics, music, found videos and web-sites. Gaming projects, like the GEAR setting or my Artesia system updates, also go on this site.

Hopefully this means both blogs are more likely to be active and have a clean delineation of content.

Nice mashup of Annie Lenox music videos.

In the last post I settled on a mechanic for the game but left a few threads hanging.  This post will address them.

This weeks random steam punk picture is a picture of a steampunk horse by dasAdam.

There’s no lore sections in here.  I’ve been banging my head against a wall with them for a week now with no real inspiration so I’ve decided its better to get this post out without them than have it sit here any longer.  Just pretend I said something entertaining at the start of each section.

Ranges

In the posts on Statistics and on Skills I established that I intended statistics and skills to be handled as a range of values and that tests would be based on the addition of the two.

From the last post I know that the number of dice a professional should be rolling is 6, this number should vary with ability and skill.  The minimum number of dice is obviously zero but we have no technical maximum.

Balance is an important concern in game design and allowing statistics or skills to grow to incredible levels will lead to problems; Firstly characters may become so specialised that they cannot fail at one type of task but have little ability outside it, and secondly impossibly difficult tasks may become easy for the character to pass due to the large number of dice rolled.

Many games handle this by using escalating experience costs.  When it costs as much to raise one high level skill by a level as it does to raise 2 or 3 low level skills the player is incentivised to spend the experience on the lower level skill.  This incentivisation fails in long running games, where large amounts of experience are available, or when a player is highly focused in getting a statistic or skill to game breaking levels.

An alternative, and the path I intend to take with this game, is to use actual hard limits on the maximum number of dice the player can roll.  Hard limits provide a number of benefits over escalating experience costs; Firstly they simplify the experience system by removing an area of responsibility from it, Secondly they provide a method of limiting the maximum ability of a character. This is not a game of super-humans, while characters can be at the top end of human capability they should not be able to significantly exceed it (technology, magic and other such augmentations aside).

Ideally I want to pick a maximum number of dice rolled for any task that leaves the lower difficulties as a near guaranteed success but still has a fair chance of failure for the very hard and insane difficulties.  Looking at the probabilities table from the previous post I can see that when the player is rolling 12 dice the distribution matches this requirement (in fact that is why I cut the table off at 12 in the first place).

This gives us a professional rolling 6 dice and a total of 6 levels of improvement from professional to the maximum.  This may not seem like a lot, but the game is meant to inspire characters with a broad range of abilities and skills and rather than highly focused masters of a single area.

I established in an earlier post that a professional could be considered to have a talented statistic level and a professional skill level, the entire system is balanced around this assumption. The simplest way to divide points among statistics and skills would be to have a maximum value of 6 and make the talented statistic and professional skill levels be 3.

This however only allows one path to the maximum dice pool, the character must max out both their statistic and their skill.  What about the character who makes up for a lack of skill with incredible natural talent or vice-versa.  Setting the maximums for each so that they total to above 12 allows more than one way to get to the maximum pool of dice and if a player manages to get a pool above 12 then the extra dice are lost (though they would help against negative modifiers if we assume capping the dice to 12 is the last thing you do before rolling). I don’t want too much flexibility in this however as letting statistics get too high can devalue skills so setting the maximum for statistic and skill to 7 instead of 6 gives a bit of flexibility without allowing statistics to dominate.

Using the above we can take a first stab at our statistic and skill levels:

The names above are descriptive but what’s important is that both statistics and skills have the same range and the balancing points (talented and professional) are both 3.  This gives a system where statistic and skill are equally balanced in their contribution to the final result of a test.  If the range for statistics was larger (or its balancing point higher) then it would tend to contribute more dice to the pool and thus be more important, the same would apply in reverse if the range or balancing point for skills was higher.  How this balance sits is mostly a matter of preference, some players prefer a more skill dominated game, others one that favours statistics.

I’m happy with both being equally important as it allows me to introduce a quick mechanic for statistic tests.

Statistic only tests

If a character has to test straight against a statistic then the number of dice rolled will be less than in a statistic+skill test.  This means a different method to judge success is needed.

This could be approached by changing the number of successes required, however the number required for a normal difficulty statistic+skill test is only 1 and that can’t really be reduced any.

The value on a die that counts as a success could be lowered to 4+ making successes more likely.  This pulls the probability of success for the easier difficulties back to the preferred ranges but the harder tests, requiring 4 or 5 successes remain prohibitively difficult compared to statistic+skill tests due to the smaller dice pools.

The best solution would be somehow to raise the number of dice back to the same range as that for a statistic+skill check.  As well as allowing us to use the same difficulties and probability table it allows for comparisons of a stat+skill roll by one player against a statistic roll by another (for example resisting a Intuition+Persuasion test may be done by rolling just Nerve).

There are two obvious ways to do this, either we can grant a set of bonus dice or we can take a multiple of the statistic.  Bonus dice sound good to start with (perhaps for a statistic test we roll 3+statistic dice) but this stops statistic tests ever reaching the absolute upper range of our dice pool (at 3+statistic the pool would top out at 10 dice) and severely disadvantages the player rolling just a statistic against a highly skilled opponent.  Doubling the statistic works better; it has the same range as statistic+ skill (0 to 14) and can be capped at 12 like any other roll.

NOTE: Its important to keep separate the concepts of two players rolling statistic+skill against each other where one of the characters has 0 in the skill (in which case they would roll dice equal to their statistic) and a character rolling statistic+skill against just the statistic of another (in which case they would roll twice their statistic).

