tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4255333413798099412024-02-08T11:11:36.986-06:00When the stars threw down their spearsAnd watered heaven with their tearscircadianwolfhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13863959331740613989noreply@blogger.comBlogger84125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-425533341379809941.post-15450063475659586032009-10-14T16:00:00.003-05:002009-10-14T16:14:15.908-05:00Freedom in Mirror's EdgeRemember when I posted <a href="http://withtheirtears.blogspot.com/2009/07/flow-in-mirrors-edge.html">part one of two</a> of an essay on <span style="font-style: italic;">Mirror's Edge</span>? That's okay, I'm pretty sure no one else does either.<br /><br /><center><img title="Mirror's Edge" src="http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v215/jsRedwall/mirrorsedge2.jpg" alt="Mirror's Edge" width="500" height="250" /></center><br />The inclusion of a story at all in <span style="font-style: italic;">Mirror's Edge</span> feels a bit unnecessary and problematic; especially in its execution, flabby and perfunctory, it makes the game feel like any other unimpressive video game, plot and cutscenes tacked on because they're expected but not with any real effort put into them.<br /><br />Yet the idea itself, of an underground struggle against a corporate police state, fits well thematically for a game whose central inspiration is free running. It seems an appropriate marriage of plot and mechanic, of story and mechanic, in the traditional sense of those terms, both using the theme of freedom and oppression.<br /><br /><br /><center><img title="Freedom Fighters" src="http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v215/jsRedwall/freedomfighters.jpg" alt="Freedom Fighters" width="500" height="250" /></center><br />It's a tall order, though, to make a game about freedom. Plenty of games have had a "fight for freedom" as their plot--any World War II game, usually; <span style="font-style: italic;">Freedom Fighters</span>, of course; and so many others--but most of the time the plot is, again, perfunctory, an afterthought, and therefore no one expects any actual connection between that plot theme and the gameplay. In <span style="font-style: italic;">Mirror's Edge</span>, though, the connection is much more explicit. A promise is, in some way, being made: as much as this is a game about flow, it is a game about freedom. And, as much as it fails to actually flow, and for much of the same reasons, the game fails to actually be free.<br /><br />On the large-scale structural level, the game's linear and fixed series of levels, coupled with linear and fixed plot advancement, clearly doesn't even have a pretense of player freedom. On that level the game is a movie, just like so many other games: there are characters, they talk to each other in shitty movie dialogue, they fight or run or die, and players get to watch, without any choice or influence.<br /><br />But this could be forgiven despite the game's promise of freedom if the game offered freedom on a smaller scale, the scale of the gamespace of the levels and the mechanics themselves--that's the more important part of the game, obviously, and what has much more impact on the thematic effect of a game. But of course there isn't any more freedom on this level, either: most sequences have one or at most two or three paths through them, with one branch or another offering little to no impact on future gameplay, and in the constant adrenaline rush pace of the game you don't have the opportunity to think much about your options anyway.<br /><br /><center><img title="Grand Theft Auto 3" src="http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v215/jsRedwall/gta.jpg" alt="Grand Theft Auto 3" width="500" height="250" /></center><br />The obvious contrary here is to open world games like <span style="font-style: italic;">Grand Theft Auto</span> or, well, pretty much any game from the past two years, as open world is currently quite in vogue. <span style="font-style: italic;">Mirror's Edge </span>would actually make sense as an open world game, though, giving players something closer to the actual experience of free running, which is as much about breaking social norms, experimentation, and finding new ways to move as it is about looking cool.<span style="font-style: italic;"> Mirror's Edge</span> allows the player to do none of these, in fact enforces the opposite of this: you must follow the rigid, strict path set by the developers, or you fail. Experimentation is punished, not rewarded. You are not free.<br /><br />But even if <span style="font-style: italic;">Mirror's Edge</span> had been an open world game, wandering around the rooftops of the city <span style="font-style: italic;">Crashdown<span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-style: italic;">-</span></span></span></span>style and taking conflicting missions from various characters, there would still be the mechanics themselves, conventional--nowadays perhaps even better referred to as old-school--platformer mechanics that are brutally strict, with very little valence between "successful jump" and "death". Higher jumps, true, have a further dimension of whether you successfully roll with the landing, thereby avoiding damage and keeping your momentum, or simply hit the ground hard, leaving yourself limping; but this is still just another aspect of "right" or "wrong", "succeed" or "fail", binaries of morality/efficiency that are antithetical to any discourse of freedom.<br /><br />If <span style="font-style: italic;">Mirror's Edge</span>, or any game, wants to truly be about freedom, its base mechanics need to reflect that, and that means more results than simply variances on a scale of positive to negative. That means that even the solutions of its platforming near-contemporaries--time reversal, quickload, etc.--would be just as ineffective: they might be more forgiving of mistakes, but they still enforce a strict difference between mistakes and the "right way" to play the game.<br /><br /><center><img title="Sim City 3000" src="http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v215/jsRedwall/simcity.jpg" alt="Sim City 3000" width="500" height="250" /></center><br />What's needed, really, are mechanics in which the different results of player choices are not merely "better" or "worse" ways of playing, not mechanics that can be optimized to achieve the most efficient completion. I'm not talking the "morality scale" endemic to (Western) RPGs, either, as that's just another binary system that confines players to developer expectations. Rather I'm talking about something like <span style="font-style: italic;">Sim City</span>, something that's more toy than game, where rather than a structured game with set goals and win conditions the player is presented with a model of a world and a set of ways to interact with that model and then set loose to do what they will.<br /><br />You can still have "better" and "worse" choices within particular subsystems--that is, you can still have ways that make your city poor or rich, or jumps that lead to your death--but the point is that navigating those subsystems is not the core of the game. They are important, sure, but only in that you have to understand how to navigate those systems in order to achieve your own goals, decided by yourself, and that those goals determine what systems you need to understand, and how you need to use them.<br /><br />I realize that this sounds very, very far from the conception of <span style="font-style: italic;">Mirror's Edge</span>. And in some ways it is--but not in the important ways, I think. This could still be a game based on free running--and now it would be a game that is actually about free running, about freedom and experimentation and defying expectations and making your own discoveries, rather than just another linear platformer with an unfulfilled promise of something better.circadianwolfhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13863959331740613989noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-425533341379809941.post-90458395476798846542009-08-18T17:38:00.003-05:002009-08-18T17:47:38.041-05:00Man's worldWe live in a world defined by the heterosexual masculine viewpoint. That is, the vast majority of our world is constructed with reference to the position of a heterosexual man (usually white in the West). This is institutionalized sexism on the level of unconsciousness for most, and a terrible thing for those who don't fall into that categorization because they are forced to privilege others' viewpoints, but it's also a terrible thing for those who do fall into that categorization because they aren't. (Yes, it's a very different terrible, and obviously less damaging, but I think it's worth mentioning nonetheless.)<br /><br />Sotomayor's controversial statement about a woman's experience was fundamentally correct precisely because of this paradigm. Precisely because we live in a straight man's world, and anyone who isn't a straight man is forced to learn what it means to be a straight man, think from the position of a straight man, in addition to their own. Women (mostly) are very aware of their status as (sexual) objects to straight men; they are indoctrinated from brith into their own objectification, and those who oppose it are nonetheless very familiar with. Straight men, on the other hand, have no such forced perspectives. They know their own and no other. Even if they try to seek out alternatives, it is very difficult to find anything, because the world is so dominated by their positional paradigm.<br /><br />Or simply, everyone would be better off in a more open world.circadianwolfhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13863959331740613989noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-425533341379809941.post-56719778708903240392009-08-15T14:15:00.000-05:002009-08-15T14:15:00.271-05:00Plasmids, Objectivism, and Mind Control: Bioshock and Postmodernism<span style="font-style: italic;">I wrote this paper for a class on postmodern fiction last year. I'm not sure how interesting it will actually be to anyone else--it references the class fairly significantly, and it's not a particularly unique or new analysis of </span>Bioshock<span style="font-style: italic;">, but I thought I'd put it up here anyway. Massive spoilers for all of </span>Bioshock<span style="font-style: italic;">, so be warned.</span><br /><br />The first video games were developed in the 1950s, but it was not until the 1970s that they became a commercial enterprise and not until the past decade that they have begun to receive critical recognition. It is perhaps not coincidental that postmodernism—both the literary genre and cultural phenomenon—arose at the same time; at the very least it can be said that postmodernism and video games influenced and were influenced by each other, even if many involved with either field were not cognizant of the influence at the time. Postmodernism is, after all, deeply connected with the rise of computers and later network technology; and video games are from one perspective simply the narrative entertainment aspect of those technologies—the natural development from books and movies into the new realm of computers. Video games are of course much more than just movies on a computer, and the difference between the two is what makes video games arguably the most postmodern medium yet in existence: consider that if postmodernism is a preoccupation with the culture of the “easy edit”, the ability to change anything and everything at the click of a mouse button, then video games—narratives in which people are not passive readers or viewers but active players who interact with, change, edit the narrative as it occurs—are postmodern in their very bones.<br /><br />This, at least, has been the argument of many academics in the fledgling field of game studies, if not in so many words: while they rarely connect their work to postmodernism, such academics frequently declare the power of video games to be their capacity for choice, in opposition to the locked linear narratives of almost all other artistic mediums (barring niche aberrations like the infamous <span style="font-style: italic;">Choose Your Own Adventure</span> series of children's books). Yet one of the first video games to generate substantial critical discourse—2K Games' <span style="font-style: italic;">Bioshock</span>, the magnum opus of designer Ken Levine published in 2007—is a game that deliberately, methodically, brutally deconstructs the myth of choice in video games. <span style="font-style: italic;">Bioshock</span>'s narrative and ludic climax revolves around a demonstration of the total lack of agency the player has, a demonstration of how everything the player has done in the game has been carefully orchestrated and choreographed, with the much-vaunted choices being nothing more than crude illusions.