A winning attitude doesn't come naturally. People are instinctively born kind of scrubby and it takes years of conditioning to remove the various emotions that cripple competitive play.
When I was younger, I was kind of scrubby. I was probably not as susceptible to it compared to most people, mostly because I was better at video games in general and I won most of the time (and when you're winning, nothing you do is cheap). However, little kid me threw tantrums whenever I didn't get my way in games, whether that was playing as P1 in a 2P game or whatever. I grew out of it eventually, I think. Maybe.
It was really concentrated effort that got me really thinking non-scrubby, though. A little over a decade ago, I played Soul Calibur 2 pretty competitively, but I was getting owned by a friend who used lots of guard impacts. I could not figure out how to beat that strategy, and I remember feeling that it was unfair. I didn't say anything though, because I felt like I should be able to just beat it. I was upset, sure.
When I play games with other people, I notice some shared traits. People love to see themselves do well, and they vastly overinflate how well they do. I really like watching pro gamers when they win, and they're like "well we made a ton of mistakes, it was really fortunate that we managed to win." You'll never see that from most gamers. Most people immediately attribute success to their own personal ability.
Average people are not OK with things that damage their own personal self-image. Ask the average gamer about a game he or she likes to play and you will inevitably get the "I'm pretty good at this game." The same is true if you ask someone if he or she is good at anything he or she likes to do. It isn't just games. If a person invests a lot of time and effort ("lot" being a pretty subjective thing) into something, that person will almost universally feel like he or she doesn't suck at it. Of course, when it comes to games this is pretty much universally false. 90% of LoL players are below Gold league skills. The same is true of SC2 players. Over 90% of them average under 50 apm during a game.
The problem is perception. People want to feel good about themselves and aren't good at thinking objectively. If you ever want a really good example of this (and you play LoL so you can appreciate it), watch Nightblue3's stream sometime. He's a really good player and has a good attitude, but he is very self-centric and doesn't think very broadly, often misinterpreting events or what he could have done simply because of his limited perception. Again, this isn't a jab at him; he's a great player and you should watch his stream, but watching him at work can really show you how the "ego goggles" work even for a very humble person.
In order to dump that scrub attitude you have to really look outside yourself and try to see how outside factors contributed to your success or failure, particularly in a team game like LoL. When I play Payday 2 (or really any cooperative game) I am really cognizant of how well my team is doing without me. Sometimes this is because I'm not doing very well and I know it, and other times it's because I am doing well but I know I'm able to do so because my teammates are doing something else that I need to have done. Sometimes I am just carrying my team, too, and because I am more aware when my teammates are doing well and a little more objective about it, I can be more objective when I do pull my team's weight.
One LoL game not that long ago I hit with probably 20 Blitzcrank hooks on players. My team did well too, but I know I was doing well because I can objectively say that I hooked people often, at good times, and with really stellar accuracy that is sort of infrequent for me. I don't normally do that well (that game was hard to top, honestly) and it was easy to see that my performance was both exceptional and vital to my team doing well.
On the other hand, I can't count the times where I've merely been adequate, doing just what I needed to do, occasionally making mistakes or plays but nothing earth-shattering. I have many other games where I've played poorly and won purely by virtue of my team carrying my loser butt. That loss of ego and ability to self-reflect is what's really important to trashing the scrub attitude. If you can objectively assess how you're doing, your pride won't take huge falls when you're doing poorly because you understand that it can happen. You also might know how you can do better later, too.
Some people are extremely self-deprecating, which is a whole different problem. I have met a lot of people who immediately give up on stuff without really trying or putting in effort. "I suck," is the common response. "I'll never get good," is another. "It's too hard," is also very frequent. I only know how to solve the problem from the "dialing down the pride" end. I don't know how to get around the lack of desire to put forth effort. I see people who want to win and play whatever game a lot, but moan about being terrible and never improve. I'd just advise quitting, but if you really want to play and you want to win you need to detach yourself from your failings and concentrate only on doing better the next time.
The most important thing is effort. Try harder! Time is the most important weapon and you can't give up just because you get mad. The most important thing is to realize you're upset and get over it. The problem is that people get too tied up in how well they did and don't work at trying to change.
Monday, March 31, 2014
Sunday, March 30, 2014
Melee versus ranged: The eternal struggle
Any game with both melee and ranged attackers faces a great conundrum. How do melee and ranged attackers fight against each other in any sort of balanced way? Your answer will depend on the game, as designers choose numerous different ways to balance these things.
We'll be covering both turn-based (including tabletop) and real-time (including MMO) combat, which means this will be a pretty long one. I hope it makes up for no update on Saturday.
We really can't discuss this in a vacuum. We have to talk about options each side has. There's really no "vanilla" option, either. For real-time games, do melee characters have gap closers? Do ranged characters have escapes? Are attackers rooted while they attack? Are only melee attacks rooted, or ranged? Can ranged characters attack while in melee range and if so, how effective are their attacks? Are there dead zones where ranged characters can't attack? Is there any sort of movement slow or other escape prevention mechanics for melee characters? What about for ranged characters? Are there ranged slows or CC to prevent the enemy from closing? And of course, how much reward is there for getting in close as a melee? How much reward is there for keeping away as a ranged? What about resources? Do ranged characters have to expend resources to attack?
Turn-based games have similar considerations. Is movement a "free" action, or does it take from the action pool used to attack? Is there any game rule preventing ranged attackers from retreating (attacks of opportunity)? Are ranged attackers prohibited from moving and attacking in the same turn?
If you think to games you've played, you probably realize just how different games can be. There's really no benchmark set of options for melee or ranged characters in any game. If you think on even shooters, many of them have a shotgun which is essentially a melee attack. It deals effectively zero damage at "normal" ranges and deals lots of damage at "close" range. Even if the game has a melee attack, the melee is probably an opportunity weapon or an attack of last resort, while the shotgun is closer to a "real" melee attack in another game where you're basing your strategy around its use.
Advance Wars style: Restricting ranged attacks and movement
Advance Wars honestly isn't the first game to have artillery units that can only shoot if they don't move. However, it's the first game that comes to my mind. I'm sure some retro gamers are shaking their fists at me right now.