Opposed Rolls

So far I’ve concentrated on task resolution against fixed difficulties, however a large percentage of tasks are against someone, or thing, who can actively resist.  In these cases its preferable to have both players roll dice and pick a winner.

An opposed roll can be resolved simply by having both players make a test and whoever gets the most successes wins.  The difference between the higher total and the lower total is the degree of success just like any other test.

Opposed rolls take longer than those against fixed difficulties.  When a lot of opposed rolls are being made against the same player (usually the GM) it can slow things down quite a lot.  As such its good to avoid opposed rolls when possible.

The biggest source of these rolls is combat and resisting the actions of a player or an NPC.  I’ll talk about this more when I get to combat but I intend to use a series of resistance values that can be used as the target for a fixed difficulty test instead of an opposed roll to speed certain things up.  Not all opposed rolls are bad however, if the player never gets to roll to resist an effect they tend to feel like they are not in control of their character.  A balance has to be struck between speed and player enjoyment.

Modifiers (Redux)

I covered modifiers briefly last post but I’ve had some more thoughts on their impact on the game.

The most common approach is to have a couple of pages full of bonuses and penalties (sometimes in one place, sometime split through the games rules) each changing the probability of success.  This can lead to games derailing as players go bonus hunting for 10 minutes for an important roll.  Nothing ruins the immersion of the climactic moment of 10 weeks of gaming like the question “what page are the modifiers for magic and sacred days on?”

Modifiers can be split in to 3 categories:

• Stat and Skill (from equipment, advisor’s, illness and injury etc.)
• Time based (taking extra or rushing)
• Situational (things like being up hill in combat, or a dense fog)

Each of these needs handled slightly differently to make a cohesive system.

Statistic and Skill Modifiers

Statistic and Skill modifiers are the easiest to deal with, these modifiers imply something that is making you better (or worse) at the things you do.  This could be an advanced set of lock picks that make doors easier to open or an injury that’s left you limping for a week.  Statistic and Skill modifiers tend to permanent or long term things written on character sheets.  To stop them growing out of control two simple rules are needed:

1. If you have multiple bonuses and penalties to a single statistic or skill count only the largest of each (so if you have 3 bonuses to Nerve, and 2 penalties count only the largest bonus and penalty).
2. Statistic and Skill bonuses have a value (e.g. +1, +2…) and may have a maximum.  They cannot raise the value beyond that level (A master thief won’t gain much benefit from better quality tools compared to a journeyman).

Some examples of this kind of bonus: Master quality Lock Picks (+2 lock picking [max 5]), Improvised Lock Picks (-2 lock picking), Clockwork exo-skeleton (+2 Body [max 4], -1 Grace)

Time

Time based modifiers can have the largest impact on results of all modifiers.  One of the core concepts of the a game system is that a test is based round the concept of a character doing something as quickly as he can without adversely impacting their chances.

Allocating extra time to work on something gives you more chances to spot mistakes and correct them, equivalently rushing makes it harder to see issues.

The impact of changing how much time you spend on something is much greater than most other modifiers and as such I think it is the one occasion where changing the difficulty level is valid.

The following rules should give a simple system for rushing or taking your time:

1. Reducing the time to complete a task that takes 30 seconds or longer by 1/4 increases the difficulty level by 1.
2. Reducing the time to complete a task that takes 60 seconds or longer by 1/2 increases the difficulty level by 2.
3. Doubling the amount of time taken to do a task that takes 30 seconds or longer lowers the difficulty level by 1.

Smaller quicker tasks are just not suitable to taking extra time over or are less sensitive to it as such I’ve put restrictions on the length a task has to be. These time constraints also mean that almost all combat actions are ruled out, simplifying the combat resolution process.

The list is not symmetric; there are 2 options to decrease the time and only 1 option to increase it.  It doesn’t matter how much time you spend on something it wont make something that’s insanely difficult for you easy, extra time can help but only a little and as such there’s only one option to spend more time for reduced difficulty.  On the other hand rushing a task is much more open to multiple levels and as such I’ve put in two options.

Situational

Situational modifiers are where systems tend to fall apart.  Statistic and Skill modifiers can be controlled easily by the system and GM, time based modifiers rarely occur in combat and are less likely to unbalance the game.  Situational modifiers on the other hand tend to come up often in combat.

The dice pools in GEAR are relatively small and constrained, large numbers of modifiers could easily push the player to the min (0) or max (12) dice no matter their starting statistic+skill. Looking at the odds table from the previous post I can see that adding or removing 1 or 2 (and sometimes 3) dice has less effect than changing the difficulty level. Any more than 3 dice and the difference in odds changes more than altering the difficulty would have done. I don’t think external influences, outside of time which I talked about earlier, can impact a test enough to change the difficulty level.  Ideally the final bonus or penalty granted should be in the range -3 to 3.

I’m concerned that if I just put the usual big list of modifiers in place that would push people towards bonus hunting and any list, no matter how complete it is, never contains everything that can come up.  As such I’m going to propose a slightly different system and try play testing it to see how it goes.

On any roll:

1. The GM has the option to list up to 3 penalties, each one of these will give a -1 to the number of dice the player rolls.
2. The player may then pick up to three bonuses to either:
   • Try to negate one of the penalties.  To negate a penalty the bonus has to be of equal or greater significance/scope/impact.
   • If there are no penalties left to negate add a bonus to the roll that gives +1 die.

The phrasing of this is quite specific.  The player must try to negate all penalties with bonuses of similar scope before he can use any remaining to gain extra dice.  The system is meant to be fast and loose.  The game is meant to be fast and furious so players should just use the items that pop in their heads, the more they play the better they’ll get at quickly identifying possible bonuses/penalties.

