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I’ve mentioned in a previous article that XCOM: Enemy Unknown’s basic mechanics are, with a few exceptions, easily transferable to the tabletop and would be a significant improvement over D&D mechanics for just about any edition you care to name. Today I’m going to talk about something else tabletop RPGs can learn from XCOM, although this time it’s going to be less of something where you can copy and paste the existing XCOM material in with only minimal changes and more something where a general design philosophy should be learned from, even though the specific implementation cannot reasonably be copied. Today, I’m going to talk about NPCs.

In XC:EU there is a steadily escalating stock of enemy aliens, with new aliens introduced each month. XCOM also gets new funding each month depending on performance so far, and research into alien technology to be replicated and construction of new facilities also takes time (and money, the accumulation of which takes time), so there is a constant arms race between XCOM and the aliens. Here we already see how the direct analogue to D&D breaks down. You could set up a specific campaign whose premise was an XCOM style arms race where the party is under pressure to level or gear up in response to escalating monster threat (I might actually do that sometime), but that’s a specific campaign premise, not something you can generalize to all of D&D.

That said, the way in which aliens become steadily more deadly as time goes on does map to NPCs getting stronger as level goes up. Rather than an arms race where players must level their characters fast enough to keep up with the NPCs, in most D&D games either the NPCs automatically level to match the players or else their levels are static and the players are expected to seek out encounters appropriate to their level.

What can and should be learned from XC:EU’s enemy design is the way the game changes as the power level goes up. As an example, let’s look at a series of three enemies, all from the base game, the sectoid, the muton, and the sectopod. These three enemies are your main bruiser enemy at tiers one, two, and three of the game respectively. You fight sectoids at the very beginning with regular body armor and mundane assault rifles, you fight mutons with carapace armor and laser rifles, and you fight sectopods with titan armor and plasma rifles. Or maybe you fall behind the gear curve and get murdered horribly. What’s important is that, although the sectoid has three health, the muton has eight, and the sectopod has a staggering twenty-five, that is not the beginning and the end of the differences between them.

Continue reading “XCOM Alien Design” →

New editions for D&D and things that wish they were D&D continue to come out at a steady pace. 5e is a few years old, and now Pathfinder is gearing up for a second edition. One thing that frequently gets changed between editions is some tinkering with the combat system. Hit charts gave way to THAC0 gave way to BAB, saves went from five to three to six, HP is constantly inflating, and so on.

And it’s weird to me that none of the more recent edition changes have drawn any inspiration from XCOM: Enemy Unknown, because those guys nailed it. Obviously you can’t just do a wholesale conversion because there’s a lot of guns and cover and so on in XC:EU, but the basics are really strong.

Continue reading “Turn-Based Squad Combat: XCOM Did It Right” →

I say “reminder” but really I’m reposting this because I am, for the first time ever, getting comments from more than one guy on my blog posts. Earlier I was mostly just leaving notices in case someone showed up, but now the tiniest inklings of an actual discussion are beginning to form. It’s cool. It also means those earlier notices are buried under like two hundred unrelated blog posts. So here’s what’s up with comments.

Real comments are still outnumbered about 2:1 by spam comments, which is why people who are posting for the first time need to have their comments approved. It’s not an Orwellian regime of only letting goodthink through, I seriously just check to see if a comment is spam and approve it if it’s not. You should be able to post automatically after you’ve had a single comment approved.

I should probably be figuring out how to flesh Guinevere out for another Merlin post, but I’m kind of tired and I’ve been wanting to do a post on this subject for a while: I have some of the weirdest search results sometimes. I expect this is common amongst anyone whose blog manages to achieve even the tiny amount of success I’ve managed, but the fact that it’s normal makes it weirder.

For example:

are there any official books about trielta hills

How did this person find my blog? It’s not a completely weird question to ask. The Trielta Hills are a location in Faerun, their thing is that they’re uniquely devoid of any lost wizard towers, ancient burial mounds, or lost kingdoms, which is supposed to be a “ha ha, we’ve got so many adventure locations that normalcy is weird!” but if you can’t find any location within 100 miles of where you’re sitting right now that wouldn’t make a great D&D adventure site then you live in a uniquely desolate area. It is indeed super weird that the Trielta Hills apparently have no notable history whatsoever.

Griping about dumb worldbuilding aside, though, how many pages of Google results did this guy scroll through to reach my blog? Must’ve been on like page twelve or something. Did I even mention the Trielta Hills in my Sphere of Influence posts?