I like this style because it inherently makes ranged weaker than melee, which I kind of feel is easier to balance around as a designer. Making powerful ranged attackers make it really hard to make melee good. GW2 actually sort of does this too; you can't run backwards or strafe as fast as you can run forward. If a ranged character turns and runs, he can't shoot back but he can get away... in theory, anyway (in practice, melee characters have lots of gap closers so that's not the most viable option). Restricting ranged attackers' ability to fight back and run away at the same time greatly limits their power and in turn, makes them easier to balance.
You actually have to give ranged attackers a lot of help in this situation. You would think that simply having ranged attacks where melee can't retaliate would be enough, even if they can fight back at 100% in close range. Honestly, you almost have to make your ranged equal to your melee in terms of tanking hits, since they can't retreat and attack, but melee can chase and attack.
Even though GW2 is a real-time game, I think it does this pretty well. The problem is that ranged characters are a bit same-y with melee characters, and you end up having a sort of similar experience regardless of what class you're playing. This works a bit better for war type games with lots of combatants, but if GW2 is any indication, forcing ranged attackers to choose between attacking or retreating (and then giving them some bells and whistles to help them deal with melee) is a pretty solid way to design and balance a real-time system.
Tactics-style RPGs: Movement is (mostly) free
Most tactical RPGs have a discrete order of operations in a turn; a character can both move and take an action. Many games allow you to do them in any order, but others require a character to move first. In any case, moving doesn't prevent the character from using his or her full range of attacks. Sometimes, skipping either or both actions lets the character act again sooner; this is mostly for time-based systems rather than discrete turn/round based-systems.
First we'll talk about "move and act in any order" since covering "move and then act" is easier once we've covered the basic groundwork. Ranged is obviously advantaged in this type of system. In most situations, ranged attackers will be able to attack first. Melee attackers need to abuse fog of war or other forms of imperfect information (such as stealth) in order to gain an advantage. The more imperfect information is present in these kinds of systems, the more melee benefits.
Note that if the time to kill is relatively long, some of the ranged advantage is lowered. This is because melee attackers get to spend more time in range attacking. Although ranged attackers can retreat and attack, if all things are equal, melee will simply chase and attack. This does allow ranged attackers to exploit advantages of terrain better, though. If the game is "move and then act only," it can be really painful for ranged attackers if they can move farther than they can shoot; either they move their full distance and still get chased down, or move less and potentially get surrounded, but get to fight back.
The biggest problem though is that ranged teams get to focus fire. In any of these kinds of games, you would want ranged attackers (it's just a given) just for this reason; you generally can't put multiple people in the same space (hex, tile, whatever), so many melee characters might not be able to attack simply because they can't get to an open adjacent space. This problem gets exacerbated as more units enter the game. Consider a game like Langrisser where you have huge armies of dudes; movements get really clumsy and irritating.
Overall I don't recommend this design at all. Ranged is too naturally favored and melee needs to be given too many concessions to be good. It creates very binary gameplay that is probably bad and really hard to balance.
XCOM: Action point tactics systems
Some tactical RPGs like the XCOM series and the old Fallout games use a different style of movement. Both movement and actions use the same pool of points. Much like the previous example, ranged is favored. All the things like focusing fire, preemptive attacking and controlling terrain are also true of this.
However, action point systems are generally worse because creating distance is part of the action economy instead of a separate, discrete action that you're forced to take. Adding free "movement only" action points does help, but not really. As melee, you literally can't close the gap to the enemy if they can all focus you afterwards, because you spend most of your offensive potential just getting in, and the ranged enemy gets all of their offensive potential immediately afterwards. Generally, a full turn's worth of action points in these games is enough to kill a single character, so you get behind on units (and therefore action economy) very quickly.
Melee needs to be very, very overpowered in order to survive in these kinds of systems. It's very telling that the modern XCOM games are completely imbalanced and it's clear the designers did not care to balance the game at all. I'm not really a big fan of that kind of lazy design, where you just put a bunch of OP stuff in your game and don't care how good it is because any of it can beat the game. I'll probably rant about game difficulty at some point too, honestly.
MMOs: Real-time attacking of all kinds
It's pretty common in modern real-time games to have attacks that root your character. WoW actually doesn't root characters any more, unless they use spells or some other specific actions that root your character. I remember when hunters couldn't move and shoot. Sigh.
Characters that can move rapidly in all directions and/or shoot backwards while retreating are really awful. It's basically the same as tactics-style systems but in real-time. Ranged has huge advantages, etc. Most of the melee versus ranged debate comes from this kind of game, and it's freaking obvious that ranged is good if they're allowed to attack and run away at the same time. Slow down backwards movement and keep characters from shooting out of their rear!
As a designer you have to give so much to melee to help them succeed. Movement snares/slows, CC, tankiness, gap closers and so on. You can give those things out but it kinda sucks to be forced to just because your game system is broken to start with.
Rooting while attacking is... only slightly better to be honest. If ranged is rooted and melee isn't, it still gives ranged an advantage but much less of one. You can add tankiness to melee and be a lot better off. If both are rooted while attacking, combat is just clumsier. Ranged characters have the same basic advantages as the tactics-style games; a lot more if running out of attack range while an attack is animating causes it to miss (which is common in many games like this). Even if it doesn't it generally puts a lot more forced skill on the part of the melee character. Definitely not a desirable thing.
D&D/PF: How to do it really wrong
I don't even know where to begin. It's basically the least balanced thing imaginable from a pure systems standpoint. I'm going to talk a little bit about specifics of this system because there are specific mechanics that make this system totally broken.
Melee are pretty limited in options in a core game. They have 3 basic options: Move and attack once, do a full attack but don't move (well you get a single 5' step), or double move in a straight line (charge) and take a single attack, but get a defense penalty. Ranged attackers have pretty much the same options, but we can also consider withdraw (double move, first square doesn't provoke) as an option as well. The options in this system are fairly clumsy but it is a PnP system (and thus more of a realism simulator) than a gamist thing like wargaming or tactical RPGs or real-time MMO combat.
Oh, also ranged weapons can shoot many times further than the standard movement action. Again, realism simulator. The first problem is that ranged attackers can take one or more full attacks before melee attackers can even close the gap. Additionally, if a melee attacker uses charge to attack one ranged enemy, other ranged enemies can use their full attacks to hit the charger and it's much easier because he charged. That seems totally fair especially because the charger gets a single attack. There is a penalty to hit an enemy engaged in close combat with a missile weapon, but the charge penalty effectively halves it and there's a feat to remove the penalty to hit enemies in close combat.
