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Darkest Dungeon seems almost like it was designed with me in mind. It has a grim atmosphere and a setting that is at least slightly non-standard, going for a 17th century vibe over your standard 15th century high fantasy affair, using Lovecraftian reimaginings of standard D&D monsters like skeletons and orcs to populate its dungeons. It lets the imagination run wild with who your heroes are, using a few stray lines of characterization to provide an outline for the player to fill in, creating a personal attachment to them. Being defeated has an actual cost, which means if you mess up, you can keep playing and let that defeat be part of your story, instead of constantly reloading, backing up and retelling the story over and over again until you land on the version where you are never once defeated, an invincible juggernaut. The sting of defeat is enough to make it a real setback, but not so steep that you end up just reloading to get around it because your whole run is doomed (Darkest Dungeon also makes an effort to prevent save scumming at all, but like any piece of software that runs on a machine you own, you can edit the save file to be whatever you want if you’re committed enough).

Moral choices that aren’t tied directly to a karma meter, but instead just ask players to consider their own opinion on a moral quandary, are also something I really like. It’s also something that people claim Darkest Dungeon has. But they’re wrong. Anyone who’s played Darkest Dungeon even halfway through knows they’re wrong. Now in fairness, Darkest Dungeon is big and you can play a lot of it without getting halfway through. I don’t blame people for coming to a conclusion about the game after “only” ten or twelve hours of gameplay. That said, being that this blog is read by the entire gaming community without exception, I am taking it upon myself to put this rumor to rest.

Continue reading “Darkest Dungeon Heroes Are Not Cannon Fodder” →

Those of you who know your pagan calendars will know that by the time this post goes live, we will be closer to Litha than to Beltane, and that I just didn’t post a Beltane update. The reason for this is mainly that from Ostara at the end of March to Beltane at the beginning of May, I didn’t get a whole lot done. This isn’t entirely my fault, because due to certain events I would’ve expected to be less prolific than normal anyway, but it’s still mostly my fault, because what hiccups and interruptions did occur do not really account for nearly the drop in output that occurred. This is ultimately not a huge deal. Creative output waxes and wanes a little sometimes, and April was a bad month for me. It does mean, however, that I didn’t have much to report at Beltane except disappointment. I am behind on my word count, not finishing up Vestitas on schedule, and the only upside is that Petals and Thorns is recycling parts of Project Regina.

One of the rules I established for myself while clearing my backlog is that if a new project has significant enough overlap with the old one that one could plausibly seem like a retread of the other, it’s fine to call them actually the same project. The amount of recycling going on between the original Project Regina and Petals and Thorns is limited enough that it’s a huge stretch to say that Petals and Thorns is just resetting Project Regina to the beginning and starting over rather than its own thing with a couple of elements in common, but Project Regina is also for an audience that turned out to be deeply toxic over the past year and a half, so I don’t care. Even then, though, most of the work on Petals and Thorns happened after Beltane during May.

One thing that happened on the actual day of Beltane, May 1st, is that I started poking around with Habitica. It’s not the first “gamify your life” thing that’s ever been tried, but it’s working better for me than most have. I think a significant part of it is that you have HP to lose if you miss daily habits, which gets incentives working both ways. I’m trying to avoid ever running out of HP (the penalty for doing so is not actually a big deal, I’m just trying to avoid it on the principle of getting as far as I can on Iron Man mode, as it were), which means I get XP and damage on the boss I’m fighting for ticking off a daily habit successfully and lose HP if I miss one. It’s all on the honor system, of course. I can claim to have done something I haven’t, or even cheat more subtly by giving myself vague goals that are easy to check off with five minutes of effort because technically I still tried. Habitica has no way of checking whether your goals are SMART or VAPID. Obviously, the secret to making things like Habitica work is to not cheat, even though it’s easy. So far it’s working for me, but some people might find that a system so easy to fool isn’t a satisfying reward system. My subconscious is wired to recognize ‘cheating to victory’ and ‘doing the normal way’ as separate accomplishments, so the first being dead easy doesn’t cheapen the other, but not everyone’s will be like that.