You may be wondering why I didn’t use the simpler system of having the player declare three bonuses (for +1 die each) and the GM three penalties (for -1 die each) and then just add them together.  If all bonuses and penalties are worth a flat +/-1 die then a simple addition mechanic that does not compare the scope of the bonus or penalty and would allow small bonuses to offset large penalties and vice versa. The mechanic I’m going with forces the player to have bonuses at least of the same scale as the penalties he’s trying to cancel out.

There will be no printed list of knows bonuses and penalties, this is an opportunity for the player to be creative and as such the GM should allow some flexibility for creative and cool bonus descriptions.

Boring Example:

Player: I’m going to shoot the merchant with my rifle.

GM: Okay, There’s a window in the way, the glass could deflect your shot (first penalty).

Player: I’ve got accurate range and wind measurements that should make my shot a lot more accurate (negates first penalty).

GM: Yeah, that would cancel out the glass.

Player: He’s asleep in his chair as well which makes him a stationary target (first bonus).

GM: That would definitely make it easier, so that’s +1 die.

Situational Modifiers In Opposed Rolls

The same system can be applied to opposed rolls by having the “defender” (or a random player if there isn’t an obvious defender) pick penalties for the “attacker” and then have the attacker counter them/gain benifits.  In this scenario the GM acts as an arbiter rather than the one picking the penalties.

The Next Post

I’ve got all but two of the core parts of the system down now.  Statistics, Skills, their ranges, tests, opposed rolls and modifiers are done.  All that’s left is experience and a framework for special abilities.  After that I need to start thinking about how to plug these mechanics together to make a character creations system and a combat system.

You might be asking what qualifies me to make these recommendations.  Very little if I’m honest; I’ve never actually run one myself.  What I have done however is run an awful lot of different games, of differing styles, using different systems over the years.  I’ve also taken part in a fair number of demos.

These comments are mainly about professional demos run by companies to show of their new games, but many apply to the small half-day games fans run at conventions.  While these games may act as a demo of a system to a player they are really more about getting to play with new people.  The difference, to me, is in the intent; professional demos are just sales pitches, fan demos are add-hoc gaming.

It’s all about the players

A RPG game is about all the players having fun.  The plot is secondary to this, the mechanics are secondary, the setting is secondary.  It’s all about the fun.  The GM (or whatever term your system of choice uses for the guy running the show) should be doing his best to balance the game so that every player has as much fun as possible.

Note the wording above. The GM’s responsibility is to make the game fun for all of the players.  In a normal RPG game at home in your basement (does anyone actually play in a basement?) the GM is a player, its just as important for him to have fun with the story and NPCs as it is for the other players playing the PCs.

In a professional demo run by or on behalf of a company the GM is not a player, he’s a salesman.  Sure if he can have fun its all for the better, and if the GM is having as much fun as the players the demo will probably be great, but when it comes down to it a professional demo is a sales pitch to the players.  The company wants people to go home talking up their new game and trying to persuade their friends to buy it.

The lines between the two tend to blur when you consider fan demos.  In these a GM has brought his favourite game to show off to a few random fellow geeks.  While these aren’t professional demos I do believe the GM has taken a burden on to themselves when they volunteer to run the demo to make it as fun for the other players as possible, possibly at the expense of themselves.  Other people may have different views on this balance though.

It’s not a competition

In most RPG games, though not all, the entire hobby boils down to collaborative story telling.  The setting is there to get the tone right and give the players a common starting point, the system to resolve conflict between the GM and the other players.

The key word there is “collaborative”.  Not to get Zen, but a good game requires the GM and the other players to be in balance.

If the GM treats the game as a competition then they will use every rule, every ability, every knack to win each conflict.  This might work when the players are on an equal footing and can pull out an equally impressive array of counter-actions, but in a game demo most players will be new to the system and will lack the knowledge required to counter a power-gaming GM.  All that happens is that the other players feel like the GM is trying to win the game at all costs.  A good conflict requires a chance of failure, a chance of success, a lot of risk and some careful management by the GM to make it fun.  It does not require the GM pulling every trick possible to kill the players and end the game there and then.

Here’s an example:

In the D&D Dark Sun demo at PAX East the GM had made a point to tell us that “encounter” abilities can only be used once per fight.  We get in to the big final battle and the boss uses his encounter ability to massive effect (though that effect was itself a problem).  Then 5 turns later he uses it again to great consternation from the players. “What?” we ask, “He as a special ability that lets him use it twice” the GM replies.

This is bad demoing.  Firstly you’ve kept a special rule just for the GM, the players don’t have that kind of ability and don’t even know it exists.  The GM has basically pulled out a special rule to let him beat the characters up a bit more than normal.  This can leave the players wondering if you just invented something to give you an edge, after all they don’t get to see the big bosses character sheet.

Pulling out a surprise ability can work brilliantly, a nice descriptions, some Ooohs and Aaahs from the other players. Using a the rules to min-max the boss in a dull way that leaves the party going “huh?” just smacks of the GM wanting to beat the players in some imagined competition.

Secondly the encounter ability was a terrible choice for a demo.  The ability om question was an area of effect blind that also knocked characters down and stopped them moving for a number of turns.  An ability of that scale is bad when used against a single player, it takes them completely out of the game for 2 or 3 turns (or more).  Players that are stuck unable to do something tend to start chatting to other players, they distract the whole group and asking them not to just means you have a player sitting doing nothing getting bored and annoyed.  Do it to half the party and you’ve got problems.  Do it to half the party before they get to act at all and your in trouble.  Do it to half the party before they get to act and then do it again as soon as they’ve recovered and you’ve just taken the all of the fun round the back of the outhouse and shot it in the head.