Now there's a catch here. Ranged characters can't use their ranged attacks in melee range without provoking an "attack of opportunity." However, they can simply use their single step to move out of melee range and then take their full attacks. In a magical world where all the melee attackers were to charge all the ranged attackers (thus forcing a threat of a full attack on the next turn), the ranged attackers still have the luxury of focus fire, while melee characters really don't.
Keep in mind that in D&D, the best ranged weapon users are also the best melee weapon users, so the actual tankiness of the ranged attackers is likely to be similar. The melee attackers are likely to deal more damage, but the ranged attackers are likely to be harder to hit. One or the other is likely a bit better than the other but it's not really important; they're roughly dealing the same damage overall when they attack.
This is further exacerbated by the fact that any sort of magic generally favors ranged attackers. Movement buffs like haste are the exception; even though they give the same effective combat benefits (+1 attack, +1 AC, and +1 hit) they give movement which favors the melee attacker. Movement slows, fatigue, entangling, and all sorts of conjurable terrain favor ranged characters who can deny melee characters an approach. One would think summoned creatures would be a benefit to melee (due to flanking), but not really; because charges are forced to be a straight line without obstructions, ranged characters can use summoned creatures to completely forbid a melee's best option to close the gap.
Probably the worst of it all is that all those magical effects presented above are on characters that are predominantly ranged -- mostly because magic is the best option in general and magic is generally ranged. The best part? Casting defensively allows spellcasters to cast right in front of their melee attackers! Magic is insanely OP in general but the fact that mages get an answer to melee that even archers don't get and is also trivially easy is just a slap in the face.
The moral of the story: Don't emulate D&D's combat in any version. It's really, really, really bad. In 2e when movement was abstract, the combat was probably more balanced than it is now (in 3.5/PF/4e/Next). If I ever design a wargaming-style strategy game, it will probably take a lot from Advance Wars; if (when?) I release my tabletop ruleset, it will also avoid as many of D&D's pitfalls as possible.
We'll be covering both turn-based (including tabletop) and real-time (including MMO) combat, which means this will be a pretty long one. I hope it makes up for no update on Saturday.
We really can't discuss this in a vacuum. We have to talk about options each side has. There's really no "vanilla" option, either. For real-time games, do melee characters have gap closers? Do ranged characters have escapes? Are attackers rooted while they attack? Are only melee attacks rooted, or ranged? Can ranged characters attack while in melee range and if so, how effective are their attacks? Are there dead zones where ranged characters can't attack? Is there any sort of movement slow or other escape prevention mechanics for melee characters? What about for ranged characters? Are there ranged slows or CC to prevent the enemy from closing? And of course, how much reward is there for getting in close as a melee? How much reward is there for keeping away as a ranged? What about resources? Do ranged characters have to expend resources to attack?
Turn-based games have similar considerations. Is movement a "free" action, or does it take from the action pool used to attack? Is there any game rule preventing ranged attackers from retreating (attacks of opportunity)? Are ranged attackers prohibited from moving and attacking in the same turn?
If you think to games you've played, you probably realize just how different games can be. There's really no benchmark set of options for melee or ranged characters in any game. If you think on even shooters, many of them have a shotgun which is essentially a melee attack. It deals effectively zero damage at "normal" ranges and deals lots of damage at "close" range. Even if the game has a melee attack, the melee is probably an opportunity weapon or an attack of last resort, while the shotgun is closer to a "real" melee attack in another game where you're basing your strategy around its use.
Advance Wars style: Restricting ranged attacks and movement
Advance Wars honestly isn't the first game to have artillery units that can only shoot if they don't move. However, it's the first game that comes to my mind. I'm sure some retro gamers are shaking their fists at me right now.
I like this style because it inherently makes ranged weaker than melee, which I kind of feel is easier to balance around as a designer. Making powerful ranged attackers make it really hard to make melee good. GW2 actually sort of does this too; you can't run backwards or strafe as fast as you can run forward. If a ranged character turns and runs, he can't shoot back but he can get away... in theory, anyway (in practice, melee characters have lots of gap closers so that's not the most viable option). Restricting ranged attackers' ability to fight back and run away at the same time greatly limits their power and in turn, makes them easier to balance.
You actually have to give ranged attackers a lot of help in this situation. You would think that simply having ranged attacks where melee can't retaliate would be enough, even if they can fight back at 100% in close range. Honestly, you almost have to make your ranged equal to your melee in terms of tanking hits, since they can't retreat and attack, but melee can chase and attack.
Even though GW2 is a real-time game, I think it does this pretty well. The problem is that ranged characters are a bit same-y with melee characters, and you end up having a sort of similar experience regardless of what class you're playing. This works a bit better for war type games with lots of combatants, but if GW2 is any indication, forcing ranged attackers to choose between attacking or retreating (and then giving them some bells and whistles to help them deal with melee) is a pretty solid way to design and balance a real-time system.
Tactics-style RPGs: Movement is (mostly) free
Most tactical RPGs have a discrete order of operations in a turn; a character can both move and take an action. Many games allow you to do them in any order, but others require a character to move first. In any case, moving doesn't prevent the character from using his or her full range of attacks. Sometimes, skipping either or both actions lets the character act again sooner; this is mostly for time-based systems rather than discrete turn/round based-systems.
First we'll talk about "move and act in any order" since covering "move and then act" is easier once we've covered the basic groundwork. Ranged is obviously advantaged in this type of system. In most situations, ranged attackers will be able to attack first. Melee attackers need to abuse fog of war or other forms of imperfect information (such as stealth) in order to gain an advantage. The more imperfect information is present in these kinds of systems, the more melee benefits.
Note that if the time to kill is relatively long, some of the ranged advantage is lowered. This is because melee attackers get to spend more time in range attacking. Although ranged attackers can retreat and attack, if all things are equal, melee will simply chase and attack. This does allow ranged attackers to exploit advantages of terrain better, though. If the game is "move and then act only," it can be really painful for ranged attackers if they can move farther than they can shoot; either they move their full distance and still get chased down, or move less and potentially get surrounded, but get to fight back.