I talk about the aesthetics of play a lot these days. Today, I’m going to be using them as a lens with which to analyze two indie games, those being One Finger Death Punch and Jydge. Jydge is a twin stick shooter in which you are a jydge, an android law enforcement officer empowered to sentence criminals to death on the spot in a dystopian megacity where the letter U is apparently prohibited. One Finger Death Punch is a game in which you click the left mouse button to attack to your left and the right mouse button to attack to your right, and is one of those minimalist games with surprising amounts of depth.

Both of these games rely heavily on challenge to get their engagement out of the player. Jydge has reasonably strong art direction and a good soundtrack, but you aren’t gonna buy this game just to look at it. One Finger Death Punch harkens back to the early 2000s browser game aesthetic by having multi-colored stick figures exclusively, so they’re definitely not trading on sense pleasure. There are occasional moments in that game when enemies are coming at you so fast that you can string together combos so quickly in a way that just feels good, but half of that is the challenge-derived satisfaction of getting through a storm of baddies unscathed in the first place. Both games are basically devoid of any kind of expression, discovery, or fellowship, their narrative is either very light (for Jydge) or also completely absent (for Death Punch), they’re pretty light on fantasy, and to the extent that they have abnegation, it’s only in that abnegation can set in when the challenge fails to ramp up fast enough and things begin to get grindy.

Which brings me to my point: Both of these games sell themselves on challenge first and foremost, but One Finger Death Punch isn’t very challenging. Certainly the game can get tricky on Grandmaster difficulty, and maybe I would’ve found Master difficulty challenging if I’d been able to start there, or skip there after warming up on just a few levels of Student. You can’t, though. In order to reach a new difficulty level, you must complete the previous difficulty level all the way to the end. By the time I reached Master I was familiar enough with the game that the increased speed was no problem. It wasn’t until Grandmaster that I started regularly running a real risk of actually losing a stage, although I expect a lot of the Master levels could’ve given me that feeling had I reached them without first having honed my skills on tons and tons of Student levels which veeeery slowly raised the default speed.

Death Punch does have a mechanic whereby speed increases automatically with every victory and decreases when defeated, but all this means is that I played Student difficulty almost exclusively at 140%+ speed, and when I lost a level I wasn’t able to try again at that speed. When I replayed the level, it had become significantly easier, and I was able to beat it in one attempt easily. So even though One Finger Death Punch has a mechanic to raise the speed to match player skill, it sabotages that mechanic by giving the player almost no control over it. If I want to play Student at about 140% speed constantly, I can’t. When defeated, I’m knocked back down something like 20% (you lose a lot of speed when defeated at far over the default 100%) and must play several easy levels to build it back up. Remember that One Finger Death Punch is a game that is about nothing else but challenge! There’s no story to see or game world to explore which overly difficult gameplay might lock me out of. The gameplay is the experience, and after going to the trouble to program in variable difficulty in two different ways, the game prevents the player from actually setting the difficulty to the level they want.

Jydge isn’t quite the total antithesis of this, but it’s definitely an example of doing things much better. Jydge has eighteen levels, each with four levels of difficulty, and each of those with one main objective and two side objectives. The side objectives can usually be completed without completing the main objective, although certain objectives like “don’t be seen” or “take no damage” require you to complete the main objective by their nature. Still, the idea is at the very least that you’ll usually equip one set of weapons and gear to complete one side objective, then another set to complete the other (on low difficulty and early levels, you can often complete all three objectives in one run with whatever gear is available, but that’s just because the objectives are all pretty easy). The lowest difficulty is so easy that anyone reasonably familiar with video games can beat not only every main objective, but probably every side objective. The highest difficulty is extremely difficult, especially for some of the side objectives like making sure there’s no property damage – whether it’s from your weapons or your opponents’. I’m a completionist for many games, and have taken that mindset to both of these two, but I have been forced to concede that about a third of the objectives on the highest difficulty just aren’t within my ability to achieve.