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Bioshock</span>, a title near the pinnacle of both blockbuster action games—<span style="font-style: italic;">Bioshock</span> sold over two million copies in its first year—and artistic and intellectual games, is a supremely postmodern video game. It is a video game in which body modification, addiction and compulsion, resistance to meta-narratives, self-referentiality, ontology, conspiracies, and nearly every other trope or trend of postmodern fiction appears in some way or another with a significant impact on either the gameplay or at least the narrative. It is a video game that combines an absurd, 1940s adventure serial-esque plot and over-the-top characters, setting, and art style with intensely serious points about human nature and the nature (and danger) of narrative. It is a video game whose first two acts build to arguably the most important comment in video games on video games yet made and then collapses in its final act into cliché and stereotypes, unable to overcome the problems it worked so hard to point out. It is a postmodern artifact both in the sense that it is concerned with postmodern concerns and in that it is itself deeply postmodern.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Bioshock</span> is a first-person shooter, a video game played from a first-person perspective and in which the primary gameplay involves shooting enemies with a variety of weapons—the same genre as the infamously less cerebral <span style="font-style: italic;">Doom</span> and <span style="font-style: italic;">Halo</span>. After surviving a plane crash in the middle of the Atlantic, the player explores the underwater city of Rapture, an objectivist utopia built at the height of the Cold War that has since collapsed into anarchy. Early on the protagonist injects himself with a “plasmid”, a genetic modification device that allows him to use supernatural powers like shooting lightning from his fingertips; the various types of plasmids, along with more conventional firearms, form the basis of the player's arsenal. The player follows the instructions of Atlas, a man who speaks to him over a radio, as he gradually learns the story behind Rapture, founded by ex-Soviet industrialist Andrew Ryan and eventually brought down by the discovery of ADAM, the material that powers plasmids; the power struggle to control ADAM between Ryan and gangster Frank Fontaine, combined with the delirious effects of prolonged plasmid use, leads to the collapse of civilized society in Rapture and leaves the city occupied almost solely by “splicers”, citizens of Rapture gone mad with plasmid use and their own traumatic circumstances. Unlike everyone else in the game, the player cannot die: when “killed”, the player simply reappears in the nearest “Vita-Chamber”, a resurrection device that obscure audio logs in the game reveal to now be keyed only to Ryan's genetic code.<br /><br />At the game's climax two-thirds of the way through, the player finally confronts Andrew Ryan, whom the player has been sent to kill by Atlas. Ryan reveals that the player is actually the genetic son of Ryan himself and a prostitute hired by Fontaine; Fontaine took the baby, had one of Rapture's geneticists accelerate its growth and implant it with false memories and mind control conditioning, then transported it to the continental United States until Fontaine called it back. The phrase Atlas uses to “suggest” directions to the player—“Would you kindly . . .”—is the code phrase that initiates the mind control protocol; Atlas is in fact Fontaine. The remainder of the game concerns the struggle of the player, now under the instruction of a Doctor Tenenbaum, to defeat Fontaine and escape Rapture.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Bioshock</span>'s plot would not be out of place in a movie commented on by <span style="font-style: italic;">Mystery Science Theater 3000</span>, yet it aims (and arguably succeeds to a significant extent) at intellectual and artistic achievement far beyond such works. One of the hallmarks of postmodernism is the blurring of the distinction between “high brow” culture of art and “low brow” culture of entertainment (<span style="font-style: italic;">Et Tu, Babe</span>'s combination of hyperbolic ego humor and cultural commentary; <span style="font-style: italic;">Motherless Brooklyn</span>'s combination of detective genre tropes and a realistic depiction of Tourette's syndrome; <span style="font-style: italic;">Choke</span>'s combination of sex and sex addiction); <span style="font-style: italic;">Bioshock</span> is near the apex of the tradition. It is after all first and foremost a video game, a medium until the past decade almost never discussed as anything but the lowest brow of culture, that nonetheless strives for a higher intellectual consideration. It is of a genre habitually described as “mindlesss” and its setting and plot are so obviously deliberately ridiculous and over-the-top that it seems difficult to take anything in the game seriously. Yet for every aspect of the game that exists purely for entertainment, there is a counterpart that has little value beyond the artistic: the splicers that the player guns down throughout the game (entertainment) speak with crazed speech that suggests they are not monsters but merely men and women driven mad by the terrible circumstances of Rapture (art); the struggle witnessed and fought throughout the game between Ryan and Atlas/Fontaine, which is both a classic dual between over-the-top villains and an honest commentary on idealism and nihilism; and of course the mind control, both an absurd device and the linchpin for the game's commentary on video games and the illusion of choice. <span style="font-style: italic;">Bioshock</span> moves between the realms of entertainment and art, primeval and intellectual, high brow and low brow constantly and easily, almost daring a commentator to attempt and fail to draw a line between what is worth analyzing critically and what is not. Like postmodernism, <span style="font-style: italic;">Bishock</span> defies categorization.<br /><br />Early previews of <span style="font-style: italic;">Bioshock</span>, which discussed an underground Nazi laboratory, reveal that only one aspect of the game remained from original conception to publication: body modification. Literally in the name—“shock” being a reference to the game's spiritual predecessors <span style="font-style: italic;">System Shock </span>and<span style="font-style: italic;"> System Shock 2</span> but “bio” being indisputably short for “biological”—the most notable deviation from traditional first-person shooter game mechanics is the plasmids, the biological weapons that the player collects and upgrades throughout the game. The narrative of course is consumed by the story of plasmids: it is plasmids that lead to the struggle between Ryan and Fontaine that brings Rapture down and it is plasmids that spawn the splicers that hunt the player the entirety of the game. Even the first major “boss” of the game is a plastic surgeon who decided after plasmids and ADAM allowed him to shape a person's body to any possible appearance—after perfection became an attainable goal—that he would become the Picasso of the body and free his patients from the tyranny of “symmetry”.<br /><br />But more than this, <span style="font-style: italic;">Bioshock</span>'s gameplay is consumed by plasmids: the choice of which plasmids to keep in the limited available slots for genetic modification is one of the most important tactical decisions in the game and significantly changes how the player proceeds. Certain plasmids are better at fighting certain enemies or achieving certain effects, and always some option must be sacrificed; in this way even players who pay no attention to the narrative—a significant number—are forced to deal with <span style="font-style: italic;">Bioshock</span>'s emphasis on body modification. The choice is not just mechanical but also visual; the appearance of the player's hands (the only part of the protagonist's body visible from the game's first-person perspective) changes radically depending on which plasmid is equipped. Postmodernism is of course obsessed with body modification, perhaps most notably in <span style="font-style: italic;">Et Tu, Babe</span>, with Mark Leyner's geriatric cyborg bodyguards and his own drug-addled physique; <span style="font-style: italic;">Bioshock</span> takes this obsession as far as it can go, and perhaps a little farther.<br /><br />The plasmids and their effects on Rapture's citizens hit upon another postmodern obsession: addiction. <span style="font-style: italic;">Et Tu, Babe</span>,<span style="font-style: italic;"> Infinite Jest</span>, <span style="font-style: italic;">Choke</span>: all are concerned majorly with addiction and addicts. In <span style="font-style: italic;">Bioshock</span> addiction manifests in the splicers, the former normal people of Rapture who have become consumed by their use of plasmids and transformed into vicious killers that stalk the ruined structures of the city. The game's finale is an extended battle with Fontaine after he has injected himself with an overdose of ADAM, gone mad, and transformed into a physical incarnation of the mythological Atlas he previously impersonated. And while the player experiences no gameplay mechanics of addiction, the player is “addicted” to the instructions of Atlas/Fontaine, compelled just as an addict is to take drugs to follow any directions preceded by “Would you kindly . . .”. <span style="font-style: italic;">Bioshock</span>'s mind control is of course rather a form of compulsion, the larger theme that includes addiction and which nearly every work of postmodernism touches on in some way or another. For <span style="font-style: italic;">Bioshock</span> compulsion and control is at the heart of its argument and commentary, the centerpiece of its skewering of the illusion of choice in video games that has spawned so much critical analysis.<br /><br />The narrative of mind control and the struggle between Ryan and Fontaine is a narrative of conspiracy, a topic that recurs over and over in postmodern fiction. From <span style="font-style: italic;">Et Tu, Babe</span> to <span style="font-style: italic;">Infinite Jest</span> to <span style="font-style: italic;">Motherless Brooklyn</span> to <span style="font-style: italic;">The Intuitionist</span>, conspiracies dominate postmodernism, likely because they are a narrative trope that relates to so many more intellectual concerns of postmodernism: conspiracies, secrets, plots within plots mean resistance to meta-narratives, as Lyotard defined postmodernism, and ontology, the question of “what world is this?”. These concerns are at the heart of <span style="font-style: italic;">Bioshock</span> as well, not just in its conspiracies but in every aspect of the narrative and game.<br /><br />Before <span style="font-style: italic;">Bioshock</span> was released its conception of a failed objectivist utopia raised the ire of some and the cheers of others, all expecting a satire of Ayn Rand's infamous philosophy; the final product, however, is not so neat in its consideration. Those players interested in the objectivist aspect of the game who explore enough to find the various audio logs detailing the city's fall learn that Rapture fell not because of some inherent failure of objectivism (or despite some inherent success of objectivism) but simply due to the human flaws of Ryan. In fact Bioshock is not so much a satire of objectivism as it is a more subtle commentary on the space between idealism and nihilism. Ryan is portrayed not as a deluded objectivist megalomaniac but as a supreme idealist brought down by his own humanity; at the other end of the spectrum is Fontaine, who at first appears as nothing more than a criminal in search of power and money but gradually reveals himself to be a supreme nihilist whose only concern is the destruction of Rapture and the downfall of Ryan. Yet in both cases <span style="font-style: italic;">Bioshock</span>'s position is not one of condemnation or approval but simply a dedication to the idea that Ryan and Fontaine are not ideas but men, not symbols of some grand over-arching narrative that explains everything but simply characters with human motivations and emotions that drive them to take the actions they do and leave Rapture in the state that it lies in.<br /><br />Beyond the characters and conspiracies of Ryan and Fontaine lies a larger postmodern question: “what world is this?” <span style="font-style: italic;">Bioshock</span>'s opening text declares that the game takes place in the North Atlantic, 1960, but clearly this is not a historical 1960: while Ryan may be a Soviet emigrant and he may be worried about CIA and KGB spies, Rapture is filled with technologies on the level of science-fiction. Moreso, such ontological questioning demands, especially in a video game, the question of the narrator: whose perspective is this narrative being told? “Whose world is this?” <span style="font-style: italic;">Bioshock</span>'s answer, of course, lies at the heart of its narrative: the revelation of the protagonist's identity not as a random plane crash survivor but as a carefully manipulated instrument in a grand scheme to overthrow Ryan is the climax of the game and dominates its final third.