The biggest problem though is that ranged teams get to focus fire. In any of these kinds of games, you would want ranged attackers (it's just a given) just for this reason; you generally can't put multiple people in the same space (hex, tile, whatever), so many melee characters might not be able to attack simply because they can't get to an open adjacent space. This problem gets exacerbated as more units enter the game. Consider a game like Langrisser where you have huge armies of dudes; movements get really clumsy and irritating.
Overall I don't recommend this design at all. Ranged is too naturally favored and melee needs to be given too many concessions to be good. It creates very binary gameplay that is probably bad and really hard to balance.
XCOM: Action point tactics systems
Some tactical RPGs like the XCOM series and the old Fallout games use a different style of movement. Both movement and actions use the same pool of points. Much like the previous example, ranged is favored. All the things like focusing fire, preemptive attacking and controlling terrain are also true of this.
However, action point systems are generally worse because creating distance is part of the action economy instead of a separate, discrete action that you're forced to take. Adding free "movement only" action points does help, but not really. As melee, you literally can't close the gap to the enemy if they can all focus you afterwards, because you spend most of your offensive potential just getting in, and the ranged enemy gets all of their offensive potential immediately afterwards. Generally, a full turn's worth of action points in these games is enough to kill a single character, so you get behind on units (and therefore action economy) very quickly.
Melee needs to be very, very overpowered in order to survive in these kinds of systems. It's very telling that the modern XCOM games are completely imbalanced and it's clear the designers did not care to balance the game at all. I'm not really a big fan of that kind of lazy design, where you just put a bunch of OP stuff in your game and don't care how good it is because any of it can beat the game. I'll probably rant about game difficulty at some point too, honestly.
MMOs: Real-time attacking of all kinds
It's pretty common in modern real-time games to have attacks that root your character. WoW actually doesn't root characters any more, unless they use spells or some other specific actions that root your character. I remember when hunters couldn't move and shoot. Sigh.
Characters that can move rapidly in all directions and/or shoot backwards while retreating are really awful. It's basically the same as tactics-style systems but in real-time. Ranged has huge advantages, etc. Most of the melee versus ranged debate comes from this kind of game, and it's freaking obvious that ranged is good if they're allowed to attack and run away at the same time. Slow down backwards movement and keep characters from shooting out of their rear!
As a designer you have to give so much to melee to help them succeed. Movement snares/slows, CC, tankiness, gap closers and so on. You can give those things out but it kinda sucks to be forced to just because your game system is broken to start with.
Rooting while attacking is... only slightly better to be honest. If ranged is rooted and melee isn't, it still gives ranged an advantage but much less of one. You can add tankiness to melee and be a lot better off. If both are rooted while attacking, combat is just clumsier. Ranged characters have the same basic advantages as the tactics-style games; a lot more if running out of attack range while an attack is animating causes it to miss (which is common in many games like this). Even if it doesn't it generally puts a lot more forced skill on the part of the melee character. Definitely not a desirable thing.
D&D/PF: How to do it really wrong
I don't even know where to begin. It's basically the least balanced thing imaginable from a pure systems standpoint. I'm going to talk a little bit about specifics of this system because there are specific mechanics that make this system totally broken.
Melee are pretty limited in options in a core game. They have 3 basic options: Move and attack once, do a full attack but don't move (well you get a single 5' step), or double move in a straight line (charge) and take a single attack, but get a defense penalty. Ranged attackers have pretty much the same options, but we can also consider withdraw (double move, first square doesn't provoke) as an option as well. The options in this system are fairly clumsy but it is a PnP system (and thus more of a realism simulator) than a gamist thing like wargaming or tactical RPGs or real-time MMO combat.
Oh, also ranged weapons can shoot many times further than the standard movement action. Again, realism simulator. The first problem is that ranged attackers can take one or more full attacks before melee attackers can even close the gap. Additionally, if a melee attacker uses charge to attack one ranged enemy, other ranged enemies can use their full attacks to hit the charger and it's much easier because he charged. That seems totally fair especially because the charger gets a single attack. There is a penalty to hit an enemy engaged in close combat with a missile weapon, but the charge penalty effectively halves it and there's a feat to remove the penalty to hit enemies in close combat.
Now there's a catch here. Ranged characters can't use their ranged attacks in melee range without provoking an "attack of opportunity." However, they can simply use their single step to move out of melee range and then take their full attacks. In a magical world where all the melee attackers were to charge all the ranged attackers (thus forcing a threat of a full attack on the next turn), the ranged attackers still have the luxury of focus fire, while melee characters really don't.
Keep in mind that in D&D, the best ranged weapon users are also the best melee weapon users, so the actual tankiness of the ranged attackers is likely to be similar. The melee attackers are likely to deal more damage, but the ranged attackers are likely to be harder to hit. One or the other is likely a bit better than the other but it's not really important; they're roughly dealing the same damage overall when they attack.
This is further exacerbated by the fact that any sort of magic generally favors ranged attackers. Movement buffs like haste are the exception; even though they give the same effective combat benefits (+1 attack, +1 AC, and +1 hit) they give movement which favors the melee attacker. Movement slows, fatigue, entangling, and all sorts of conjurable terrain favor ranged characters who can deny melee characters an approach. One would think summoned creatures would be a benefit to melee (due to flanking), but not really; because charges are forced to be a straight line without obstructions, ranged characters can use summoned creatures to completely forbid a melee's best option to close the gap.
Probably the worst of it all is that all those magical effects presented above are on characters that are predominantly ranged -- mostly because magic is the best option in general and magic is generally ranged. The best part? Casting defensively allows spellcasters to cast right in front of their melee attackers! Magic is insanely OP in general but the fact that mages get an answer to melee that even archers don't get and is also trivially easy is just a slap in the face.
The moral of the story: Don't emulate D&D's combat in any version. It's really, really, really bad. In 2e when movement was abstract, the combat was probably more balanced than it is now (in 3.5/PF/4e/Next). If I ever design a wargaming-style strategy game, it will probably take a lot from Advance Wars; if (when?) I release my tabletop ruleset, it will also avoid as many of D&D's pitfalls as possible.
Friday, March 28, 2014
What does our gameplay accomplish?