This broad spectrum of difficulty unlocks as you play through the original levels. New levels are unlocked by completing a certain total number of objectives across all difficulty levels, so players are encouraged both to try out new playstyles to get the low-hanging fruit on lower difficulties and pick only the higher difficulty objectives that suit the playstyle they prefer. It’s not quite “all difficulties are unlocked from the word go, play as easy or as hard as you like,” which seems like the obvious ideal to me, but it’s pretty close, since the objective requirements for unlocking new levels are low enough that you don’t have to spend much time in higher difficulties if you don’t want to, but the higher difficulties are still there, and as soon as you unlock them they’re available on every level you’ve reached so far. It also helps that the challenge ramps up fast enough that I hit the point where I felt like I was being forced to learn and adapt as a player much more often than in One Finger Death Punch, and again – that’s pretty much all there is to these games. Other forms of engagement exist, but not here.

Things like this are why understanding the aesthetics of play can be helpful to designing a game. If you’re going to make your game all about challenge, you should probably make sure that it’s actually challenging, and not just occasionally or towards the very end like in One Finger Death Punch, but very frequently and starting from early in the game, like in Jydge.

One of the most common search terms by which people reach my blog is “amazon”. Considering that there is an Amazon rainforest and associated river, the Amazon tribe of warriors, plus Amazon the giant, moderately evil delivery corporation, it’s weird that people searching for “amazon” find my blog, which I don’t think even has any articles that use that word very prominently. I think I may have linked to Amazon pages for some books I referenced once or something. Who’s searching for “amazon” and finding my blog instead of any of the far more famous and far more relevant hits for that term? Is it the nomadic robot who accessed my site a hundred times a day several days in a row, each day from a different country?

Vampire: The Last Night is a playtest scenario for Vampire: the Masquerade’s…fifth edition? Whichever one Chronicles of Darkness is working on that Paradox isn’t. Quick clarification there, when White Wolf keeled over, a bunch of its most committed and not necessarily most competent fans picked up the pieces as Chronicles of Darkness, while the main IP was sold off to first one Nordic company and then another. The current owners of the IP are Paradox Interactive, and they are producing a glossy art book sort of game that may or may not be atrocious, sort of picking up the old White Wolf torch of having fluff and art that’s good enough that you don’t even care that the mechanics are a broken mess. I want to believe, but the previews don’t look promising even as an art book.

We’re not talking about that book today, though, because it isn’t out yet and it’s not like this blog sells itself on being ahead of the curve. No, we’re talking about a Chronicles of Darkness scenario from like 2014 or something. Details are scarce, because this shit was so awful that they took it off the internet and it now survives only as a .pdf passed around the internet. My acquisition of the .pdf was, of course, of utterly impeccable legality, but I’m given to understand that most owners of it did so through the unthinkable act of piracy. What terrible times we live in.

EDIT: Turns out (according to the impeccably legal source of the .pdf, which is basically the only source of information on this I can find now) that this is actually a playtest packet for the thing that Paradox is outsourcing, not whatever the Hell Chronicles of Darkness is getting up to, which means my opinion on the final product of that new VtM art book coming out has gone from “signs are bad, but there could still be a surprising reversal of fortune in the cards” to “abandon hope, all ye who enter here.”

The first thing I double-checked on this was its authors. We’re looking at Martin Elricsson and Ken Hite, with Karim Muammar on editing. The reason I checked this is to confirm that none of them were Matt MacFarland, the pedophile who wrote the conspicuously pro-abuse Beast: the Primordial. The reason I felt the need to double check this before beginning a full-on analysis will become clear later.