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Bioshock</span>'s climax is in fact perhaps its most postmodern element. The move is not just a narrative but a mechanical removal of control: unlike the entirety of the first two-thirds of the game, control is taken away from the player and the events unfold in cinematics for the first time. The scene is deliberately muted, then brutal in a way that ascertains no player can ignore it: the protagonist finally meets Andrew Ryan, who appears not as a megalomaniacal monster but as the most sane person the player has yet seen in Rapture, a tidy man in a business suit putting at one of the office golf sets so often seen in movies. Ryan explains how the player has been deceived, demonstrates the conditioning—“Would you kindly . . . run?” he says, and the player runs—then hands the player the club and solemnly declares, “A man chooses. A slave obeys. Would you kindly . . . kill?” The player watches helplessly as his virtual hands raise the club and bring it down violently against Ryan's face, over and over, as Ryan repeats himself, until finally the top of the club breaks off and remains impaled in Ryan's skull. The scene is shocking not just for its narrative content but for the visceral feeling of inescapability it forces on the player: there is absolutely nothing they can do to stop this. But the move is not to create a jarring juxtaposition from the player's previous freedom, it is to demonstrate the fundamental equality with the player's previous experience. The player character has followed Atlas' instructions due to the mind control conditioning; the player has followed Atlas' instructions because <span style="font-style: italic;">Bioshock</span> is a video game and they understand that he is to follow such instructions in a video game. Players do not have a choice, <span style="font-style: italic;">Bioshock</span> says, as much as they would like to: their experience in a video game is just as directed, just as controlled, just as linear, as that of any other medium. Video games merely present the illusion of freedom and choice.<br /><br />The concept of video games as narratives with choice is of course simply another meta-narrative that <span style="font-style: italic;">Bioshock</span> postmodernly refutes, but it is more than that: it is a supremely self-referential commentary in that most obvious aspect of postmodernism. Like fiction about fiction and movies about movies, <span style="font-style: italic;">Bioshock</span> becomes, in this moment, a video game about video games, a commentary (and in some ways an attack) on its own medium, in a way that no other medium could. It is ironic that <span style="font-style: italic;">Bioshock</span>'s most famous and powerful commentary is achieved through a cinematic—essentially, through an in-game movie—but it is so successful precisely because it nonetheless could not be achieved in anything other than a video game.circadianwolfhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13863959331740613989noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-425533341379809941.post-62991821044828882822009-08-13T21:00:00.005-05:002009-08-13T22:09:09.137-05:00The fallen order of witchersThis afternoon, after some tedious work getting all the updates working, I finally started playing my recently purchased copy of <span style="font-style: italic;">The Witcher</span>, an eastern European RPG from 2007 based on a Polish series of fantasy novels. I've just completed the prologue/tutorial so far, but I'd like to share a story.<br /><br />After a lengthy opening pre-rendered cutscene (which unfortunately didn't have any sound due to a bug, I assume), the game opens with . . . a very long in-engine cutscene, beginning with the protagonist, Geralt, being carred unconscious on a wagon back to the mountain fortress of the witchers, an infamous group of mutants who hunt monsters, according to the game's omniscient narration. All swell, until Geralt opens his mouth: "I don't remember anything."<br /><br />Well, if there's anything to create a negative first impression, especially in an RPG, it's amnesia. I know of two games that dealt with it well (<span style="font-style: italic;">Torment</span>, where the basic mystery of it is done away with fairly quickly, and <span style="font-style: italic;">Sanitarium</span>, where it's the entire point of the game), and already it feels tacked on considering that the game has made very clear who the main character is--Geralt of Riveria, the White Wolf, one of the most famous of the surviving witchers.<br /><br />I realize soon enough that the device is a necessary evil for the game to equally behave as a traditional RPG and allow the player to control Geralt. Amnesia allows the game to introduce the narrative and mechanical aspects of the world as if they were new to the character as well as the player, which is of course the usual reason for its inclusion in RPGs, and also to have the player start with a first-level character, as opposed to the great monster slayer that Geralt is already. (Which seems a bit disingenuous to me. What's the point of playing a famous hero if you don't start super powerful?)<br /><br />Anyway, the cutscene finally (and I do mean finally, it is damned long) gives way to the combat tutorial as a band of hilariously incompetent bandits attack the castle. But as the prologue goes on, involving Geralt, his sorceress girlfriend Triss, and four other witchers (well, three witchers and a trainee) defending the castle against what they discover is a much more calculated and dangerous incursion, a number of strange things begin to strike my mind.<br /><br />The first is as I'm sent to sound some bells in a high tower to damage a giant monster vulnerable to loud noises. In a cutscene (arg!), the stairs, which circle a bit that falls to open ground rather than a stone floor, begin collapsing. Geralt gets to the top but the bandits pursuing him are left behind as I watch agape and wonder, how does an inhabited castle have collapsing stairs? The next time Geralt meets up with the other witchers their leader apologizes and comments that one of the others was supposed to fix it, to which the witcher in question McCoys that he's not a mason.<br /><br />For the rest of the sequence I'm too concerned with stopping a powerful sorcerer, regaining some magic powers, and getting upset over the trainee's death at the hands of an assassin awesomely called "The Professor" to notice other odd things, but once combat is over and I'm sent to collect the ingredients for a healing potion for Triss, things get stranger. As the witcher leader warns me that there are still some stragglers about the castle--bandits they didn't kill--I begin to question the narrative integrity of this game.<br /><br />Would they really let any of the bandits get away? It seems ridiculous except as a device to provide more combat during this fetch quest. And where are the rest of the witchers, anyway? The opening cutscene showed a huge castle, yet all I've seen are five other people here. Shouldn't the rest of the castle been helping to defend against the attack? That would have made it too easy, of course. And would there really be no significant defenses against an incursion into the witchers' most secret sanctuary, the laboratory they never allowed even Triss to enter?<br /><br />As I explore the castle, I'm confused by its appearance more as a ruin than an active fortress. There are huge cracks in the walls, more collapsed staircases, a flooded basement, and many rooms that are either empty or hold only a few random pieces of junk--a dusty, broken chest, a twisted metal bedframe. Beyond the central area the witchers stay in with the wounded Triss and a few select rooms--a library, Triss' bedroom at the top of a tower--the castle is an abandoned relic.<br /><br />I begin to question my cynical analysis of the game, and slowly I realize the story behind all of this. The four witchers and Triss are the only people left in the fortress, they alone maintaining a glimmer of whatever former glory the witchers might have once possessed. And they're not enough to maintain a massive castle, of course, and so they maintain a few areas they use and leave the rest to rot. The bell tower was seldom used, and the witchers aren't masons, and so the stairs had never been repaired. The stragglers were left to roam the castle because the witchers didn't have enough men to confidently root them out and still defend their central living area. The laboratory was undefended because everyone in the castle was already fighting.<br /><br />At first I'm not sure if this is the truth or just me coming up with an explanation that gives the game more credit than it's worth, but when I return with the potion ingredients and speak to the witcher leader, one of the optional dialogues leads to him telling the story of an attack on the castle some twenty years earlier, in which the then twenty-four witchers and several dozen trainees were all murdered, save for himself, who survived by hiding among the corpses. (I assume he simply fails to mention the numerous servants that must have kept the castle running, but in fariness, he probably wouldn't mention them, being beneath the consideration of such a powerful man.)<br /><br />There's another fact that emerges from this dialogue, too: there will be no more witchers. While the laboratory contained the tools necessary for the brutal process of chemical and magical mutation that produces them (which is itself an interestingly scientific position in a fantasy setting), they didn't have a mage powerful enough to perform the necessary rituals, and it's unclear whether the witcher leader even knew said rituals, himself being quite young when the rest of the order was slaughtered.<br /><br />And thus my respect for the game shoots up immensely. Perhaps they could have done a better job introducing the status of the witchers and their castle, but once it becomes clear, the story is tragic and touching. And it lends a fatalistic quality to (at least the start of) the game's main quest, which is to find the mysterious sorcerer who led the attack. The witchers split up for the four corners of the world in search of clues not hoping to stop some great evil or save the world but simply looking to avenge their fallen comrade and retrieve their stolen potions that are of no use to them. Even if they succeed, it's likely that more of them will perish in the quest, and they'll have gained nothing for it. But they can't gain anything anyway--they are the last of the witchers, and they know it.<br /><br />Which, despite everything else, is a great way to start to game.circadianwolfhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13863959331740613989noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-425533341379809941.post-71260840810138003592009-08-12T15:37:00.003-05:002009-08-13T12:38:52.849-05:00Flow in Mirror's EdgeShe tells us from the beginning: it's about flow.<br /><br /><center><img title="Mirror's Edge" src="http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v215/jsRedwall/mirrorsedge.jpg" alt="Mirror's Edge" width="500" height="250" /></center><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Mirror's Edge</span> is a fascinating game in many respects. It's a first-person platformer, which is unique enough, but it's through its mechanical and narrative focus on replicating parkour/free running that the game truly shines as something new and interesting.<br /><br />The problem with platformers is that they too often devolve into frustrating puzzles where players calculate and repeatedly attempt a series of jumps and other special moves, failing and iterating their technique until they find the intended solution and reach their goal. (Perhaps it's thus fitting that platformers are often referred to as "adventure games" on consoles, leading to genre confusion/ignorance.) But while true adventure games are often predicated on the satisfaction of solving a puzzle after much mental anguish, platformers are usually intended as much more visceral, continuous experiences. Games with flow.<br /><br /><center><img title="Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time" src="http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v215/jsRedwall/princeofpersia.jpg" alt="Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time" width="500" height="250" /></center><br />It's the same problem that has plagued shooters and led to the introduction of health regeneration in <span style="font-style: italic;">Halo</span> and others, and in platformers of the time rewind mechanic of <span style="font-style: italic;">The Sands of Time</span> and the ultimate quickload in the latest <span style="font-style: italic;">Prince of Persia</span>. And yet many of these games still have a natural rhythm of starting and stopping, still have a pace that lulls and rises. I don't know of any game that has demanded a constant pace and flow as <span style="font-style: italic;">Mirror's Edge</span>--a game that knows nothing of the above devices.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Mirror's Edge</span> is game so focused on the constant adrenaline rush--so focused on keeping players running that even the protagonist's title is "runner"--that players never have the opportunity to stop and contemplate their options, analyze their surroundings and figure out the best method of jumps and climbs and wall runs to get to where they're trying to go. Almost any time you stop in <span style="font-style: italic;">Mirror's Edge</span>, the "blues" (antagonistic police) show up quickly, forcing you to keep running (or engage in the game's feeble combat system, which is both poor and out-of-place, although the guns are suitably lethal that if you are willing to use them combat is at least laughably easy).