Once upon a time there was a certain lady who worked at BioWare who claimed that she would rather "skip the combat" in games. Of course, Jennifer Hepler didn't "get" video games, or games in general. But the point she raised back then is still valid. Why shouldn't we be able to skip the combat?
The statement to me is patently ridiculous, but it makes sense if you look at games in a certain way. The singleplayer gameplay in a modern shooter serves what end? You walk through rooms of dudes and shoot them. Why not just make a movie about that? That's one of my hangups with Spec Ops: The Line, if you've ever played that game or heard about it. That game is a statement about modern shooters, so in that respect it's good that it is a shooter. However, basically the entire game would have been better if it was a movie. The combat in that game serves no point except as a backdrop to tell the story.
That's a big problem with modern games. We create gameplay that isn't novel anymore and don't use it to serve any purpose except tell a story. We make games that are designed for the player to win, but don't do so in a way that is interesting or fun. I'm really looking at shooters here because they're the worst offenders, but the same can be true of any other genre. Let me state some pretty big blasphemy here: the best Final Fantasy games would be better if they were books or TV shows. Very few Final Fantasy games do anything fun with the gameplay; it's just a means to get to the end. Final Fantasy VI is the worst offender; you barely have to even try to beat the game. It's just that easy. Final Fantasy VIII is even worse since the gameplay actively hampers enjoyment of the game.
Good games create an experience with their gameplay, and sometimes that's hard to describe with words. Metal Gear Solid (the original on PSX, not the remake on newer consoles) did a really good job of putting you in the shoes of this super-spec ops guy and showing you the dangers he was going through. Rooms were puzzles, but you could solve them in your own way; violently, stealthily and virtually any inbetweens. The game even gave feedback on how well you did. The gameplay was a huge part of the experience of that game, and if you played it for the first time, you felt really smart when you figured out the latest trick or puzzle. Skipping the combat (or perhaps action is a better word) in MGS is like skipping an entire movie except for the credits.
As designers we shouldn't just say, "I just want to create this story, so I'll make a game around it." The entire point of video games is the game part. If the only games you were exposed to were Dragon Age and Mass Effect, I can understand skipping the action parts because honestly other games do those things better; all BioWare games are about telling your story. They're basically visual novels that have gameplay added on (notable exception being SWTOR which has evolved quite a bit into a "real MMO").
In case weren't aware, I'm pretty hard on shooters. There are a lot of shooters that have been released that push the envelope (HAWKEN, Loadout, and especially Strike Vector) but the majority of shooters are really just old rehashes of the same boring shooter formula. Most action RPGs are too, honestly, but I'm less harsh on them because the people playing them really like that sort of gameplay (I play Borderlands 2 still, so I'm not exempt). I feel like shooter and to a lesser extent JRPG gameplay has become really stale. I do like that more games are branching out with stuff like DayZ, but then there's games like BioShock Infinite that are basically nothing new. Yes, I understand you're telling a story and showing a world, but why not do that in film? Depressing from the franchise that brought us System Shock 2.
The point of this rambling is that more developers should actually do something with their gameplay that makes their game worth calling a game. Even Long Live the Queen did it for visual novels (it's really good!) so I really think it shouldn't be that hard to create something that gives a new experience for a player without just telling a different story.
PS: Story's not a pillar of games and it never will be.
Thursday, March 27, 2014
The Summoner's Guidebook: More on role mastery
I'm not feeling really inspired to write something amazing this week (assuming you thought what I normally write is amazing), partly because I think my muse ran hard thinking about tabletop games. Haha. But I have been playing and thinking about roles a bit.
You may have already read my discussion already about picking a role. Naturally I was thinking about it a bit today. If you've picked a role, for crying out loud be good at it. Nothing is more irritating to me than getting into a game where someone firstpicks a role and then plays awfully. Examples include picking any last-hitting lane role and being bad at last-hitting, picking support and being passive in lane, or picking jungle and not exerting map presence via wards, ganks, counterganks or invasions. It might also be picking mid/top and getting wrecked by any matchup you're not familiar with.
I recently played a game where my team's Vayne was forced into ADC. She really wanted a solo lane, but both of them were picked by an obvious duo queue. The duo queue went on to play terribly. Katarina let the enemy Vel'Koz free farm while she attempted to put pressure on bottom lane, while our Jax lost horribly to the enemy Teemo. I couldn't gank top past level 6 (you can't really gank a Teemo lane) so I ended up playing proxy mid and jungle invasion because my mid laner was rarely in her lane. I would like to emphasize that Shyvana versus Vel'Koz is not a very fun matchup.
Likewise, our Vayne was garbage and would not ever shoot at the enemy. I understand being defensive and all, but I don't think she understands the need for ADC to continuously shoot. Our support would make plays but she wouldn't follow up, and unless Kat was around, basically nothing would happen.
Now I understand that you don't always get the role you want, but screwing someone who can play the lane out of the matchup so that you can lose your lane or give your opponent free farm is not really OK. Yes, I do think that ganking is important for a mid, but you really need to push up and ideally harass your opponent out of lane or kill him before you gank. I'm not a pro mid player, but you generally rotate as mid when you're ahead, not when you feel like giving the enemy hits on your tower.
What I'm saying, and what numerous games where this happened (I had jungle stolen from me by the worst Evelynn ever) have told me is that you really need to know your role. I mean really. Pick a role and actually learn what the heck you're doing. If you don't know what you're doing in a role, don't call it until you know!
Maybe I should just have talked about the skills you actually need to have to do well in a position. I dunno.
Sorry for the meh update (and slow update too), not really feelin it today I guess?
Wednesday, March 26, 2014
Tailoring a narrative to your games
First on the agenda: apparently you can't import a feed into Tumblr anymore. I'm not sure what's up with that. You can import your entire blog into Tumblr but the links to the tool for that are currently down. Kind of annoying.
Anyway, today I'm gonna talk about creating a narrative. I've been getting positive feedback with PnP-related stuff and it's been on my mind lately, but this is probably the last tabletop-related post for a while. One of my friends talked about how she was good at writing, and I snickered a bit because she is terrible at writing. Pretty much any criteria you could use for writing, she'd be bad at. Her mechanics are bad, the stuff she writes is super self-indulgent, and she has no concepts of plot or pacing. I'll come back to this story a bit more later.