Continue reading “Vampire: The Last Night is Terrible” →

I usually make a point of not writing a “someone is wrong on the internet” article unless I’ve been in or at least observed two different online conversations in which someone asserted something dumb, that way I can be reasonably confident that this is a thing that some subsection of the internet believes in rather than just a specific guy who is crazy or suffering from some very specific misunderstanding. In this case, it was actually one conversation in which three different people all made the same mistake, so this may be even less generally applicable than these usually are, but Hell, at least I’m posting more or less on schedule again.

Today’s subject is the different between history and sciences like physics and biology and so forth, and why applying the standards for one to the other is dumb. History is the study of things that are over. Wars that have already been fought, technological revolutions that have already altered society, people who are already dead, that sort of thing. History is usually thought to begin (and current events end) somewhere between 10-25 years ago which means sometimes it is possible to go out and get brand new primary sources by going and talking to a guy who was there, but generally speaking the events have passed mostly or completely from living memory, and in any case the memories of an event that happened decades ago are significantly less reliable than the memories of an event recorded a week after the event occurred.

Huge swaths of history are cobbled together from a handful of eyewitness accounts supplemented by government-sponsored historical narratives that might plausibly include entire campaigns that were fabricated, especially if they were written long after the events allegedly took place. The incidence of literacy throughout most of history was very low and is inversely correlated to how durable the means of recording a personal diary are – when people used near-impervious clay tablets to write things down, almost nobody could write, and when lots of people knew how to write, everyone was using flimsy paper notebooks that fall apart after just half a century. If your entire record of a battle is the propaganda of state media on one or both sides, eyewitness reports of a few dozen people who were there, some mass graves, and a bunch of spent shells, then odds are excellent that this will always be your entire record of the battle.

In biology, if you have anecdotal evidence that a horse and a donkey can produce fertile offspring, you can go double check if that’s true, and if so, how often, because horses and donkeys are still a thing. Therefore, if you have anecdotal evidence that horses and donkeys can produce fertile offspring, that’s considered insufficient in the specific field of biology not because anecdotal evidence is worthless, but because it’s inferior to other, stronger kinds of evidence that we can go out and gather. It’s not that using anecdotal evidence is some original sin that automatically makes an argument wrong, it’s that modern science has easy access to more reliable methods, so there’s generally no reason but laziness not to employ those methods rather than calling anecdotal evidence good enough and moving on.

In history, if you have anecdotal evidence that women warriors fought alongside their men in iron age Balkan tribes, that’s all she wrote (for the curious: no, this was not the actual subject of the argument that inspired this post). If you dismiss the reports as “anecdotal,” you have not exposed your opponent as a propagandist using flimsy evidence to uphold their political narrative, you have exposed yourself as failing to understand how history works. If we have a couple of anecdotes saying that something happened one way and not any compelling evidence to say that it happened another, then that first way is our best guess as to how things were and we have no idea when we’ll get any better evidence. We collect a lot of data these days, and we store a lot of it on the internet, so when dealing with science or current events it is often the case that good stats are available with just 30 minutes of research. In history, we have whatever stats the ancients left for us. That gives us a lot on crop harvests and basically nothing on murder rates, military effectiveness, and self-reported rate of happiness in [insert extinct civilization here].

On a related note, this is why fields like physics and chemistry tend to see a lot of refining, where what we believed before was basically correct but new experiments have revealed how it’s wrong in some edge cases, or there’s more nuance and detail than we had previously anticipated, or whatever. Turns out “atoms” aren’t actually atomic at all, they’re made out of neutrons and protons and so on, but atoms are still real. On the other hand, history is more prone to things like “that thing we thought was true has turned out to be a complete fabrication by the Ancient Egyptian government which we believed because we didn’t have anything else to go off of until a recent archaeological dig turned up some Hittite records.” Like, it’s true that history’s lower standards of evidence leave the field more prone to having the current consensus on a particular time period completely overturned by new evidence, but that’s true of all history and scoffing at historians for relying on anecdotal evidence isn’t being skeptical or insightful, it’s being an idiot contrarian.