You could argue its a game design fault to even have this ability in the system but in certain cases, such as players using it to survive otherwise un-winnable odds, it can be a great ability.  Just because its there doesn’t mean you have to give the character it when writing the demo, or use it if someone else wrote the scenario for you.

Show off your setting

An RPG game is 1 part setting, 1 part system.  A demo has to show both of these of equally as they differentiate the game from others on the market.

The system will almost take care of showing itself, any demo will have conflict and conflict is resolved by the system.  Make sure the demo has a fair spread of types of conflict; combat, negotion, intimidation, persuasion, stealth.  Guide the players into all of these and your golden.

The setting is harder, you have to really work to make the setting a big part of a demo.  You can’t simply say “this is a dark sun game and that guy is a Mul; a half human, half dwarf hybrid.  Oooh ain’t this setting special”.  Spend 5 minutes going over the setting and what makes it different at the beginning.  You’re probably using pre-gen characters so use the new races and give the players explanations of what makes them different.  But more importantly work descriptions of setting specific stuff into the game.  Have the players just walked out of a underground tunnel? Then make sure the first thing they see if a cool setting specific vista (in the afore mentioned Dark Sun you could give them a description of a ruined city half buried in sand, a storm approaching as camps of cannibalistic Halflings take shelter under the overhanging walls of ancient temples).

This is especially important when it’s a new setting for an existing system (e.g. a GURPs or D&D setting), in this case many players may know the basics of the rules so the setting becomes the sole differentiator between it and other games.  If you don’t spend time working the setting in your just trying to sell them on / show off the system and there could be multiple settings that use that system for them to buy.

Know thy Demo

Demos are usually run with pre-written scenarios and pre-generated characters.  The GM really has to have read the system, setting, scenario and characters before and if possible run through the demo at least once prior to doing it for potential customers.

If the GM stops for 5 minutes to go flicking through the scenario to work out what’s behind door number 2 then immersion is broken.  Immersion is something you hear talked about more with computer games; designing UI that don’t detract from the game being a common topic.  It’s just as important with an RPG game.  If the players get pulled out of the game for a minute while the GM is off doing something else then they will start talking about the last movie they saw or the comic they bought.  By the time the GM finds the missing info and yanks people back in to the game people have lost the mood of the scene.

This is not a train sim

Don’t, for the love of all things spaghetti monster, rail road your players.  This goes for all RPG games, not just demos; The worst thing you can ever do is rail road players into playing the game your way.  Each player must feel like he is in control of his character at all times, each time you rail road the players you’re telling them they don’t control their characters.

I’ve heard things from GM’s over the years to the tune of “I won’t let the other players ruin my brilliant, amazing, perfect, genre defining master piece of a scenario”.  If this is how you think of the other players then give up running role playing games right now and try writing a novel (and get a psychiatrist for that megalomania).  It’s not your scenario, its belongs to all of the players.

In the D&D demo that inspired this article I said I was going to try and persuade the mercenary working for the big bad to quit the fight as it wasn’t worth it.  The GMs response: “No”.  No chance to role play it, no roll (on my very very high charisma), nothing.  If nothing else had proven how bad the demo was then this certainlly did.  If it’s essential that a player can’t do something then at least make them feel like they had a chance; maybe they can’t persuade the mercenary to leave without breaking the game but perhaps they can make him more wary of fighting or quicker to surrender when injured.

Design is everything

Demo scenarios are not the same as normal RPG sessions, they’re not even the same as a that little half day game you put on the day your usual GM was busy having root canal work done.

Remember the goals of the demo:

1. Show of the system
2. Show of the setting
3. Make sure the players enjoy the game so they remember things positively and end up buying the game when its released.

Consider the points above as well and make sure to avoid the pitfalls mentioned:

• Make an interesting spread of characters that are tied to the cool new parts of the setting (if its Dark sun make sure to have a Mul or psionics), make sure to tell the players why they’re different and what that means. Make sure to have a couple of more general characters for players who like to keep to a good old human.
• Don’t use starting characters.  Starting characters haven’t had time to develop into the signature abilities of the class/profession/career and tend to have less “oomph”.  Set things up as if this is the parties third or forth adventure.
• Start with a party that’s all ready working together.  This gives the players a reason to trust each other and work together, it also gets round those awkward in game introductions.  Some players are uncomfortable doing these in character and they either become an issue or get skipped over (which is terrible for immersion).  If the party knows each other you can do this informally as you get ready to play.
• Keep the demo tightly focused and set in a contained environment.  This stops the players going off on huge detours that could prevent the game finishing in time without you having to rail road them back on track yourself.
• Tie the demo in to the lore or history of the setting in some way.  Use an important NPC or an iconic location to set the tone.
• If your writing the demo, run it with some friends/colleagues at least once before using it with perfect strangers.  Tell them to be honest, beat them up if they don’t give real feedback. Change the game based on the feedback, don’t assume you know better.

Conclusion

The most important point of this to remember that its about the players having a memorable fun experience, and showing off what makes this new game interesting and unique enough to buy.

Retro gaming meets Hollywood blockbuster style special effects

But Thou Must: choice in Games

I walked in to this thinking it would be something completely different.  I was expecting a panel on choice in games and how it impacts game play and design on a general level.  In fact the panel was dedicated to talking about Obsidian’s upcoming Alpha Protocol game.