When you're creating a narrative for anything, whether writing or gaming or interactive (tabletop) gaming, the first and most important thing you need to dump is your attachment to whatever it is you're writing. I feel like this is why George R. R. Martin is such a fantastic writer, because he isn't in love with the people he writes about. It allows him to create a compelling narrative because the characters feel believable and act believable. Characters don't just act out of turn "because plot." In the Song of Fire and Ice, you really feel like the story just flows and he never has to force things to happen.
That's sort of the problem with narrative is that you create an idea and you fall in love with it. You identify a sequence of events that you want to happen and you create a story around that idea. The problem is that unless that idea is the central point of your story, the rest of your story can easily get tangled up around it. Your idea could just be bad too, but unless you can step back and trash what doesn't work then you're kind of doomed to "because plot."
"Because plot" is really bad in tabletop and you will get some pretty bad feedback regarding it if your player group is at all creative. If you have a story in mind you want to tell, that story better have some if/then statements to cover if the players fail, if they succeed far greater than you would have expected, or if they do a flying leap off the rails and do something you don't expect. If your villain is defeated and you want him to get away, he'd better start running before he runs out of hit points and he'd better be able to make saving throws against CC spells, tear gas, and a huge fighter dude blocking his way. You'd better have contingencies and more importantly, you'd better be ready to have those contingencies get trumped by smart players.
If you're creating a narrative you want as few ridiculous coincidences as possible in your story. Things like having the protagonists meet up is technically a coincidence, but no one thinks twice about it unless it happens in an especially contrived way. If you aren't familiar with Star Ocean 3, there's a part where the main character's escape pod randomly lands on the same planet as a space criminal's escape pod, and then another character's ship lands on that same planet (following the protagonist's distress beacon), but that character is randomly someone important to the plot. If that wasn't bad enough, the group crash-lands on another planet later which ends up being a planet of key significance to the endgame plot, forcing the heroes to return later. There are a lot more ridiculous coincidences in that game and they are all plot-drivers. Really awful.
In the same way, events in your story should flow naturally. When you create characters, you give them motivations and you make those motivations drive those characters into conflicts. This can happen whether you're a DM/GM or just writing a story, interactive or not. Coincidences can happen -- they happen in real life -- but they shouldn't be the key driving forces in your story. Try to limit "because plot" coincidences to one or two at the absolute most. If the good guys get bailed out by luck at just the right time every time, or the bad guys get away due to chance every time, it just feels hackneyed.
The reader/player is attached to the protagonists emotionally, and so their triumphs and failures should be their own. If a bad guy succeeds, it should be because he had a good plan or contingency, or maybe because he just naturally had some advantage that the good guys didn't plan for. In general, when I plan encounters I make my antagonists way ahead of time and just play it as it goes. I scale the overall power level to be comparable to the players but the actual plan for each antagonist is flavored for that character. It's then up to the players to do the work, and depending on the antagonist, he might be able to gather info about the players too and change his plans.
When story events happen, they happen because the story has already been driving towards those things happening. As a writer, you need objectivity. You need to play out plans from multiple perspectives and try to see things in the eyes of other characters. Characters act according to their wants and needs, and people's wants are what ultimately create the narrative of a good story.
Anyway, today I'm gonna talk about creating a narrative. I've been getting positive feedback with PnP-related stuff and it's been on my mind lately, but this is probably the last tabletop-related post for a while. One of my friends talked about how she was good at writing, and I snickered a bit because she is terrible at writing. Pretty much any criteria you could use for writing, she'd be bad at. Her mechanics are bad, the stuff she writes is super self-indulgent, and she has no concepts of plot or pacing. I'll come back to this story a bit more later.
When you're creating a narrative for anything, whether writing or gaming or interactive (tabletop) gaming, the first and most important thing you need to dump is your attachment to whatever it is you're writing. I feel like this is why George R. R. Martin is such a fantastic writer, because he isn't in love with the people he writes about. It allows him to create a compelling narrative because the characters feel believable and act believable. Characters don't just act out of turn "because plot." In the Song of Fire and Ice, you really feel like the story just flows and he never has to force things to happen.
That's sort of the problem with narrative is that you create an idea and you fall in love with it. You identify a sequence of events that you want to happen and you create a story around that idea. The problem is that unless that idea is the central point of your story, the rest of your story can easily get tangled up around it. Your idea could just be bad too, but unless you can step back and trash what doesn't work then you're kind of doomed to "because plot."
"Because plot" is really bad in tabletop and you will get some pretty bad feedback regarding it if your player group is at all creative. If you have a story in mind you want to tell, that story better have some if/then statements to cover if the players fail, if they succeed far greater than you would have expected, or if they do a flying leap off the rails and do something you don't expect. If your villain is defeated and you want him to get away, he'd better start running before he runs out of hit points and he'd better be able to make saving throws against CC spells, tear gas, and a huge fighter dude blocking his way. You'd better have contingencies and more importantly, you'd better be ready to have those contingencies get trumped by smart players.
If you're creating a narrative you want as few ridiculous coincidences as possible in your story. Things like having the protagonists meet up is technically a coincidence, but no one thinks twice about it unless it happens in an especially contrived way. If you aren't familiar with Star Ocean 3, there's a part where the main character's escape pod randomly lands on the same planet as a space criminal's escape pod, and then another character's ship lands on that same planet (following the protagonist's distress beacon), but that character is randomly someone important to the plot. If that wasn't bad enough, the group crash-lands on another planet later which ends up being a planet of key significance to the endgame plot, forcing the heroes to return later. There are a lot more ridiculous coincidences in that game and they are all plot-drivers. Really awful.
In the same way, events in your story should flow naturally. When you create characters, you give them motivations and you make those motivations drive those characters into conflicts. This can happen whether you're a DM/GM or just writing a story, interactive or not. Coincidences can happen -- they happen in real life -- but they shouldn't be the key driving forces in your story. Try to limit "because plot" coincidences to one or two at the absolute most. If the good guys get bailed out by luck at just the right time every time, or the bad guys get away due to chance every time, it just feels hackneyed.