<br /><br />This isn't intrinsically a bad thing. In fact it's an interesting scenario, putting players in an unfamiliar situation where they're on the run, not the bad guys. Most gamers are used to being gods compared to their enemies, who are only dangerous in mass numbers; <span style="font-style: italic;">Mirror's Edge</span> manages to make players truly feel hunted, as if they need to run in order to survive, which is certainly an accomplishment to be applauded.<br /><br />The problem is that the game's spaces don't take this into account. They're designed like most platformer spaces, with lots of red herrings and only one or a few routes to the goal. It's extremely easy to miscalculate a jump and fall to your death, and even if you make it's hard to be sure you're going the right way. And you don't have any time to think, because the blues are coming. You have to run and run, and you don't know where you're going, or what you're supposed to do. And so the game becomes simply frustrating instead of tense.<br /><br /><center><img title="Half-Life 2" src="http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v215/jsRedwall/hl2citadel.jpg" alt="Half-Life 2" width="500" height="250" /></center><br />Part of the problem is the game's art direction. Its minimalism is brilliant but I can't help but wish the game's art director had learned a bit from Valve and <span style="font-style: italic;">Half-Life</span>, the masters of subtly drawing players' attention. Throughout <span style="font-style: italic;">Mirror's Edge</span> their are voice overs that theoretically point you towards your goal--some distant building, usually--but frequently the building blends in with its surroundings (despite the saturated and limited color scheme allowing for strong definition, as the runner's sight mechanic demonstrates), and even if you can locate it the route is usually so opaque and roundabout that sighting your eventual goal is next to worthless.<br /><br />This, I assume, was the genesis of the "runner's sight", the mechanic whereby helpful ramps, bars, walls, etc. turn strongly red as the player approaches, explained as the protagonist's runner intuition. It feels like a cheat (and indeed the hardest difficulty mandates turning it off), a way to guide players because the developers' couldn't figure out a better way. It's such a blatant way of directing players, putting up a giant glowing sign saying Go Here!, that I sometimes felt offended, like I was being treated as a child. But most of the time I didn't, because most of the time I needed those clues because there weren't any others in the game. And sometimes even when I had those clues I still didn't know where to go.<br /><br />But ultimately I think it's a problem of unfocused goals. It seems the developers just weren't sure what kind of game they were trying to make, how their game was that different from most platformers, and what other changes they needed to make to make those differences work. When you know where to go, <span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-style: italic;"></span></span>Mirror's Edge</span> approaches brilliance, the experience reaching towards the exhilaration and terror the game seems to be aiming for. But every time you screw up, the experience is ruined; and you screw up a lot.<br /><br /><center><img title="House of the Dead" src="http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v215/jsRedwall/houseofthedead.jpg" alt="House of the Dead" width="500" height="250" /></center><br />At times while I was playing it I almost wished the game was something that might be termed a rail platformer, a platforming version of arcade rail shooters like <span style="font-style: italic;">House of the Dead</span>, whereby instead of shooting the zombies at each screen you simply jumped at the right time, or made simple choices to go left or right, etc., at various points. A node-based platformer, in which the mechanics of actually getting a jump right were left behind. Because that seemed the easiest way to actually accomplish the experience <span style="font-style: italic;">Mirror's Edge</span> aims and fails to achieve.<br /><br />But that speculation got me thinking about a much greater problem I have with <span style="font-style: italic;">Mirror's Edge</span>, one that gnawed away at me as I played the game at a place low enough it didn't even register consciously for some time. And that's the fact that in a game about free running, it seems to forget about the free.circadianwolfhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13863959331740613989noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-425533341379809941.post-33356650616192015192009-08-11T14:06:00.001-05:002009-08-13T12:36:15.481-05:00Something for nothingSomething clicked for me this morning. It's something that I've known a long time, really, in disparate forms, but never really brought together, connected to form the obvious truth. And so I find myself writing a post about what I said I wouldn't write about for a long time, and certainly this isn't the end of those thoughts, just a beginning. So here we go.<br /><br />Popular wisdom has it that you can't get something for nothing. To get it out of the way, this is not true. Humans are awesome in that we can give something for nothing, via love and grace. But we live in a world where love and grace are thought weaknesses and wrongs. We live in a world defined by economics, where every action must produce a benefit for ourselves, lest it be deemed a failure. The world doesn't have to be this way (Another World Is Possible), but that's the world most of us do live in, to a greater or lesser degree, that mainstream culture tells us to embrace and act upon, and that we are hippies or idealists or naive children if we act otherwise.<br /><br />Anyway. There is a curious bit of contradiction, though, in that while we are taught never to do something for nothing, we are also taught that we can get something for nothing, or for less than it is worth. We can get free t-shirts, we can get cheap newspapers, we can get cheap fast food and cheap junk at Wal-Mart.<br /><br />Partly this is due to horrendous human rights violations where many of those items are produced. Workers are treated horribly, paid next to nothing, with next to nothing spent on ensuring their safety and security, so that we can buy things cheaper. And that's obviously horrible and disgusting and something to work against, but that's not what this post is about.<br /><br />You could say that with regards to that, what you are paying instead of money is human suffering. Not your own, but perhaps then you are paying in your own moral degradation, but that's getting a bit silly and farther than I want to go. But the point is you are paying something. There is an exchange. You are not getting a free ride, and your actions have consequences.<br /><br />On to the other part of how we get things cheap, which is: advertising. The simplest example of this, one of my old standbys of hate, is free t-shirts. When we arrived at college nearly everyone was given a t-shirt emblazoned with the logo of the credit union that's made a deal with the university. I'm a bit infamous for my very limited and specific selection of t-shirts--most feature animals, almost none feature logos. This is because I am very conscious that everything I wear makes a statement.<br /><br />Those who know me may find that an odd declaration, as I often seem the kind of person who doesn't give a damn about "style" and such; and that's true. But I do care about what I promote, what I support, what I advertise, through my clothing. Those students wearing the credit union t-shirts didn't pay money for them, but they are advertising the credit union every time they wear those shirts. They may not be saying, Go Here! I Like These People!, but they are spreading recognition of the logo and name. And in an information-saturated world, recognition is the first and greatest hurdle for any marketing endeavor.<br /><br />T-shirts are cheap to produce en masse. Name recognition is harder. For the credit union, it's a positive economic gain. For the students, well, they get a t-shirt? Ultimately, however, it's hard to really fault people who accept such things. They may be helping companies they may not necessarily actually support, but there isn't any real harm being done. Spreading recognition of a name is not a bad thing.<br /><br />The same processes, however, do cause real damage. The principle example of this is that great pincushion of criticism that is mainstream media. News coverage is almost endlessly criticized for biases of one way or another, but especially (and most truthfully) of being a tool of corporate intent. Mainstream news are carefully articulated tools designed to influence the public towards particular cultural positions that economically benefit the megacorporations that fund them, with little regard for the ethical consequences of such actions.<br /><br />But most critics stop there, call out the corporations on being unethical and caring only about money and frown a lot. And there definitely is something wrong, obviously, with a culture entirely based on economics. But the situation is our own fault. The public's. Because we believe we can get something for nothing.<br /><br />Corporations exist to produce money; that is their function. As much as we may like to, we will not change that position anytime soon. But what we can change is how they produce money. The main source of news outlets' profits is from advertising. As newspaper subscriptions have plumetted in the Internet age, more and more money has come from advertising, with more and more advertisements taking up space in newspapers as a result. And as for television news, of course--nearly all of their profits come from advertising.<br /><br />We pay nothing for basic television, a minimum for basic cable, monetarily. Economically. We celebrate because we've gotten something for nothing, and then complain when the source of that something--the advertisers that keep television news on the air--acts as if it has the right to dictate the nature of that something. As if it should have the right to decide what airs just because it's paid for it, and not us, who haven't done anything for it. We get what we pay for.<br /><br />News outlets will care about what their readers think, will care about telling the truth, when their readers who care about the truth are the ones making sure they stay in business, and not advertisers who will leave them if they start telling the truth. I say a lot that our culture shouldn't be based on economics, and obviously I believe that, but the first lie we must correct is that in our culture of economics we can get something for nothing. Once we accept that we pay for everything, somehow, we can begin to work towards changing that paradigm.circadianwolfhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13863959331740613989noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-425533341379809941.post-65339072867606583062009-08-05T23:00:00.004-05:002009-08-05T23:27:33.054-05:00Kids read the darndest thingsMcDonald's* is putting Beanie Babies in Happy Meals again. This is an extremely odd event to me (it brings back memories of the mad Beanie Baby craze, which my family took some part in and which I tried to explain to my ignorant 8-year-old sister) but for this post I'm just making a short comment on the tag of the one my sister got, a hamster named Fluffball. The inside poem reads:<br /><blockquote>Running on my hamster wheel<br />Such fun it almost makes me squeal<br />But what would make a good thing better ?<br />A friend so we could run together !<br /></blockquote>What a brilliant piece of marketing. I'd like to meet the writer of this, though I'm not sure whether I'd want to shake their hand or slap them. Most marketing aimed at kids demonstrates a disgusting lack of subtlety (because "subtlety" is only valuable to marketing when it aids the inherent economic motive, and kids generally are too innocent to recognize the crassness of advertising), but this is elegantly sinister. What would make this toy better? Another toy!<br /><br />Advertising/marketing is one of my push-button issues. I despise it and am liable to get very, very angry over it, or rather, its position as the definer of mass culture and its lack of loyalty to any ethic beyond economics. Someday I'll write a lengthy manifesto on the market culture and a proposal for an alternative, ethical culture . . . but that's a long way off, I think. It's just such a vast issue, and I don't have enough of a grasp on it to even begin to write what I want to write on it.<br /><br />In that spirit, though, how about a run down of upcoming posts? This is as much to incite me to get them done as anything else.