The panel did talk about choice but it was so heavily related to this one game that it functioned mainly as an extended demo session with a sneak peak of the development tools used to create it.

The one thing it did succeed in getting over however was the sheer amount of effort required to create branching dialog options that react to the players choices throughout the game.  It makes me respect games like Mass Effect even more.

Alpha protocol does look pretty good and I may pick it up based on the strength of this session.

VERDICT: OKAY (not what I expected but that’s my fault the description in the schedule did say it focused on Alpha Protocol)

Getting in to the games industry

The getting in to the games industry panel at the previous PAX was excellent giving lots of information for developers, artists, writers, Q&A, managers etc.  This one had a decent panel as well apart from one massive glaring omission.  There was no developer on the panel.  The Q&A (testing) guy tried to answer some questions on the topic but really was out of his depth.

In the end I walked out after about 20 mins and went to a different panel.

VERDICT: Meh (could be good, show up and see if anyone related to your desired job is on the panel)

Beyond Candyland

The second panel by the guys that did the Beyond D&D one I went to on the first day.  This one focused on board games.

Lots of really interesting stuff here. There was a nice discussion of the differences between games that are purely random (snakes and ladders) and ones that are pure skill (chess) and the various combinations in-between (e.g. war games have a lot of skill but still some random element).

Along with this was a discussion of games that could be considered solved.  For example if you know what your doing you can’t loose at Noughts and Crosses.  Draughts is solved for computer players.  Many games are solved by having optimal play strategies that may not guarantee a win but will always give you the best chance of victory.  Games like this reduce down to either seeing who made the first mistake or become purely random.  Generally once you solve a game its time to move on as most of the fun is gone.

With these terms and ideas in place the panel moved on to talk about various board games and how they stand up to these criteria.

There was lots of mention of the term “German board games” (Carcassonne, Settlers of Catan etc.) as a new wave of more advanced board games with different more interesting play mechanics.  This amused me a fair bit as these games have been played over in the UK since I went to university but it appears there just starting to get a bigger hold in the US.

VERDICT: Excellent (even if you have played a lot of games the talk on solved games and the difference between purely random and skill based was interesting)

Closing Ceremony

I hadn’t intended to go to this but at I fell in with a crowd of people from the Beyond Candyland panel and ended up playing some Flux with them before queuing for this.

I actually met the guys that did the Beyond D&D and Beyond Candyland panels at my last PAX and spent a bit of time chatting to them that day and then bumped into them the next day as we all were exploring Seattle.  Unfortunately being me I promptly lost the flier for their podcast (you should listen to it if either of the panels they gave sound interesting), forgot there name and spent 2 years cursing my memory.  To my surprise they remembered me as well so we got to chatting and then I spend a couple of very pleasant hours hanging out with some of there friends and forum members while they went off to do an interview.

We played a bit of FLUX and then someone (I’m sorry I can’t remember your name) gave a demo game of Burning Wheel.  It was a bit broken up due to location and stuff going on around us but still showed of some nice things about the game.  To sum up: The impromptu demo of Burning Wheel, given sitting on a concrete floor in a room filled with a thousand noisy geeks was better than the pre-planned D&D Dark Sun demo.

The closing ceremony itself consisted of a brief talk by the penny arcade guys followed by the final round of the Omegathon, PAX’s big multi-day competition.  This year random two person teams had been competing in a variety of events over the three days with the winning team getting tickets, hotel, flights etc. to a big convention (I think they said it was in Germany, or maybe Japan).  The final was a 4 game relay race where each game had targets and players took turns playing the games.  The first team to finish was the winner.

Unfortunate technical difficulties mean that they had to restart the competition half way through.  This turned out to be really unfair to the team on the left.  In the first round they’d been significantly far ahead but in the replay they ended up loosing.  I have to say I thought this showed a real issue with the design of the competition and that it should have been handled differently.

For the most part it was worth going to though as it provides a good conclusion to the 3 days.

VERDICT: OKAY, made excellent by the group I was hanging out with

The Expo floor

Not really a single event or panel the expo floor is open all three days with displays of games from most of the big publishers.  I don’t think the Expo was as good this time.

I didn’t see as big a presence from Blizzard as I expected, considering Cataclysm is out this year I expected to see a Warcraft stall with lots of advertising, some loot and maybe even playable demos of the intro sections for the new races but I didn’t see them at all (turns out they had a few staff at the NVIDIA booth).

I barely had a chance to see the Expo in the end.  I had intended to spend a couple of hours going round it on Sunday but ended up playing Flux and Burning Wheel instead.  It was a good trade but in the future I’d take more care to get to it.

I did manage to get play of the new Prince of Persia game.  It’s gone back to the original character and story and looks pretty decent if lacking that little something special that made the recent re-invention so good (and I know that’s a contentious statement).

I also had a chance to try out a game (Just Cause 2 I think) on a NVIDIA 3D triple monitor system (wow!).  It used the new shutter glasses that actively switch which eye is allowed to see the screen in time with it rendering images for the left and right eye, that’s the same tech that most of the 3D HDTVs coming out this year are using (bar a couple that use polarising filters).  I was very impressed with this, I expected some sort of blur or the images to look dull due to your eye only seeing them half the time but everything looked amazingly crisp and clear and the sense of depth was impressive for such a small screen.  Thankfully the game didn’t do any stupid out of screen effects which never work well.

About the only problem was that the glasses are slightly bigger and bulkier than the polarising glasses for the current breed of 3D cinema and don’t fit over normal glasses as well.  I wonder if we’ll see an uptake in contact lenses among geeks?