“princess peach” “different plot”

When I wrote my weird Mario ramblings in 2017, I thought it was barely reaching the level of “better than nothing,” but apparently it’s actually bringing some amount of traffic in? I hope this guy found what he was looking for. My interpretation of the Mario canon is definitely a different plot.

5e op necromancer

Was this guy looking for an explanation of why Necromancers are OP? Or was he just looking for how to build an OP necromancer? The latter one isn’t exactly hard. You just prepare Animate Dead into every slot you can and call it a day. Sure, we can quibble a little bit over how often you should prepare Animate Objects instead, but really, do we care exactly how much we’re breaking the game after we’ve already broken it?

what awaken on line affinity are you

Dark. You are dark affinity, because everyone is dark affinity. Jason got there by killing two NPCs for power, and I guarantee you’ve done that at least once.

ffx11 love chaos

This guy was probably trying to type in FFXII and just failed super hard at it, but I like to imagine that this is actually a secret code used to communicate to Google that he is ready to join their chaos cult.

https://chamomilehasa.blog/

Apparently at least one person has reached this blog by Googling its exact url.

vampirer blog white wolf

It’s not weird that someone searching for a blog about White Wolf wound up running into my Beast: the Primordial article. It’s also not weird that they made a minor spelling error. It is kind of weird that I got three different views from the exact same misspelling.

https://chamomilehasa.blog/2017/07/28/remember-how-much-wrath-of-the-righteous-sucked/

This is the single most popular known search result leading people to this blog (which still makes it a minute amount of total traffic – almost all search results are unknown). The exact url of one of my articles. It’s a good article and all, but why do people enter this one into a search engine instead of the address bar by mistake so often?

amazon

Forget page twelve, this guy must’ve been on like page two hundred before my blog came up in a Google search for a term that refers to a massive online marketplace, a massive rain forest, and a famous tribe of warrior women with an association with the hero of a recently popular super hero movie.

I’ve sort of been doing the professional GM thing for a year-ish, but it was only about two months ago that I got at all serious about it, publishing my services page and figuring out how to advertise without being an irritating jackass about it. Those two months have seen in some ways explosive success, but if things do not continue to scale up, it cannot last.

To explain, I am now running about four or five games per week, constantly riding the limit of what I can handle. Even though I’ve found a far easier way to feed this blog than what I did during 2017, I feel just as busy, if not busier, with personal projects because of how much time is consumed running all these games. My GM’s Guide videos aren’t improving the way I’d hoped, considering I have very little experience making this kind of content and should therefore be able to rapidly improve as I learn basic concepts, because I have little time to experiment. When I do take the time to try something new, I have to use the result even if I don’t like it, even if it needed several more takes, because there’s no time for refinement or to re-record using my existing style. I’m not wrapping up Vestitas at the pace I’d hoped to. I should be nearly done with the Grey Harbor urbancrawl by now, but instead I’m hardly 10% of the way in. Work on side projects like Dark Lord and Dinosaur Riding Barbarians has completely halted as all effort goes to the GMing. I’m not writing as much as prose as I used to.

Despite having consumed a large chunk of my spare time and creative energy, I’m still making less than a quarter of what I’d need to quit my day job. I make less than $300/month right now, optimistic estimates for August suggest I may make $500/month if everyone who’s paid for at least two sessions (i.e. the first session to see if they like it, then at least one more afterwards) continues to do so, and I estimate the ceiling for this is between $1,000/month and $2,000/month. That upper bound is still not enough to live reasonably comfortably on even in a fairly low cost of living area, but it’s a pretty beastly fund for creative side projects. The annual cost for covers and editing on fiction is in the neighborhood of $2,000-$3,000, and speaking with map and token artists from Roll20, the cost on putting out an adventure to the Roll20 Marketplace is looking to be in the neighborhood of $1,000-$1,500. It would take only two or three months of effort to fund these projects if I can hit that ceiling.

If. The main question at this point is whether or not I can get away from running games for tiny groups of two or three people and start putting together larger groups of five or six, and if the $15 price point will be as consistently successful as my current $10 price point has been. If so, that could provide the money I need to pay for the art assets and editing I’ll require to get some high quality products on the market and generating passive income, enough to supplement the GMing and let me live off of creative work. It’s not an impossible plan, but there’s a lot of “ifs” (if I can scale upwards to $1,000/month, if my books or adventures are profitable, if this even lasts longer than a few months at all rather than burning out quickly), and this whole thing may end up being a big waste of a considerable amount of time.