<br /><ul><li>"Flow in Mirror's Edge", on the failure of the game's mechanics to recreate the sensation of parkour/free running</li><li>"Freedom in Mirror's Edge", on the ethical contradictions embedded within the mechanics, narrative, and themes of the game</li><li>"Freedom of information in Children of Earth", on how Torchwood almost finally did something right</li><li>"With Keven Spacey as the voice of Gerty", on the association of actors with characters</li><li>And a few posts wrapping-up my summer D&D<br /></li></ul>*How sad is it that McDonald's is in Firefox's spell check dictionary?circadianwolfhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13863959331740613989noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-425533341379809941.post-44264232963285166932009-08-03T09:46:00.008-05:002009-10-14T16:14:02.328-05:00Just playing with you: Hitman and player goalsThere's a conventional wisdom among some game developers and enthusiasts that in order for the player to have fun, the fun way has to be the easiest way. That is, players don't care about how they're "supposed" to play the game if they can find an easier way of doing it, even if that easier way is boring, dull, repetitive, etc.--and they'll then get bored with the game quickly and blame the developer for having failed at making a fun game.<br /><br />And there are certainly many players for whom this wisdom holds true. Those who played <span style="font-style: italic;">Left 4 Dead</span> by simply hiding in a corner and meleeing their way through a horde of zombies (and thus prompted the melee fatigue patch), to name a recent example.<br /><br />And there is nothing wrong with such players, at least in their playing style. (Blaming the developer when they don't enjoy the game seems a bit much, though.) For many such players, they wouldn't blame the developer because they aren't looking for a game to be "fun"; or rather, fun has a different meaning to them than other players. For them, it simply means accomplishment, overcoming the challenge presented by the game by any means possible. These are the compulsive gamers, who strive for every achievement, the highest level, the fastest solution, etc. (And those that don't complain are publishers' wet dreams: they consume games with very little regard for their quality.)<br /><br />But I'm more interested in the games that could be said to actively defy this play style. That is, all such players will generally end up doing things in a game unintended by the developer (which is absolutely right and good, all players should) and more importantly things that make the game arguably less interesting, but there are some games where such players will miss the entire point of the game. Which brings me to the <span style="font-style: italic;">Hitman</span> series.<br /><br /><center><img title="Hitman" src="http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v215/jsRedwall/hitman.jpg" alt="Hitman" width="500" height="225" /></center><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Hitman</span>'s protagonist is a genetically-engineered super-assassin known as Forty-Seven. While fragile compared to some FPS protagonists, he's far stronger than any human or any enemy in the games: he can take a shotgun blast to the chest and keep on going. (Two, however, starts to push it, and there's no way of regaining health during a mission.) On most missions, Forty-Seven could easily get to his target by simply cutting down everyone with a gun. Enemies in <span style="font-style: italic;">Hitman</span> are fragile: a bullet to the head is instant death, it only takes a few more shots to the chest with a pistol, and a heavy weapon buts down anyone with a single burst anywhere.<br /><br />But the game's design is based around stealth. It's a game about sneaking in, knocking out a lone guard, taking his uniform, hiding his body, infiltrating a compound without rousing suspicion, silently assassinating the target, and then getting out before anyone is the wiser. It's a game in which an FPS-style massacre means you've screwed up. Yet there is little in-game penalty for such action, and it's certainly easier than the stealth approach. Unlike some stealth games--like<span style="font-style: italic;"> </span>the<span style="font-style: italic;"> <span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-style: italic;"></span></span>Thief</span><span style="font-style: italic;"> </span>series, where stealth is a requirement because almost any enemy will easily dispatch you in one-on-one combat, or the <span style="font-style: italic;">Splinter Cell</span> series, where stealth is a requirement because you fail most missions if anyone "raises an alarm"--<span style="font-style: italic;">Hitman</span> is perfectly content to allow you to complete a mission through mass murder.<br /><br /><center><img title="Forty-Seven Massacre" src="http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v215/jsRedwall/hitmanmassacre.jpg" alt="Forty-Seven Massacre" width="500" height="225" /><br /><br/><em>from <a href="http://silentamateur.wordpress.com" target="new">The Amateur</a></em></center><br />There are a few drawbacks--the later games rate your performance on each mission based on your stealthiness, with the highest rating offering some unlockable bonuses, and the first and fourth game, which allow you to purchase your own equipment, penalize you monetarily ("clean-up" expenses deducted from your payment). But by and large, you can ignore nearly every major mechanic of the game and simply shoot your way through if you want. The game will play like an extremely easy and short third-person shooter.<br /><br />So why is <span style="font-style: italic;">Hitman</span> one of the more well-regarded franchises on the PC, especially the fourth game, which garnered nearly universal praise? Because most players understand what's fun about the game. Because most players understand that survival is not the challenge in <span style="font-style: italic;">Hitman</span>. Completing the mission is not the challenge in <span style="font-style: italic;">Hitman</span>. Just because the game allows you to advance on those conditions alone, they are not victory.<br /><br />Well, that's not exactly true, of course. As soon as you try to define "victory" or the "challenge" of a game as anything other than reaching the end screen, you're in subjective territory. (Not than anything is truly objective, but you get the idea, I hope.) But what we're talking about is just that--players defining their own victory conditions. Players deciding that merely advancing in the game is not good enough for them.<br /><br />(As a side note, an interesting thought just occured to me that in essence, <span style="font-style: italic;">Hitman</span> is a game that allows you to fail. Because the game is so easy in terms of simply finishing the missions, you don't see a game over screen or are otherwise forced to reload a saved game very often. Most of the time when you restart a mission or load a save, it's by your own choice--you failed your own conditions, not the game's, and you could have continued if you had wanted to. And that's a very interesting and powerful thing, to me, the option to fail and go on, though I won't be exploring it in this post.)<br /><br />There are a couple things that are very interesting to me about this. The first is the meta aspect: because Forty-Seven can easily dispatch everyone in a given mission, the fact that he (canonically) doesn't and instead pursues stealthy execution means that he is, in some way, playing a game with his targets. Forty-Seven, unlike most shooter protagonists, isn't in this for survival. That's easy. He's in it for invisibility. He's in it about satisfying his own chosen conditions. He's playing a game, just like the players.<br /><br />There's often a disconnect between the abilities of a player and the supposed abilities of a game's protagonist. <span style="font-style: italic;">Half-Life</span>, for example, is often mocked for its MIT graduate lab assistant who manages to slaughter Marines and stop an alien invasion, while on the other side, many games with military protagonists are forced to treat players like ignorant civilians (like they are) rather than well-trained soldiers. <span style="font-style: italic;">Hitman</span>, to me, is one of the few games that evades this problem. There are a few moments in cutscenes when the player may know more than Forty-Seven (he is ignorant of a lot of human culture due to his upbringing), but for the most part the story's treatment of the character matches up with players' abilities.<br /><br /><center><img title="Gordon Freeman" src="http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v215/jsRedwall/half-life.jpg" alt="Gordon Freeman" width="500" height="225" /></center><br />The second interesting thing to me is that by making the game's conditions of advancement easy to satisfy, it encourages players to make their own rules. I started this post talking about players who don't do what game developers intend them to--and I pointed out that, in general, this is a great thing and something all players should do and all developers should encourage. And this is what I meant.<br /><br />The difference between the players I described at the start of this post and <span style="font-style: italic;">Hitman</span> players isn't some slavish adherence to how the game is "supposed" to be played. That's a bullshit idea. <span style="font-style: italic;">Hitman</span> doesn't have a "right" way to play it any more than any other game. The difference with <span style="font-style: italic;">Hitman </span>players is that they aren't to make the game as easy as possible. They're out to make the game as <span style="font-style: italic;">challenging</span> as possible. Players impose their own restrictions on themselves, set their own goals, and consider themselves defeated when they fail those goals, not when the game tells them they've been defeated.<br /><br />One of the most important bits of game theory I've ever heard was from Will Wright, creator of <span style="font-style: italic;">Sim City</span>. In a talk on stories in games, Wright commented than whenever he talked to someone who'd played <span style="font-style: italic;">Grand Theft Auto</span>, for example, and asked about the game, he never heard anything about the game's linear narrative. Instead he heard stories about getting six stars, using rocket launchers to destroy tanks, crashing cars and creating massive pile-ups, and so on. And these, he explained, are all stories, too--and stories that are more important and more meaningful to players than the ones authored by game developers, because even if they aren't as detailed or as complex or as artistic or whatever, the players created them, not the developer, and that makes them more meaningful to them than anything someone who's never met them could create.<br /><br /><center><img title="GTA and Sim City" src="http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v215/jsRedwall/gtaandsimcity.jpg" alt="GTA and Sim City" width="500" height="225" /></center><br />Wright is also famous for describing his own creations--<span style="font-style: italic;">Sim City, The Sims,</span> etc.--as toys rather than games because they don't have set victory conditions.<br /><br />I think there's an obvious correlation here. In <span style="font-style: italic;">Sim City</span>, so long as the player doesn't go bankrupt, the game never ends. There is no "winning" <span style="font-style: italic;">Sim City</span>. Thus players have to decide for themselves what they're aiming to accomplish, what kind of city they want to build. They define their own victory conditions. In <span style="font-style: italic;">Hitman</span>, "winning" is easy, in the sense of actually reaching the end of the game. But it's that ease that allows players to play with the game. When advancement is trivial and the game's space is nonetheless diverse, players are allowed and encouraged to decide for themselves what they're aiming to accomplish, what kind of hitman they want to be. They define their own victory conditions. And they can change their minds, try out different techniques and goals, vent steam when they're frustrated by actually just slaughtering everyone, and so on.<br /><br />What we're talking about is the difference between a game of chess and a Lego set. Chess is a very strictly defined game--all of your options are set from the beginning. There is a limited number of variables with limited possible values and a strict victory condition. Thus winning is simply a matter of calculation--that's why computers are the best chess players. There is such thing as the perfect chess algorithm, the perfect chess game, even if it hasn't been created yet.<br /><br /><center><img title="Chess and Legos" src="http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v215/jsRedwall/chessandlegos.jpg" alt="Chess and Legos" width="500" height="225" /></center><br />A Lego set is just a child's toy rather than the province of grandmasters. Nobody sets computers on building the best Lego set. And you know why? Because they can't. Legos are building blocks for our own imagination. They're tools to aid us in developing our own creativity. They can teach problem solving just as much as chess can--we can define our own goals, our own victory conditions, and figure out the best way to solve them, or set a computer to do it for us. But those victory conditions must always be decided first by the player.