Conclusion

Probably not as good as my first PAX, but firsts always get a boost and then there’s the rosy tinted spectacles of time.  From what I can see the Expo floor certainly wasn’t as impressive.  There were less panels going on but most of the rooms were bigger so more people got in to each.  In the end I think I probably saw more events this year.

The convention sold out (50,000 to 60,000 people showed up over the 3 days apparently) this year and they’ve already announced its moving to a bigger venue next year.  Still in Boston but unfortunately a bit more out of the way which could make food and hotels harder to deal with.

Overall an excellent time was had.  I’m not sure If I’ll go again next year.  It’s a great event but its not quite as fun by yourself as I think it would be with a couple of geeky mates.  I guess I’ll have to see.

What follows is a rambling, though vaguely chronological, record of some highlights from the 3 days split over two posts.

Keynote

PAX welcomed the return of Wil Wheaton for the keynote this year.  He’s widely regarded as giving one of the best keynotes ever back at PAX Prime in 2007, so his return was widely anticipated.

This turned into one of the highlights of the event for me, much more than I expected it to be.  Wheaton has become the poster boy for geek on the web over the last 10 years, mainly because he truly is a geek and has a knack for getting over ideas and feelings about our hobbies.

This may veer a little to far into self congratulating back slapping on a couple occasions but its nice to be in a place where everyone gets the same geek jokes as you and laughs when you laugh.  It sets the tone for the rest of the event.

(part 1(above), 2, 3, 4, 5, 6)

VERDICT: Excellent (Makes me wish I’d gone to the keynote last time as well)

Beyond D&D

Given by the people that do the geek nights podcasts.  I’ve seen this presentation before back at my previous PAX and it was for the most part the same as the previous presentation.  A little more refined, a little better practised and updated for recent changes in both D&D and gaming in general.

D&D is an acceptable system for many types of games but it is not the be all and end all of pen and paper RPG systems, the panel does a good job of explaining D&Ds weaknesses and giving examples of the types of system and game available that are better suited to games where D&D would struggle.

The contention of the panellists (and I have to agree with them) appears to be that D&D and its siblings are good for the “dungeon bash” adventure.  Heroic tales of valiant warriors with fantastic abilities out to beat equally impressive bad guys into a pulp.  Where D&D starts to struggle is in games more about the role rather than the roll.  Games where skills become more important and the focus moves away from combat.

The final part of the panel is basically an sales pitch for the burning wheel system.  Burning wheel is designed to handle and run with a lot of things more combat orientated systems generally skip or ignore, for example it has systems for managing player conflict (something I’ve not seen in an RPG before).  I’d rather they’d covered a number of different systems in a little less detail.

I finally managed to get a demo of burning wheel this year (though it was somewhat improvised) and its certainly intrigued me enough to try and get a copy.

VERDICT: Good (Wouldn’t go to it every PAX but it’s well worth seeing occasionally)

Kotaku and Coal: In search of the best games ever

Run by one of the writers for the geek culture web site Kotaku this panel was an attempt to come up with a list of the best games ever.  The basic premise was to start with a list of the best games from one of the meta review sites and then send this list to various luminaries of the games industry who could each replace one item with a new game or switch the position of two entries. After sending it round a lot of people you should end up with a consensus agreement on the best games.

The presentation was fun with the pannel revealing each change to cheers and boos as peoples favourites appeared (ico!) disapeared (ico!). Unfortunately it was let down by the basic system for picking the top list being hopelessly broken.

Pretty much everyone they gave a shot at changing the list chose to replace. This gave the feel that the order didnt matter and being on the list was the only important part, with this in mind I’d have switched the list to being un-ordered.

More importantly however one person could completely undo another change, this meant that the list didn’t really represent a consensus so much as just the actions of the last few people to play.

There was no consensus as to whether the list was for “games that changed the industry” or “games that the person adding it really enjoyed”, this led to the list being unfocused.

Finally and most importantly Elite wasn’t on it!  How can a list of the top games ever not have one of the most well remembered and earliest open world games ever created.

VERDICT: Meh (Unless they change the basic premiss substantially I wouldn’t recommend it)

Death of Print

An interesting panel with a bunch of writers and publishers from the computer game magazine industry talking about the future of video game publishing.  There’s really two aspects to this; the magazine as a format and the dead tree distribution model.

In terms of content/format the biggest thing I took away from the presentation was that putting game reviews in magaizines is not a solid proposition any more.  The web will allways be faster to “print” than a magazine and by the time a review is in print most people will have already read one on ign or meta-critic.  To make things worse the online review may have had video andor audio components to enhance it.   It’s not financially viable to base a magazine on what is essentially out dated information.

What a magazine does do better however are the longer editorial type articles, exclusive previews of new games, interviews, commentary on the industry, photo tours of development houses etc.  These take a more financing to produce, aren’t as time sensitive and work as well or better in print as they do online.

Perhaps the future of the games magazine is with independent, article only magazines like Kill Screen.

On the distribution side there appears to be problems with the sustainability of the subscription model as it works in the USA (too much discounting) compared to other countries (the UK actually got a shout out here as a country where more people actually buy magazines).

Digital distribution may help companies get round the problems with falling revenue due to over discounted subscriptions (after all they can be more careful to stop it occuring again) and provide access to back issue archives at limited cost to the publisher without having to maintain legacy inventory.  It can also get round some of the problems with static content compared to the web (articles can have embedded media).  It won’t help with the immediacy concern however.