But hey, after several years of effort, I’ve at least gotten as far as step 1) Convince a significant number of people to consistently pay me for my creative work in any amount.

This blog now has 40 followers. It remains unclear to me exactly how many of them are real human beings, but I figure even just drawing the attention of a significant number of bots is some kind of achievement. Even if 90% of my followers do turn out to be bots, they’re not my bots, they’re other people’s bots, who latched onto my blog because they estimate that doing so will make them look more human. That’s not great compared to real human followers, but it’s probably better than nothing.

Background music can make or break a scene in a tabletop RPG. It enhances the atmosphere and helps you control the pace.

You can’t just slap any old music onto the scene, though. Actually, you can, and even that will still probably set a better atmosphere than nothing. If you just set the Lord of the Rings trilogy soundtrack on shuffle, it’ll probably be fine. But we can do better. Here are three ways how, because the Rule of Three is my waifu.

First, pick a soundtrack based on the mood it sets, not the words in the title. Sometimes, when I’m fishing around for a soundtrack for a forest, or underwater, or a pirate battle, or some other situation, I’ll ask people on the internet, and they’ll answer with a song that has related words in the title. There’s using Wake Me Up Inside during a sequence where the party is trying to escape a dream world as a referential pun, which is fine and funny and the song only lasts 4 minutes and then the joke is over, but then there’s using Jesters of the Moon for a visit to a moon temple, because, y’know, it has “moon” in the title, so it must be appropriate music for all things to do with moons, right? Or they’ll suggest Leafblade Woods for a wood elf ambush, because it comes up when you type “wood elf music” into YouTube. Jesters of the Moon has a strong circus vibe and should be limited to actual clown- or carnival-themed situations. Leafblade Woods is calm and sedate and is just as usable for a temple, an underwater journey, or a wise and sagely character, none of which have anything to do with leaves, blades, or woods. What matters is the music’s mood, not the words in its title.

Second, use video game music. There’s exceptions to this rule, of course, but it’s generally a good one to stick to. Video game music is designed to blend into the background and be looped for 30+ minutes. It doesn’t demand so much attention that it grows tedious after you’ve heard the same thing over and over again, which means instead of finding a four hour playlist of material in case the players stay in the cave the whole session, you can just loop the Overlord tower underground track, and after the first few loops (provided you keep the volume low) it will become easy to ignore instead of agitating. They also almost never have lyrics. Some players find lyrics distracting, and you don’t want half your group muting you because they can’t focus with Evanescence shouting about their inner demons’ narcolepsy.

Third, moderate intensity. Having maximally intense music playing in the background all the time will not make your game more epic, it will either fatigue your players or else they’ll just tune it out entirely and you’ll lose your ability to affect the mood. You can’t use Nobunaga’s theme to punch up the intensity for a final boss if you’ve been looping it in the background for the last three hours. Even for players who are perfectly happy to listen to that or other tracks of similar intensity for four hours straight, keeping things at that level means you are out of notches to crank up to for your finale. There have been enough video games with enough final bosses that every encounter in your campaign could have the likes of One-Winged Angel and Guardando nel Buio playing in the background, but while you can rank these kinds of tracks in order of most to least intense, the differences between them are minute enough that switching from one to another barely makes a difference. The utility of tracks like Final Fantasy XII’s boss theme is not that you can’t find something more exciting for your first boss, it’s that you can find something more exciting for your last boss.

As of earlier today, this blog has had more likes, views, and visitors in 2018 than it did in 2017. This despite the fact that I blogged for ten months in 2017 and have only had six and a half in 2018. The numbers are still pretty small overall, of course, I’m still just a random guy with a blog not all that different from every other random guy with a blog, but hey, it’s still progress. Thanks to everyone who read for helping make this small achievement happen.

I watch a lot of video game content on YouTube and I’m pretty sure I’ve never talked about it before, so let’s list off some good ones now.

Mark Brown runs relatively short videos about specific game design topics. He doesn’t have a specific theme, but if you play all and put his channel on shuffle, you’ll get a lot of interesting ideas thrown at you. Since his videos are usually under twenty minutes, he’s great for listening to as a quick cooldown between doing one task and another without accidentally losing the entire afternoon. Provided you remember to turn auto-play off.