<br /><br />And, of course, chess was the same way once. Someone decided the victory conditions of chess, the rules of chess. And those rules changed over time, when people didn't just play the game but played with the game, toyed with it, experimented. It's just that at some point people decided not to anymore. That toying was wrong, that chess was only worthwhile if the rules were always the same, that accomplishment only had value when it could be compared numerically against someone else's accomplishment and one could be declared objectively (hah!) superior. When people decided that there had to be a best way to play chess.<br /><br />In other words, what we're talking about is the difference between a game player and a game creator. The person who follows the rules and the person who makes the rules. The computer and the programmer.<br /><br /><center><img title="Computer and Programmer" src="http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v215/jsRedwall/computerandprogrammer.jpg" alt="Computer and Programmer" width="500" height="225" /></center><br />Who do you want to be?circadianwolfhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13863959331740613989noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-425533341379809941.post-18057795474260049152009-07-28T22:00:00.001-05:002009-07-28T22:02:16.102-05:00Politics as usualI've been on something of a <span style="font-style: italic;">Who</span>niverse overdose the past two days. SciFi aired a marathon of the best of <span style="font-style: italic;">Doctor Who</span> season 3 on Monday ("Human Nature"/"Family of Blood", one of my favorite things ever produced for television, plus "Blink" and "Utopia"/"The Sound of Drums"/"Last of the Time Lords", "The Sound of Drums" being my personal choice for most purely entertaining piece of television ever), and this combined with the glowing reviews of <span style="font-style: italic;">Torchwood</span>'s limited season three/miniseries event thing "Children of Earth" got me to watch that, too--and, before I did, the final three episodes of <span style="font-style: italic;">Torchwood</span>'s season two, which have been sitting unwatched on my computer since they aired over a year ago due to my growing indifference to the series. (A short review: the last three episodes were better but still mostly <span style="font-style: italic;">Torchwood</span> as usual. "Children of Earth", on the other hand, is really quite good and absolutely brilliant in a few unexpected places.)<br /><br />But what I'm more interested in is the political circumstances depicted in the <span style="font-style: italic;">Doctor Who </span>finale and in "Children of Earth". I realize I'm way late to the game in analyzing the Master's return, but as a student my work is mostly analyzing old things anyway, so whatever. What's interesting to me about the political circumstances is that they aren't unusual, or different, or new, beyond the superficialities of aliens and advanced technology.<br /><br /><center><img title="The Master" src="http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v215/jsRedwall/master.jpg" alt="The Master (John Simm) in Doctor Who (2007)" width="500" height="225" /><br />The Master (John Simm) in <em>Doctor Who</em> (2007)</center><br />In "The Sound of Drums", the Doctor figures out that the Master has elected himself Prime Minister of Great Britain via embedding a psychic signal within a satellite network that controls cell phones: it's not exactly mind control, the Doctor says, just an implanted rhythm (the chilling "Sound of Drums" that also reverberates uncontrollably within the Master's mind) that contains the message: "Believe in me. Vote for me." It seems like just a science fiction plot device, but the moment when the Doctor's companion's acknowledge that even they were planning on voting for the Master (before they knew who he was) resonates uncomfortably with the modern political space:<br /><blockquote><span style="font-weight: bold;">Martha:</span> I was gonna vote for him.<br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">The Doctor:</span> Really?<br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Martha:</span> Well, it was before I even met you. And I liked him.<br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Jack:</span> Me too.<br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">The Doctor:</span> Why do you say that? What was his policy, what did he stand for?<br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Martha:</span> I don't know, he always sounded . . . good. Like you could trust him. Just nice. He spoke about . . . I can't really remember, but it was good. Just the sound of his voice . . .</blockquote>On one level it's a merely a demonstration that the Master can affect even those who should be most resistant to his machinations. But of course on another level there's a sense that this isn't actually unusual. Martha's inability to articulate the Master's policy despite her confidence in him--her admission that she simply "trust[ed] him" based on "the sound of his voice" would not sound out of place in a modern news segment interviewing voters (or more likely, a <span style="font-style: italic;">Daily Show</span> parody ridiculing the ignorance of voters, though the difference between the comedic farce of <span style="font-style: italic;">The Daily Show</span> and the blatant lies of mainstream news is a thin one indeed).<br /><br />Ultimately this element of political commentary is dropped in favor of <span style="font-style: italic;">Doctor Who</span>'s more usual intensely absurd character drama (which I love, no mistake), but I wish there was more of it. The political aspects of the new series--Harriet Jones, UNIT, and of course Torchwood--are some of its most interesting (at least in terms of its Earth-based stories) because they do often seem to be simply our modern circumstances with aliens thrown in.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Torchwood</span>, indeed, deals with this a bit more often (though sometimes it dodges it when I feel it shouldn't), especially in "Children of Earth". But even in its full seasons there's an interesting arc in the background of the acknowledgement of the existence of aliens by the general populace despite governments' continued official denials. For some time I considered it simply absurd and contrived that the populace at large hadn't already simply accepted this after the events of <span style="font-style: italic;">Doctor Who</span>'s seasons--the Master himself points out a number of such incidents, including the highly visible destruction of Big Ben by an alien spacecraft, as part of a press conference announcing his (as Prime Minister) official first contact with aliens (an elaborate ruse ending with his global domination, though the aliens are real).<br /><br />It seems ridiculous that after this public declaration and subsequent fallout (the deaths of the Master as Prime Minister and the American President in "Last of the Time Lords") the world's governments would refuse to acknowledge aliens and that the public would, by and large, accept this. And it should be ridiculous. But the more I thought about it, the more it occured to me that such obvious, blatant lies have always been the province of government, and though in the age of decentralized social media these lies are more visible than ever before to those looking for them, they still have ridiculous powers of persistence.<br /><br /><center><img src="http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v215/jsRedwall/abughraib.jpg" alt="Abu Ghraib" width="500" height="225" /></center><br />The United States' torture of detainees, its general execution of the War on Terror and the predatory nature of Western foreign policy in general, plus many, many others: they're a sort of step beyond "open secrets", those things like Israel's nuclear armaments that are officially denied but nonetheless widely acknowledged. They're things that anybody looking to know can know, that all the information about is out there and ridiculously easy to find, but that the vast majority of the public do not know, because the mainstream news refuses to acknowledge them and because the public in general simply <span style="font-style: italic;">do not want to know.</span><br /><br />And with this depressing realization I accepted that <span style="font-style: italic;">Torchwood</span>'s treatment of the subject is actually probably accurate. Even after so many public images, most people wouldn't accept the existence of aliens--but it wouldn't be hard for them to accept it once forced to, as happens numerous times throughout <span style="font-style: italic;">Torchwood</span>. It seems at first wierd that people accept so easily extraterrestrial life, perhaps just a necessary plot contrivance to keep 42-minute episodes moving, but once we see that they <span style="font-style: italic;">already</span> know, in some sense, and just haven't accepted it yet, it becomes much more understandable (and, perhaps, frightening).<br /><br />I've got more to say about politics and "Children of Earth", but it's of a more different sort, and so will be another post.circadianwolfhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13863959331740613989noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-425533341379809941.post-1390158887310913132009-07-18T11:49:00.001-05:002009-08-12T19:02:20.773-05:00The Curse of the Black Pearl: Empire, fall 1700Before I can collect my tax income and proceed with restoring Spanish glory in the winter, the United Provinces offer me a chance to try out a duel. Apparently they're rather offended by that whole attempted espionage business and they send a gentleman to deal with this affront to their honor by challenging my rake to a duel. There's no option to flee, unfortunately, despite his supposed stealth skills, just a choice of weapon. I'm helpfully informed that the Dutch gentleman is better with both swords and pistols. I decide to go with swords, since that at least sounds less lethal.<br /><br /><a href="http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v215/jsRedwall/empire/duel.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v215/jsRedwall/empire/duelsm.jpg" alt="Duel" border="0" /></a><br /><br />I'm treated to a fancy video (seems a bit anachronistic, really) of the duel, which involves the two men chasing each other back and forth off the screen. Apparently they didn't have mobile cameras, at least. The last shot is of the gentleman running away with my rake waving his sword defiantly, and then a video of a carriage moving down a city street. I have no idea what the carriage was about since the duel took place in a wooded area, but against the odds my rake has won! That ought to show the Dutch. Maybe he'll be more confident in his sneaking next time.<br /><br />Before I can celebrate too much, however, there's another problem. Pirates have attacked by fleet in the Caribbean. And by fleet, I mean an admiral's flagship and one other ship, which is a bit less than I was expecting, but I suppose the Spanish Armada is in the past and Barbossa was an admiral with just two ships, right? This pirate's got more ships than I do, but no admiral, so I figure I've got a fighting chance and decide to duke it out. Not that fleeing from pirates was ever an option anyway, Spanish honor and all that.<br /><br /><a href="http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v215/jsRedwall/empire/pirates.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v215/jsRedwall/empire/piratessm.jpg" alt="Duel" border="0" /></a><br /><br />It turns out the pirates may only have one more ship than me, but they have a lot more guns. For a while it looks like I might actually triumph, as I get the pirates grouped up and disable one of their ships, but things quickly fall apart after that minor victory, and soon both Spanish ships are fleeing from the battlefield. Err, battlesea? Anyway. Cowards. Shouldn't the British and French and Dutch be dealing with these guys? Or maybe New Spain?<br /><br />Ah, yes. As winter rolls around, my adviser informs me that the government will occasionally assign me optional missions. Not sure who's assigning them, given that I seem to have control over everything, but in this case it's a moot point, as the mission is from New Spain. It seems a bit audacious for my own protectorate to be giving me orders. They want me to capture three territories (Texas, Curacao, and Trinidad) in exchange for giving up control to me. Shouldn't I already have control of them? This seems fishy, but they also have a lot of territory and I assume thus a lot of money. I guess it's something to work towards.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Next time:</span> New allies, more pirates, and WAR!circadianwolfhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13863959331740613989noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-425533341379809941.post-8205703870063682622009-07-16T00:01:00.002-05:002009-08-12T19:02:26.581-05:00Isabella, eat your heart out: Empire, summer 1700I have a love-hate relationship with <span style="font-style: italic;">Civilization IV.