VERDICT: Excellent (Possibly the best panel of the show for me but I don’t know if its one they’ll repeat at a future event)

Dark Sun

I’m an old fan of the D&D Dark Sun setting.  Unfortunately it was not released again during the 3rd edition era of D&D.  4th ed. rectifies this intolerable slight to the gaming community by re-launching the setting.

I attended a demo of the setting and it’s new rules which took up most of an afternoon.  This was a big investment of my time at PAX and I skipped a number of other promising panels to go to it.

Unfortunately the event was marred by a terrible GM running the demo and an poorly written scenario.  I was wary about events this long the first time I went to PAX, in a panel if your not enjoying it you can leave, no one is put out.  In an RPG demo there’s pressure not to leave as it will impact 4 or 5 other people directly.  In the end this was a great waste of my time and I regret taking part in it there were other things I could have done that would have been more fun.

In fact the demo was so poorly run that there is an upcoming post on some dos and don’ts of running demo sessions.

VERDICT: Terrible (Skip RPG demos unless you’ve a good idea what your getting in to)

Part 2

Part 2 will follow soon.

In the last post I discussed the general kind of dice mechanics available and settled on a Bucket’O'Dice system.  In this post I’ll look at the core probabilities and difficulty levels of the system.  This is probably the single most important post of the entire system, everything hinges on getting good probabilities set down here.  Mistakes will be compounded and expanded through the rest of the system.

This weeks random steam punk picture is a photo of a difference engine by IvanAndrevich.

Actions And Tests

There are generally two types of actions a player can make in a roll playing game:

Unopposed actions occur when the player is only hindered by the environment or the task itself.  These include picking a lock or climbing a wall and are typically handled by asking the player to make a test against some sort of GM assigned difficulty.

Opposed actions occur when another player or NPC is directly opposing the player.  These include most combat actions and social tasks like persuasion and are typically handled by asking both players (or the player and the GM) to make a test and see who does better.

This post is concerned only with unopposed actions,  I’ll examine opposed actions later.  In general opposed rolls, absent exploding dice mechanics, are relatively easy to balance once you have the main system down.  I have some thoughts on the need for opposed rolls in most situations that I want to walk through as well.

Birendra paused to get his bearings as he passed through the inner door of the basement.  The room was dusky, lit by a few lanterns and light filtering down through small windows from the street above.  Against the far wall was a makeshift bar, propped up by two old men playing a game of Chaturanga. The room was filled with tables, all of them left empty as there previous occupants abandoned drink and games alike to crowd round the central table.

The basic dice mechanic

In the previous post I decided on a Bucket’O'Dice mechanic.  The players will roll a number of dice and count how many they get that are a certain value or above.

That count is the number of successes they get on the test.  I can express difficulties as either requiring a certain number of successes or changing how many dice the player rolls.

Sliding and Fixed Difficulties

Difficulties are an awkward concept.  What’s difficult for one person may be easy for another.

Generally difficulties are handled by rating everything against a fixed point, a good choice would be the average man or better yet the average professional.  So an average difficulty lock picking test is a lock thats of average difficulty for an average thief.  It’s still an average difficulty test for a world class thief, they just get more dice (or some other benefit).

There are other types of difficulty system, the most obvious of which is sliding difficulties.  In sliding difficulties everything is rated for the person performing the action.  The hard lock for the average thief is an easy lock for the world class professional.

Sliding difficulties are conceptually a little closer to reality than fixed difficulties but they require a lot more management from the GM for no real increase in the accuracy of the system.  I’m going with the classic fixed difficulties.

Birendra circled the crowd slowly looking for an easy mark. Most were guarding their purse well but he quickly spotted a few that were too distracted to keep a close eye on their money.  Closing in on the nearest Birendra slid a razor into his hand and, shielding his actions with his body, reached for their purse.

Medium size, good make, heavy, made of thick cloth with a rope tie.  Small stone seal hanging from the tie.  Birendra snapped his hand back, vanishing the razor back up his sleeve.  The seal was carved with house marks and the symbols of the noble caste, stealing from someone of that exalted a caste would get him more than just a whipping.

The Average Professional

In a fixed difficulty system we need a point to balance our system on.  I mentioned above the concept of the average professional.  This could be the average blacksmith (slightly higher body than most people, professional training in blacksmithing) or the average thief (slightly higher grace than most people, professional lock pick skills) or anyone else with a professional level of training in an area and a slightly above average statistic.

This average professional is the centre point of the system and even without establishing what value their statistics and skills are we can take a stab at working out a set of difficulty levels and how likely this character would be to succeed in them.

Some of these difficulties may look lower than you would expect, others higher.  After all given enough time a thief could probably pick any lock.  The key phrase there is “given enough time”, these chances are for the character to succeed in one attempt without spending any extra time on it. Most non-combat (and thus unopposed) tasks can be repeated or longer spent on them to make things easier.

Different styles of game may call for a different odds.  I want the average professional to have a decent chance of doing everything up to hard difficulty, with very hard and insane being saved for those with better skills.  In a more gritty realistic setting it may be more appropriate to have it be harder for the average professional to do hard or even difficult tasks.

There is no easy level on this table.  Any professional should be almost guaranteed to pass an easy test unless something gets in his way, in which case it either not an easy test or we have modifiers in play.

Intrigued as to why a noble would be down in the warrens Birendra moved round the crowd and pushed in towards the table at the centre.    Practice let him slip between the larger patrons and push the smaller ones gently to the side without drawing more than an occasional elbow or muttered insult, and after a few seconds of careful work he broke through into the front rank.