Raycevick mainly covers shooters, a genre I don’t play much of. He usually does long analyses of specific games or series’, and apparently was one of those stereotypical fifteen year old Halo/Call of Duty fanboys before growing up and becoming smart. This gives him a unique perspective and ability to explain what these kinds of games do right.

Joseph Anderson was originally that guy that reviewed Souls games but later broke out into other games and genres. He’s reviewed everything from Subnautica to Super Mario Odyssey, although in fairness Odyssey did have that one Dark Souls level out of nowhere. Like Raycevick, he mainly reviews single games in extreme detail. His upload schedule is slower, but I find his encounter-by-encounter reviews of games like Bloodborne to be helpful for figuring out how to design my tabletop encounters. Obviously, a lot of the things he discusses don’t map 1:1 to a turn-based game and efforts to make Dark Souls RPGs usually end in failure for not understanding that, but there are some things that do translate well.

Summoning Salt holds some kind of Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out speedrun world record. In celebration of achieving that record, he made a video about the world record progression from the game’s release to the moment he took the throne, and his YouTube channel has been about speedrun histories ever since. He shares Joseph Anderson’s glacial upload pace, but I found his archive fun to binge.

I can’t promise that my enjoyment of Spoiler Warning isn’t because I first started watching it when I was about 19 or 20 and had never seen or heard this kind of analysis before (except in written form, when members of that show’s cast blogged about it in a similar way). Assuming my rose-colored glasses haven’t totally impaired my judgement, though, Spoiler Warning is a let’s play series (peppered with some other stuff, especially as time went on) in which the hosts are mainly thoughtful, analytical types. Although sometimes that thoughtful analysis is used for evil.

EDIT: Due to an error in scheduling, this post showed up at midnight July 6th instead of noon. Fuck it, I’m leaving it.

Saints Row to Grand Theft Auto comparisons are obvious and thus played out. We’re doing one anyway. The original Saints Row is probably the most straightforward GTA clone to ever hit the market (and get noticed). While Mafia responded to GTA’s success by making a similar game, but set in the 30s and featuring a heavier emphasis on realism, Saints Row was almost exactly the same in era, tone, and gameplay as what was then the current state of the GTA series. It was a blunderbuss assault on modern American culture that valued cynicism above everything else. In the attitude of GTA 3, Vice City, and San Andreas, everything was a corrupt farce.

Saints Row had the same philosophy. Freckle Bitch’s was a perverse reimagining of Wendy’s in which a sultry, “all grown up” mascot in a bikini coquettishly flirted over radio ads and batted her eyelashes from the sign over a restaurant that sold nothing but double entendres. No effort was made to establish why Wendy’s was singled out for this alleged hypocrisy between their wholesome facade and the crass, adult reality that apparently lay just underneath. Really, I’d expect a cynical takedown of the fast food industry to focus more on working conditions, the slave labor in their supply chain, the health problems they cause, or the conditions of the American beef industry that are so terrible that people will accuse you of being a vegan hippie just for describing them. Instead, Wendy gets some curves and a naughty streak, which we are to understand is indicative of…something. I dunno. I don’t think there’s an actual criticism underneath this. It’s just perversion of Americana for the Hell of it.

I bring up Freckle Bitch’s in particular for the disconnect between the thing it’s criticizing and the criticism leveled, but if the criticisms in other parts of the game are better, it’s only because they’ve managed not to lose the substance of a parody completely while they copied the surface elements. Forgive and Forget is a mercenary religious authority offering forgiveness for a fee. Friendly Fire is a proud supporter of Americans’ second amendment rights to own sniper rifles and rocket launchers. Technically Legal is a strip club whose name seems to be poking fun at the fetishization and subsequent exploitation of youth, not that the series presents this as wrong so much as just kinda funny. It makes fun of it the way you make fun of MMO mobs for being sociopathically indifferent to the slaughter of their comrades whenever your level is high enough to shrink your aggro bubble down to near non-existence. Not as an actual problem or anything, just as something to snark at for a giggle.

This whole attitude was directly imported from GTA 3, Vice City, and San Andreas. It was a juvenile sort of cynicism in which making fun of things was an end unto itself. You didn’t have to have an actual point to your sarcasm. The goal was just to be sarcastic. This could be grating, but as a backdrop for the wacky mayhem of an open world crime game, it worked fine. Who cares if the cynical sarcasm was really landing, you’re tearing through the streets of Stilwater looking for Westside Rollerz cars to blow up with a rocket launcher.

Continue reading “Saints Row, Mafia, and GTA” →