</span> I love the mechanics, the music, the dynamics, the customizability. I hate Isabella. Every time I played a game of Civ IV, without fail, sooner or later the Spanish came knocking. Every time, Isabella was pissed that I was a different religion than her, and sooner or later, without fail, she declared war on me. And every time I tried to negotiate with her, she just stared back haughtily at me. I have never hated a video game character so much--and all she is is an animated profile picture and some obscure game logic.<br /><br />Somehow I find myself playing the Spanish in <span style="font-style: italic;">Empire: Total War</span>.<br /><br /><a href="http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v215/jsRedwall/europestart.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v215/jsRedwall/europestartsm.jpg" alt="Europe" border="0" /></a><br /><br />The year is 1700, and somebody's handed me control of what's left of the Spanish Empire. My history's a little hazy, but it's pretty obvious that the days of Spanish glory are in the past, though Spain does begin with control of various parts of Italy and southern Holland, which my adviser helpfully advises me is in danger of being overrun by the now Protestant republican northern Holland. She also gives me a quick overview of the Spanish possessions in the Americas, which seem surprisingly sparse until I realize that "New Spain" (all the land from California to Venezuela) is a separate faction set up as a "protectorate" but not under my direct control. Which seems a bit cheap, but they're still sending me lots of money and I'm not paying for upkeep, so I guess that works out.<br /><br /><a href="http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v215/jsRedwall/americasstart.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v215/jsRedwall/americasstartsm.jpg" alt="America" border="0" /></a><br /><br />My adviser warns that the "rogue states" of Great Britain and the United Provinces (northern Holland) may attempt to take my American possessions. Apparently "rogue state" still just means "people we don't like". The adviser also warns me not to piss off the French, but they're apparently my allies, which is nice since they're right next to me and I'm not looking forward to a protracted land war right now.<br /><br />Also, apparently the last lion has died in Libya. Then the game gives me control.<br /><br />I start off focusing on Flanders (southern Holland), per the advice. There's a nice army stationed there already, along with my best defensive general, which is nice, but there's no walls, so I order the construction of those. There's an option to build either a governor's mansion or a military governor's encampment--I'm going with the military governor. It looks like it lets me train better units. I've also got a "rake", e.g. a spy and assassin, which I decide to sent into Rotterdam, a mission that immediately fails. Oops. The rake gets away, at least.<br /><br />I decide to send a missionary to Flanders as well to convert the Protestants and maybe improve my public image after that failed spy. Unfortunately it's going to take four years for him to get there by land and there's no ships on the northern coast to get him there faster. Ah, well. Maybe I should improve roads with next year's income.<br /><br /><br /><a href="http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v215/jsRedwall/ministers.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v215/jsRedwall/ministerssm.jpg" alt="America" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br />In addition to the regional options there's a lot of options for the central government, the most interesting of which are my ministers. My starting cabinet is full of floozies--apparently whoever was in charge before me didn't put much value in efficiency--but a few of the candidates are more impressive and some of the standing ministers perform better in other posts, so after some shuffling the government's looking much better. I'm hoping there are more monocled candidates soon, though.<br /><br />The other significant option is technology research. There are options under military, agricultural, and more theoretical stuff. Initially I'm rather interested in the military technologies, of course, but after looking over them "Social Contract", surprisingly, grabs my eye, mainly because it increases technology research rate, which seems a good thing to get out of the way in the beginning. I also order one of my government-employed gentleman to a nearby college to speed up the research. The adviser informs me gentleman can also duel other characters, which seems too amusing not to try at some point.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Next time:</span> pirates, a duel, and New Spain's impositions.circadianwolfhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13863959331740613989noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-425533341379809941.post-91267331818827275892009-07-15T19:30:00.004-05:002009-07-15T19:51:04.265-05:00I'd like to see<ul><li>A movie about the end of the world that's not about saving the world but about who gets to live through it. Inspired by the <span style="font-style: italic;">2012</span> trailers, which actually have a few interesting bits among the Roland Emmerich Epic Explosions, involving scenes of the government preparing what amounts to a modern Noah's Ark and deciding who gets on and who gets left behind. (Think also <span style="font-style: italic;">Battlestar</span>'s "Razor": "So you're going to decide just like that who lives and who dies?") You could even have lots of explosions and action shit with people revolting, trying to smuggle/attack their way onto the ark, etc., as well as a genuine Ethical Dilemma and angsty character drama (survivor's guilt, etc.).<br /><br /></li><li>A prose story (novel, novella, hypertext, whatever) about digital ghosts formed by the vast quantities of personal data left behind on the Internet in the modern world. Inspired by <span style="font-style: italic;">Caprica</span>'s pilot, except not with a stupid perfect copy but a fragmented, obviously artificial but still bearing significant resemblance construct, like a person with Alzheimer's, where sometimes they sound just like themselves and sometimes they're so very obviously not. Targeted straight at Uncanny Valley technological anxiety, identity theft fears, dreams of technological immortality via singularity and sci-fi's brains on disc trope, and more generally the piecemeal, constructed nature of modern cognizance (which has always been true obviously, just not so obvious, and the tearing away of the illusion of truth is what's so damaging and scary to us).<br /><br /></li><li>A video game about the exploration and terraforming of a new planet after Earth's downfall. Player character as the lone awakened human aboard an ark spaceship stocked with humans in hibernation/cryostasis/whatever and plant and animal specimens, sent down to a living planet's surface to scout. Encounters completely alien fauna and flora and early on involves lots of exploration porn, sweet vistas and crazy creatures and stuff, structured by a categorization mechanic ala <span style="font-style: italic;">Beyond Good and Evil</span> or <span style="font-style: italic;">Pokemon Snap</span>. Switches between on the planet (huge open world nonlinear exploration, with scout vehicle for fast travel around, all natural and curvy and colorful and alive) and the ark ship (cramped corridors, bulky square technological drab dead), getting orders from an AI terraforming protocol, gradually transitioning from exploration and cataloguing to terraforming, bringing in algae and small stuff at first and slowly escalating to higher terrestrial life forms, in the process wiping out the existing ecosystem. Watch all the cool creatures you hopefully became friendly with early on slowly killed off by your own efforts. Rebellion is inadvisable as the AI controls your fuel, food, water, etc. rations--and even if you just kill yourself, the AI awakens someone else to take over, and the game continues.<br /></li></ul>circadianwolfhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13863959331740613989noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-425533341379809941.post-89594840385426284122009-07-08T23:48:00.002-05:002009-08-13T12:39:00.609-05:00Left 4E DeadThese are not the monsters exactly as I ran them; rather, they are updated versions based on my own experience with running them. They in general run on the more damaging side (as my players noticed) but also ideally of lower health and defenses, to get as close to L4D's greater swinginess (to use an RPG term) while still feeling like 4E. House rules that already do this (e.g. decreasing monster hit points and increasing their damage) will amplify this effect.<br /><br /><table class="monster" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"><thead><tr><td><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"><tbody><tr><td><span class="name">Zombie Horde</span></td> <td><span class="role">Level 3 Brute</span></td> </tr> </tbody></table> <table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"> <tbody><tr> <td><span class="type">Huge Natural Humanoid (undead, swarm)</span></td> <td><span class="exp">XP 150</span></td> </tr> </tbody></table> </td> </tr> </thead> <tbody><tr class="mainstats"> <td> <table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"> <tbody><tr> <td style="width: 150px;"><span class="initiative"><b>Initiative</b> +1</span></td> <td><span class="senses"><b>Senses</b> Perception +1; darkvision</span></td> </tr> </tbody></table> </td> </tr> <tr class="mainstats"> <td><span class="aura"><b>Grabbing Mass</b> aura 1; at the start its turn the zombie horde makes a melee basic attack against each enemy in the aura as a free action.</span></td> </tr> <tr class="mainstats"> <td><span class="hp"><b>HP</b> 55; <b>Bloodied</b> 27</span></td> </tr> <tr class="mainstats"> <td><span class="defenses"><b>AC</b> 15; <b>Fortitude</b> 18, <b>Reflex</b> 15, <b>Will</b> 15</span></td> </tr> <tr class="mainstats"> <td><span class="damagetypemodifiers"><b>Immune</b> disease, poison; <b>Resist</b> half damage from melee and ranged attacks, 10 necrotic; <b>Vulnerable</b> 5 close and area attacks, 5 radiant, 5 fire</span></td> </tr> <tr class="mainstats"> <td><span class="savingthrows"><b>Saving Throws</b> +5 to effects imposed by ranged or melee attacks</span></td> </tr> <tr class="mainstats"> <td><span class="speed"><b>Speed</b> 6 squares, climb 4</span></td> </tr> <tr class="powerhead"> <td><span class="powerheadspan"><span class="dndicon">M</span> <b>Slam</b> (Standard; at-will)</span></td> </tr> <tr class="powerbody"> <td><span class="powerbodyspan">Melee 1; +6 vs. AC; 2d6 + 3 damage.</span></td> </tr> <tr class="powerhead"> <td><span class="powerheadspan"><span class="dndicon">m</span> <b>Grab</b> (Standard; at-will)</span></td> </tr> <tr class="powerbody"> <td><span class="powerbodyspan">Melee 1; +4 vs. Reflex; 1d10 + 3 damage, and the target is grabbed (until escape). Attempts to escape the zombie horde's grab take a -5 penalty.</span></td> </tr> <tr class="powerhead"> <td><span class="powerheadspan"><span class="dndicon">m</span> <b>Engulf</b> (against a grabbed target, standard; at-will)</span></td> </tr> <tr class="powerbody"> <td><span class="powerbodyspan">Melee 1; +4 vs Fortitude; 2d6 + 3 damage, and the target is engulfed by the zombie horde (until escape). While engulfed the target is grabbed, restrained, takes ongoing 10 damage (ongoing 5 while the zombie horde is bloodied), and slides into an adjacent square occupied by the zombie horde. An attempt to escape being engulfed takes a -5 penalty (not cumulative with the zombie horde's Grab penalty). Any ranged or melee attack against the target instead targets the zombie horde. While engulfing a target, the zombie horde can take no action other than to sustain the engulfment, although its aura still functions.</span></td> </tr> <tr class="powerhead"> <td><span class="powerheadspan"><b>Horde Stability</b></span></td> </tr> <tr class="powerbody"> <td><span class="powerbodyspan">The zombie horde can reduce any push, pull, or slide effect against it by 1 square.</span></td> </tr> <tr class="powerhead"> <td><span class="powerheadspan"><b>Thinning Out</b> (when first bloodied)</span></td> </tr> <tr class="powerbody"> <td><span class="powerbodyspan">The zombie horde's size changes to Large, and all its attacks take a -2 penalty to damage.</span></td> </tr> <tr class="powerhead"> <td><span class="powerheadspan"><b>Stragglers</b> (when reduced to 0 hit points)</span></td> </tr> <tr class="powerbody"> <td><span class="powerbodyspan">Three zombie rotters appear in any unoccupied space formerly occupied by the zombie horde.</span></td> </tr> <tr class="secondstats"> <td> <table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"> <tbody><tr> <td><span class="alignment"><b>Alignment</b> Unaligned</span></td> <td><span class="languages"><b>Languages</b> --</span></td> </tr> </tbody></table> </td> </tr> <tr class="secondstats"> <td> <table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"> <tbody><tr> <td><span class="ability"><b>Str</b> 16 (+4)</span></td> <td><span class="ability"><b>Dex</b> 11 (+1)</span></td> <td><span class="ability"><b>Wis</b> 11 (+1)</span></td> </tr> <tr> <td><span class="ability"><b>Con</b> 15 (+3)</span></td> <td><span class="ability"><b>Int</b> 3 (-3)</span></td> <td><span class="ability"><b>Cha</b> 3 (-3)</span></td></tr></tbody></table></td></tr></tbody></table><br />The zombie horde owes much of its design to a similar homebrew monster on the EN World forums by a user whose name I unfortunately do not recall. It begins as a fairly normal swarm creature (though unusual in that it is a swarm of Medium creatures) with an unusual and powerful Engulf ability that unfortunately I never got to try out in actual combat. The Engulf ability is meant to simulate getting surrounded by the horde in L4D and is quite dangerous, although as a brute the attack is unlikely to hit.