The reader/player is attached to the protagonists emotionally, and so their triumphs and failures should be their own. If a bad guy succeeds, it should be because he had a good plan or contingency, or maybe because he just naturally had some advantage that the good guys didn't plan for. In general, when I plan encounters I make my antagonists way ahead of time and just play it as it goes. I scale the overall power level to be comparable to the players but the actual plan for each antagonist is flavored for that character. It's then up to the players to do the work, and depending on the antagonist, he might be able to gather info about the players too and change his plans.
When story events happen, they happen because the story has already been driving towards those things happening. As a writer, you need objectivity. You need to play out plans from multiple perspectives and try to see things in the eyes of other characters. Characters act according to their wants and needs, and people's wants are what ultimately create the narrative of a good story.
Tuesday, March 25, 2014
How detailed should non-combat systems be?
One of the most common things I hear from other GM/DMs is that they feel that skill and non-combat systems in general should be less simulationist. Roleplaying is about roleplaying, not roll-playing, people tend to argue. I agree with the statement, but not the premise.
Tabletop RPGs are fundamentally evolutions of games like Cops n' Robbers or House, or perhaps even like playing with dolls or action figures. The difference is that they're actually games. Cops n' Robbers isn't really a game. You're playing it but it's not a game. There's no rules saying what you can't do. You can decide that you're a SWAT officer in that game if you want. You can even be Robocop. I did once, when I was a kid. He's a cop, right? So that's fair!
Of course, your friends think you're cheating when you play Robocop in Cops n' Robbers, but there are no rules saying you can't. Heck, there aren't even rules for how much Robocop or any cop can get shot before he goes down. That's really what separates RPGs from those kinds of games. Rules.
With that, we have really elaborate systems of how our heroes and villains can hurt each other in our games. I personally think that's both OK and lame at the same time. If you compare combat to an opposed check of any other kind, combat is generally of similar complexity. Card games, strategy games, social interactions or racing (foot, horse or otherwise) are similarly complex to crossing swords. In real life, combat ends much faster than these things, mostly because when you stab someone they usually go down right away. In other events you can come back from a deficit and still win.
Combat gets the complicated rules though and other skill checks get single opposed rolls even though in real life, we do way more opposed checks that aren't fighting than we do fighting. I've been in more fights than most people have, and the number of actual fistfights I've been in number less than 20. I've been in more "fights" that were sparring or whatever, but those don't really count. All my real fights were over in under 10 seconds (typically 2-3 punches), except for one that lasted a bit longer.
It seems sort of weird to put that much weight on combat and not put emphasis on non-combat too. If you have this really simulationist combat system (D&D 4e, I'm looking at you) and then have a really barebones skill system, that feels really tacked-on to me.
Let's put it like this. Your character is also a bassist and you jam out a performance. You want to know how good your character is. Some systems, particularly those without detailed skill rules, would simply say that your character just succeeds. Maybe you roll a stat check or something. So anyone with your dexterity (or charisma or whatever the GM decides is the stat for bass playing) could play the bass as good as you. If you're a bassist IRL that really feels hokey. I have much higher dexterity and charisma (he's missing half a finger and he's kind of a jerk) than my dad but I'd be damned if I can play any instrument as well as he can.
So you go a bit further and now you have skill ratings, and you roll your perform check for a set. Except that feels hokey too. Even if you've played Rock Band you'd know that even a single song has easy and hard parts and you might do some parts amazing (even possibly improv something really cool) and other parts you might make a slight error or a big error or whatever. And if you get into a bass battle where you're playing off the other guy and improv-ing stuff everywhere, that has just as much back and forth as something like combat. Probably more so because nobody is immediately dying.
Now being too simulationist is probably bad too, I mean we don't roll for angle of swing for our swords, angles of deflection or stuff like that. In the end it's opposed rolls or rolls against a target number, and really the difference in combat is stuff like movement, defense, or grappling that add to the complexity of fighting.
It's really not fair to the characters that play in non-combat roles (and anyone who has ever played a rogue knows my pain here) to say simply that they do something fine and be done with it. It's important to know what characters can do and what they can't, and how well they can do that thing. Opposed checks might be all that is needed, or we might not need to roll. But the option should be there, and there should be guidelines for what a good roll means.
Let me use a real example here. In our D&D campaign, we're playing E6 and our party is fighter/cleric/bard. I'm the bard. I'm int/charisma so I have a lot of skill points and I'm good at a lot of stuff. I have a huge amount of points invested in knowledge skills -- I don't have any in planes, geography, architecture, dungeoneering, or martial lore, but I can take 10 and get over 15 in any other check (and I can get 14 in the others due to a feat that lets me roll them as trained). The game gives guidelines for what various numbers mean. A 15 means something that's not common knowledge, but not especially rare. A 20 is privileged information, 25 is a secret no one wants to have known, and so on. Sometimes I ask a question and the DM knows the answer in the setting, but he isn't sure whether he wants me to know the information. A skill check says whether or not I know. Sometimes if I really need to know the answer, it means I'll need to do other forms of research like gather information checks or maybe even asking specific NPCs or library research. Knowing the party limits means I can work to find ways around those limits or get lucky and just know a tidbit of info.
The other part of this is that with a rule system for skill checks you really do need to have a guideline for what kind of roll equals what level of knowledge or ability a character has. D20 is pretty good about this. Every skill in the game says what you can do if you can roll X number. Other games don't do this and that is the big mistake. If you don't know what you can get with a roll of 50 (or whatever), the GM will just match the difficulty to the party's average skill. I was once in a D&D 3.5 game where there were DC30 spot checks to see things 15 feet away that were not actively hiding and in good light. What the hell?
Of course, sometimes you don't need to roll. I haven't rolled a disguise check since the first month or so of playing, because my bonus is so high and I've never impersonated anyone specific. Our DM just decided not to bother having me roll. Sometimes I don't have to roll diplomacy checks if I roleplay really well. If something is obviously trivial for a character or the DM really wants the character to know the info, we don't have to roll.
That's really the thing, though. There's always a time where you don't want players to roll because you want them to succeed, and rules don't stop you from letting that happen. They just provide context for all the blurry stuff in the middle.
Monday, March 24, 2014
Action economy in turn-based games
Turn-based games have a unique way of handling event timing. Instead of acting in real-time, turn-based games use actions to determine how many things a character can do in a given span of time. The action economy is something very difficult to work with, and any alterations to it can greatly skew the balance of a game.