Sitting around the table were 7 men, noble and merchant caste the lot, playing the fastest and richest game of Ganjifa that Birendra had ever seen.  That in itself might draw a small crowd, but the dealer explained why everyone in the bar had given up drink for a time.

The Mathematics Of The Dice (Drum Roll Please)

All of which leads me up to the dice: D3, D4, D5, D6, D8, D10, D12, D20, D100 and a few more esoteric ones in-between.  Out of these the most common are D6 and D10.  These are the ones people are likely to have lots of so I’ll restrict myself to those.

At its most general level a Bucket’O'Dice system comes down to rolling dice and counting how many rolls you get above a certain threshold.  The following table shows the results for rolling D6 and counting a 5+ as a success:

The number of dice (D6 in this case) is down the left side and number of successes (a roll of 5+) along the top.  The value in each cell is the percentage chance of getting that many, or more, successes.  These are calculated using a basic binomial distribution (more about that here, copy of the open office spreadsheet I used to calculate this table here).

Looking at this I can see that adding more dice quickly increases the probability until you get to about 80% then each extra die becomes worth less.  I can also see that you never get a 100% chance of success, this is good as nothing is guaranteed in life.

Ideally I want to find a consecutive block of numbers roughly the same as the difficulties I listed above.  If these show up as a row it equates increasing difficulties with requiring more successes.  If it shows up as a column it equates increasing difficulties with reducing the number of dice rolled.

In this case the closest match corresponds to the row for 6D6.  We can see that the first 2 values fall nicely into my normal and difficult ranges,  the next two are a little lower than my hard and very hard ranges and the fifth is nicely in the middle of my insane range.  These deviations aren’t far enough outside my ranges to concern me.

The last thing I need to decide is how statistics and skills will be handled.  I can either keep the roll at 6D6 and change the number of successes required or I can use it to change the number of dice rolled.  Looking back up at the table I can see that numbers fall off faster as you start to look for more successes compared to the impact of looking for the same number of successes on less dice.

For example; you’ve got a 65% chance of getting 2 or more successes on 6 dice, drop that to 5 dice and you’ve still got a 54% chance but if you look for 3 successes on 6 dice you’ve only got a 32% chance.

This means asking for one more success has much more of an impact than rolling one less die.  If I add or remove dice to modify tests then I have a better degree of control than if I change the number of successes.  So I’ll use statistic and skill to change the dice pool.

Experimenting with various different dice and changing the value required for a roll to count as a success shows that 5D10 (count 7+) is a good match for my desired odds as well.  However the table for D10 (count 7+) shows that the percentages grow much quicker as more dice are added.  By the time your rolling 10D10 the odds are about the same as 12D6.  This means I get a finer degree of control with D6 than D10, admittedly it’s only one extra die but it will give me a bit more flexibility when I start to pick number for statistics and skills.

Sitting at the dealers seat was a woman in red robes.  She wore a simple golden half mask that changed the features on the right side of her face to that of a goddess.  Her own hands flicked cards across the table with practised grace while a mechanical pair, signs of her devotion and rank, shuffled cards at a blinding pace.  A priestess of Dhana had arrived in town on pilgrimage.

Birendra grinned, if she was dealing at a card game and still only had 4 arms then this had to be her first pilgrimage.  Playing with her would bring luck, beating her would grant you success for a year.  But more than that just being near her would give Birendra access to any number of rich fools wanting to loose their money.  Today was going to be a good day.

Modifiers

Modifiers have two uses:  In opposed rolls they are used to model an advantage, or disadvantage, on one players behalf. This could happen if the player is defending against multiple opponents, or if they’ve been temporarily dazed.  In an unopposed roll they are used to indicate that something is making the task harder or easier, in this they are basically the same thing as the difficulty.

I mentioned above that changing the number of successes required is the big stick approach to altering the odds, each extra success required has a large impact on the characters chances compared to changing the number of dice.  We want the finest level of control possible which indicates changing the number of dice rolled is the better approach.

Eventually a table of modifiers will be needed but many will depend on the abilities available and the setting.  Like the skills list this can be put off until later.

The Mechanic

Putting this all together I have my average professional rolling 6D6 as their standard roll.  The difficulty is based on the number of successes.

I’ll use the characters statistics and skills to modify the number of dice away from the default 6.  Poor statistics and skills mean less dice, good statistics and skills mean more dice.  Modifiers will be handled by adding or removing dice to the characters pool.

The number of successes above the amount required are the “extra degrees of success” (e.g. If its a difficult test and I get 4 successes on the the roll thats 2 extra degrees of success).  These can be used to increase the effectiveness of abilities and skills, or used to work out how much you beat an opponent by in an opposed roll.

You might be thinking this is an awful round about way of re-inventing the one of the most common Bucket’O'Dice systems out there.  But going through this makes sure I know how my dice work.  I know the differences between giving the player an extra die or reducing the number of success by one and I can look back at the probabilities table when I’m balancing abilities, modifiers and poisons to make sure the odds work as I expect.  If I’d just skipped to this mechanic because I liked it then I wouldn’t have this understanding.

The Next Post

We have a mechanic now.  The final thing to do in getting our core system in place is to look at opposed rolls and then pick the ranges for stats and skills.  The next post will cover that step before I move on to the next topic.  I’ll probably cover combat first and then look at character generation.

I really don’t want to think how much practice it takes not to drop any.  Perhaps not as impressive as the naked woman hanging 20 foot over the stage with no safety net while keeping 20 going at once during the Cirque du Soleil show in Vegas, but still good to watch.