Extra Credits has an episode on the aesthetics of play, and I’ve written on the subject in my GM’s guide, where I refer to them as “elements of fun” because that apparently made more sense to me at the time and I’m too lazy to change it now. In both places, it is recommended that a designer (including a game master designing a specific campaign, regardless of whose engine he’s using) focus on 2-4 elements in order to deliver an experience focused strongly on those elements, and avoid diluting focus by trying to be good at all eight simultaneously.

But okay, let’s say you’ve got your three (ish) aesthetics picked out. How do you balance between them? And for that matter, should you always be making trade-offs between those three and all eight others?

Continue reading “Meditations on the Aesthetics of Play” →

Petals and Thorns is an adventure I designed as a demonstration of my ability to someone looking into starting a professional GMing service. It wasn’t the first time I GM’d for money at all, but it is the first time I got a decent amount of money for it. I’ve since expanded that original adventure to a full six adventure arc and am currently investigating running it professionally on roll20. A lot of my creative energy has gone to that the past two or three weeks, and in the interests of having something to feed the blog, here are some of the summaries for various threats. Mild early-game spoilers for Petals and Thorns below the break, and I am hoping to stream the campaign at some point in the next few months, although I don’t yet have concrete plans to do so, so anyone’s guess if anything will come of it.

I hesitate to include the goblinoids in this, mostly because part of their premise is that hobgoblins and bugbears are recent creations of a rogue wizard. I don’t generally like to put my players in the position of pretending not to be familiar with a staple like the hobgoblin or bugbear. I am considering having the fruits of his experiment be based around a more obscure or entirely original goblin variant, with the hobs and bugbears being just goblinoids he recruited to his cause the same as he did the goblins, but that would require me to rebalance his forces around the presence of the new goblinoid variant and I’m not sure I want to bother.

Continue reading “Threats of Ramshorn” →

As part of a Roll20 campaign I’ve been working on, I have written up an ecology for a dungeon full of giant spiders. As part of the same campaign, I sifted through several dozen pictures of actual spiders to make tokens, and that night ever time I closed my eyes I saw a huntsman.

Continue reading “Giant Spider Ecology” →

Every patient gamer has that one game. That one game that killed hype for them forever. The one that proved that no matter what ambitions a game set out with, no matter how sincere the dedication of its creators, it is simply impossible for any game to be more than a relatively minor iteration on what comes before.

Rutskarn’s moment, for example, was Oblivion, recounted here:

I remember how the official forums felt. People began to play the imagined perfect game in their heads long before boxes of the real one hit shelves. Everyone had their characters all planned out, everyone had their backstory written up–people were hatching assassination plots and writing fanfiction about them. I remember the tone of thread titles: “What’s the first thing you’re going to do when you’re out of the dungeon?” “What’s your character’s motivation?” “What’s your build going to be like?” People made a lot of detailed plans. Basically all of them would turn out to be impossible.

Mine was Guild Wars 2. Sure, I’d been suckered in by Spore and come to regret it, but I hadn’t become jaded enough from just that one experience. Spore was sold on the strength of just one tech demo, a tech demo that showed off basic features of one stage of the game. Sure, the character creator was great, and when it shipped it was about as good as advertised, even, but the gameplay attached to that character creator was rubbish. And I should’ve seen that coming, because what gameplay had we seen in the Spore demo, even the really good one, the one that got the hype train going before they switched to the cartoon art style? Basic combat and a mechanic for spawning the next generation of your creature.

Guild Wars 2’s hype train was different. It wasn’t just one amazing system and the vague and ultimately empty promise that there would be a rest of the game, too, there was a vision for a complete game. The dynamic event system, the beautiful art direction, the team that took its time, always making visible progress but never committing to a release date, and the simple fact that Guild Wars had been amazing had me convinced even more deeply than Spore that this was going to work. I followed every update. I discussed the game on the forums. I became such a regular that the nickname I gave to the (otherwise unnamed) Deep Sea Dragon is used to this day. I was taken in. I was hype.

Continue reading “The Stirring of Long Dead Instruments” →