The simplest type of action economy is single action rotations where each character gets one action per cycle of turns, and the characters go in order until everyone has taken one action, and then the cycle repeats. This basic concept is used by most turn-based games, although there might be some wiggle room with things like movement.
Anything that allows extra actions in this environment tends to be extremely powerful even if those things are very limited. In D&D 3.5 (and PF), there's a special type of action called a swift action that can be taken in addition to the standard or full-round action you normally get. These swift actions are often less significant than standard actions, but for the most part because they do something at all they are extremely powerful. Some swift actions are just as good as standard actions, but cost more resources (such as quickened spells).
Action denial also really impacts the action economy. Making an opponent lose an action by spending an action of your own is generally really powerful, but making an opponent lose more actions rapidly becomes ridiculous. Even two rounds of lost actions generally falls under the "save or die" category just because being two actions behind the curve means an otherwise balanced combat is now probably heavily skewed.
Clock-based turns are another way of handling the action economy. These systems have a number of problems, mostly due to initiative advantage rather than action economy. As an example, games like Final Fantasy Tactics or the semi clock-based PnP game Champions have faster characters acting first. Occasionally, faster characters also get more turns too if the encounter runs longer. Faster characters acting first AND getting more actions is generally bad, because their actions are, all things being equal, going to have the first chance of disabling an enemy. Even if the enemy isn't downed right away, they will win the battle in the long run simply by doing more things.
The only way a slower enemy can beat a stronger enemy in this type of economy is if their actions have more weight. Put simply, if they are more resilient/evasive than the faster opponent, they might shrug off enough of the opponent's power to get ahead. Likewise, if they are considerably stronger offensively they may be able to win as well. It really comes down to specific numbers, but going first AND having action advantage is generally very ridiculous.
The last type, and the type I like a lot, is some volume of actions that is measured during the turn order, with initiative a separate thing. Linking initiative with action economy is very bad for balancing because you have to adjust both to adjust one. The action volume is much nicer because you can make small tweaks or adjust it without doubling. Adding a single partial action to 4-6 base actions is a lot less impactful than adding the same sort of action to one. It makes balancing a lot easier because nudges aren't huge swings.
In the same vein are action point systems and I kind of view them the same way. If you have 6 action points and you gain 1, and it takes or 3 action points to do a full action, that extra 1 point might only mean a bit of extra movement or an extra small thing. Again, I really like that overall idea.
This is perhaps why I keep coming back to my homebrew Palladium games, because many of the issues with the system could be fixed with really aggressive balancing. Unfortunately you'd have to completely throw out most of the content (and the system has a lot of great content that was produced over the years) and make your own stuff, but I feel like the basic skeleton of the system is probably better than something like D&D where adding an extra action breaks everything.
Honestly I would publish my own homebrew Palladium content if they weren't so awful with their legal issues. The main issue with simply rebranding it as something else is really content. D&D has huge reams of material for their system. I used to have like, probably 40+ books for Palladium games worth of content. I'm good at rule systems and semi-OK at worldbuilding but producing enough specific things like gear, character classes, abilities, monsters/enemies and stuff like that is so daunting for me.
I dunno, I have time now so maybe I'll work more seriously at it.
The simplest type of action economy is single action rotations where each character gets one action per cycle of turns, and the characters go in order until everyone has taken one action, and then the cycle repeats. This basic concept is used by most turn-based games, although there might be some wiggle room with things like movement.
Anything that allows extra actions in this environment tends to be extremely powerful even if those things are very limited. In D&D 3.5 (and PF), there's a special type of action called a swift action that can be taken in addition to the standard or full-round action you normally get. These swift actions are often less significant than standard actions, but for the most part because they do something at all they are extremely powerful. Some swift actions are just as good as standard actions, but cost more resources (such as quickened spells).
Action denial also really impacts the action economy. Making an opponent lose an action by spending an action of your own is generally really powerful, but making an opponent lose more actions rapidly becomes ridiculous. Even two rounds of lost actions generally falls under the "save or die" category just because being two actions behind the curve means an otherwise balanced combat is now probably heavily skewed.
Clock-based turns are another way of handling the action economy. These systems have a number of problems, mostly due to initiative advantage rather than action economy. As an example, games like Final Fantasy Tactics or the semi clock-based PnP game Champions have faster characters acting first. Occasionally, faster characters also get more turns too if the encounter runs longer. Faster characters acting first AND getting more actions is generally bad, because their actions are, all things being equal, going to have the first chance of disabling an enemy. Even if the enemy isn't downed right away, they will win the battle in the long run simply by doing more things.
The only way a slower enemy can beat a stronger enemy in this type of economy is if their actions have more weight. Put simply, if they are more resilient/evasive than the faster opponent, they might shrug off enough of the opponent's power to get ahead. Likewise, if they are considerably stronger offensively they may be able to win as well. It really comes down to specific numbers, but going first AND having action advantage is generally very ridiculous.
The last type, and the type I like a lot, is some volume of actions that is measured during the turn order, with initiative a separate thing. Linking initiative with action economy is very bad for balancing because you have to adjust both to adjust one. The action volume is much nicer because you can make small tweaks or adjust it without doubling. Adding a single partial action to 4-6 base actions is a lot less impactful than adding the same sort of action to one. It makes balancing a lot easier because nudges aren't huge swings.
In the same vein are action point systems and I kind of view them the same way. If you have 6 action points and you gain 1, and it takes or 3 action points to do a full action, that extra 1 point might only mean a bit of extra movement or an extra small thing. Again, I really like that overall idea.
This is perhaps why I keep coming back to my homebrew Palladium games, because many of the issues with the system could be fixed with really aggressive balancing. Unfortunately you'd have to completely throw out most of the content (and the system has a lot of great content that was produced over the years) and make your own stuff, but I feel like the basic skeleton of the system is probably better than something like D&D where adding an extra action breaks everything.
Honestly I would publish my own homebrew Palladium content if they weren't so awful with their legal issues. The main issue with simply rebranding it as something else is really content. D&D has huge reams of material for their system. I used to have like, probably 40+ books for Palladium games worth of content. I'm good at rule systems and semi-OK at worldbuilding but producing enough specific things like gear, character classes, abilities, monsters/enemies and stuff like that is so daunting for me.
I dunno, I have time now so maybe I'll work more seriously at it.
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