<br /><br />One of the additions to most of these monsters from the versions I ran is a vulnerability to fire. When the tank attacked my players their first thought was to set it on fire; I had not originally included any rules for it, but I decided on the fly to give the tank vulnerability to fire (although not actually catch on fire from such damage, to my players' disappointment), which I then transferred over to the rest of the zombies as I went over them afterwards. Purely from a 4E stand point, the radiant vulnerability is completely servicable and adding fire gives them an additional weakness, but fire is such an iconic part of L4D that I didn't want to give it up.<br /><br /><table class="monster" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"><thead><tr><td><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"><tbody><tr><td><span class="name">Zombie Hunter</span></td> <td><span class="role">Level 3 Lurker</span></td> </tr> </tbody></table> <table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"> <tbody><tr> <td><span class="type">Medium Natural Humanoid (undead)</span></td> <td><span class="exp">XP 150</span></td> </tr> </tbody></table> </td> </tr> </thead> <tbody><tr class="mainstats"> <td> <table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"> <tbody><tr> <td style="width: 150px;"><span class="initiative"><b>Initiative</b> +8</span></td> <td><span class="senses"><b>Senses</b> Perception +8; darkvision</span></td> </tr> </tbody></table> </td> </tr> <tr class="mainstats"> <td><span class="hp"><b>HP</b> 37; <b>Bloodied</b> 18</span></td> </tr> <tr class="mainstats"> <td><span class="defenses"><b>AC</b> 17; <b>Fortitude</b> 16, <b>Reflex</b> 18, <b>Will</b> 16</span></td> </tr> <tr class="mainstats"> <td><span class="damagetypemodifiers"><b>Immune</b> disease, poison; <b>Resist</b> 10 necrotic; <b>Vulnerable</b> 5 radiant, 5 fire</span></td> </tr> <tr class="mainstats"> <td><span class="speed"><b>Speed</b> 8 squares, climb 6 (spider climb)</span></td> </tr> <tr class="powerhead"> <td><span class="powerheadspan"><span class="dndicon">M</span> <b>Claw</b> (Standard; at-will)</span></td> </tr> <tr class="powerbody"> <td><span class="powerbodyspan">Melee 1; +8 vs. AC; 2d6 + 3 damage.</span></td> </tr> <tr class="powerhead"> <td><span class="powerheadspan"><span class="dndicon">m</span> <b>Pounce</b> (only usable as part of a charge; standard; at-will)</span></td> </tr> <tr class="powerbody"> <td><span class="powerbodyspan">Melee 1; +6 vs. Reflex; 1d6 + 3 damage, ongoing 5 damage, and the target is grabbed and dazed (escape ends all) and knocked prone. Attempts to escape the zombie hunter's grab take a -5 penalty. The zombie hunter enters the target's space, is dazed, and any melee or ranged attack against the target instead targets the zombie hunter. If the zombie hunter leaves the target's space for any reason, the grab ends.</span></td> </tr> <tr class="powerhead"> <td><span class="powerheadspan"><b>Leaper</b></span></td> </tr> <tr class="powerbody"> <td><span class="powerbodyspan">As a move action or as part of a charge, the zombie hunter can jump up to its speed without making an Athletics check and gains a +4 bonus to defenses against opportunity attacks provoked by jumping.</span></td> </tr> <tr class="powerhead"> <td><span class="powerheadspan"><b>Flaming Hunter</b></span></td> </tr> <tr class="powerbody"> <td><span class="powerbodyspan">If the zombie hunter takes fire damage, its attacks on its next turn gain a +2 bonus to damage (including ongoing damage).</span></td> </tr> <tr class="secondstats"> <td> <table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"> <tbody><tr> <td><span class="alignment"><b>Alignment</b> Unaligned</span></td> <td><span class="languages"><b>Languages</b> --</span></td> </tr> </tbody></table> </td> </tr> <tr class="secondstats"> <td><span class="skills"><b>Skills</b> Stealth +9, Acrobatics +9</span></td> </tr> <tr class="secondstats"> <td> <table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"> <tbody><tr> <td><span class="ability"><b>Str</b> 14 (+3)</span></td> <td><span class="ability"><b>Dex</b> 17 (+4)</span></td> <td><span class="ability"><b>Wis</b> 14 (+3)</span></td> </tr> <tr> <td><span class="ability"><b>Con</b> 13 (+2)</span></td> <td><span class="ability"><b>Int</b> 4 (-2)</span></td> <td><span class="ability"><b>Cha</b> 3 (-3)</span></td></tr></tbody></table></td></tr></tbody></table><br />Hunters were especially interesting to design due to their Pounce attack. I borrowed from the horde's already established Engulf ability for an attack that did a lot of damage if sustained (though, like the actual L4D hunter, the initial damage is less than a simple claw swipe) but also made the hunter more vulnerable. (In one encounter, I had a horde attack a hunter pounced on a character due to its aura; I figured it fit the mindlessness of the Horde.)<br /><br />Flaming Hunter is one of my favorite features of any monster I've ever designed. Part of it is that I like the idea of mixing advantages and dangers--hit the hunter with fire to do more damage to it, but also make it do more damage. And part of it is simply for the fact that flaming hunters are probably my favorite part of L4D, to the point that I giddily scream "Flaming hunter!" and intentionally set myself on fire when playing as one. (I suppose a few people might not actually know: hunters in L4D do significantly more damage when on fire. They also don't take ongoing damage from fire while pouncing someone, which makes setting yourself on fire extremely effective in most situations.)<br /><br /><table class="monster" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"><thead><tr><td><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"><tbody><tr><td><span class="name">Zombie Smoker</span></td> <td><span class="role">Level 3 Controller</span></td> </tr> </tbody></table> <table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"> <tbody><tr> <td><span class="type">Medium Natural Humanoid (undead)</span></td> <td><span class="exp">XP 150</span></td> </tr> </tbody></table> </td> </tr> </thead> <tbody><tr class="mainstats"> <td> <table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"> <tbody><tr> <td style="width: 150px;"><span class="initiative"><b>Initiative</b> +4</span></td> <td><span class="senses"><b>Senses</b> Perception +3; darkvision</span></td> </tr> </tbody></table> </td> </tr> <tr class="mainstats"> <td><span class="hp"><b>HP</b> 43; <b>Bloodied</b> 21</span></td> </tr> <tr class="mainstats"> <td><span class="defenses"><b>AC</b> 17; <b>Fortitude</b> 16, <b>Reflex</b> 17, <b>Will</b> 16</span></td> </tr> <tr class="mainstats"> <td><span class="damagetypemodifiers"><b>Immune</b> disease, poison; <b>Resist</b> 10 necrotic; <b>Vulnerable</b> 5 radiant, 5 fire</span></td> </tr> <tr class="mainstats"> <td><span class="speed"><b>Speed</b> 6 squares, climb 5</span></td> </tr> <tr class="powerhead"> <td><span class="powerheadspan"><span class="dndicon">M</span> <b>Claw</b> (Standard; at-will)</span></td> </tr> <tr class="powerbody"> <td><span class="powerbodyspan">Melee 1; +8 vs AC; 1d6 + 3 damage.</span></td> </tr> <tr class="powerhead"> <td><span class="powerheadspan"><span class="dndicon">r</span> <b>Tongue Grab</b> (Standard; recharge <span class="dndicon">56</span>)</span></td> </tr> <tr class="powerbody"> <td><span class="powerbodyspan">Ranged 10; +7 vs Reflex; 2d6 + 3 damage, ongoing 5 (until escape, and the target is knocked prone, pulled 3, and grabbed (until escape). Attempts to escape the zombie smoker's grab take a -5 penalty.<br /><i>Sustain Standard:</i> the target is pulled 3 squares. The first time the zombie smoker sustains this power, the target is dazed (until escape). The second time the zombie smoker sustains this power, the target becomes unconscious (until the target takes damage from an attack). If the zombie smoker fails to sustain this power, the target automatically escapes at the end of the zombie smoker's turn. The zombie smoker can only recharge this power when it does not have a target grabbed.</span></td> </tr> <tr class="powerhead"> <td><span class="powerheadspan"><span class="dndicon">c</span> <b>Smoking Cloud</b> (when the zombie smoker is reduced to 0 hit points) ♦ <b>poison</b></span></td> </tr> <tr class="powerbody"> <td><span class="powerbodyspan">Close burst 1; +7 vs Fortitude; 1d6 + 3 poison damage, and the target is weakened and takes a -2 penalty to attack rolls until the end of its next turn.</span></td> </tr> <tr class="secondstats"> <td> <table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"> <tbody><tr> <td><span class="alignment"><b>Alignment</b> Unaligned</span></td> <td><span class="languages"><b>Languages</b> --</span></td> </tr> </tbody></table> </td> </tr> <tr class="secondstats"> <td><span class="skills"><b>Skills</b> Stealth +9</span></td> </tr> <tr class="secondstats"> <td> <table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"> <tbody><tr> <td><span class="ability"><b>Str</b> 14 (+3)</span></td> <td><span class="ability"><b>Dex</b> 17 (+4)</span></td> <td><span class="ability"><b>Wis</b> 14 (+3)</span></td> </tr> <tr> <td><span class="ability"><b>Con</b> 11 (+1)</span></td> <td><span class="ability"><b>Int</b> 5 (-2)</span></td> <td><span class="ability"><b>Cha</b> 3 (-3)</span></td></tr></tbody></table></td></tr></tbody></table><br />The smoker is my favorite of L4D's zombies, and it proved the most annoying of any of the zombies in the 4E version due to its ability to attack at range and quickly disappear. The smoker is labeled here as a Controller, but that's mostly for diversity: all of the specials are clearly Lurkers, with the boomer having an obvious Leader ability as well, but smokers clearly have a minor in controlling as well--their job, after all, is not so much damage as disruption of the survivors' formation.<br /><br />While the smoker proved the most annoying of foes for my players, it never managed to sustain its grab long enough to reach the more powerful effects (it kept strangling the ranger, who had a very high Acrobatics modifier), so I'm not sure how those work out. Obviously it's very powerful for a level 3 monster, but I also ruled that players could use their own move action to make an escape check for the grabbed player (essentially L4D's melee-to-free), which I don't think is RAW an option but seems reasonable.<br /><br /><table class="monster" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"><thead><tr><td><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"><tbody><tr><td><span class="name">Zombie Boomer</span></td> <td><span class="role">Level 2 Lurker (Leader)</span></td> </tr> </tbody></table> <table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"> <tbody><tr> <td><span class="type">Medium Natural Humanoid (undead)</span></td> <td><span class="exp">XP 125</span></td> </tr> </tbody></table> </td> </tr> </thead> <tbody><tr class="mainstats"> <td> <table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"> <tbody><tr> <td style="width: 150px;"><span class="initiative"><b>Initiative</b> +5</span></td> <td><span class="senses"><b>Senses</b> Perception +1; darkvision</span></td> </tr> </tbody></table> </td> </tr> <tr class="mainstats"> <td><span class="aura"><b>Boomer Stench</b> aura 1; enemies in the aura take a -2 penalty to attack rolls.</span></td> </tr> <tr class="mainstats"> <td><span class="hp"><b>HP</b> 26; <b>Bloodied</b> 13</span></td> </tr> <tr class="mainstats"> <td><span class="defenses"><b>AC</b> 15; <b>Fortitude</b> 13, <b>Reflex</b> 13, <b>Will</b> 14</span></td> </tr> <tr class="mainstats"> <td><span class="damagetypemodifiers"><b>Immune</b> disease, poison; <b>Resist</b> 10 necrotic; <b>Vulnerable</b> 5 radiant, 5 force</span></td> </tr> <tr class="mainstats"> <td><span class="speed"><b>Speed</b> 5 squares</span></td> </tr> <tr class="powerhead"> <td><span class="powerheadspan"><span class="dndicon">M</span> <b>Claw</b> (Standard; at-will)</span></td> </tr> <tr class="powerbody"> <td><span class="powerbodyspan">Melee 1; +7 vs. AC; 1d6 + 3 damage.</span></td> </tr> <tr class="powerhead"> <td><span class="powerheadspan"><span class="dndicon">c</span> <b>Vomit</b> (Standard; recharge <span class="dndicon">6</span>) ♦ <b>Acid</b></span></td> </tr> <tr class="powerbody"> <td><span class="powerbodyspan">Close blast 3; +5 vs Reflex; 1d10 + 3 acid damage, and the target is blinded (save ends). While a target is blinded, zombies gain a +4 bonus to damage rolls against the target.</span></td> </tr> <tr class="powerhead"> <td><span class="powerheadspan"><span class="dndicon">c</span> <b>Boomer Burst</b> (when the zombie boomer is reduced to 0 hit points) ♦ <b>Acid</b></span></td> </tr> <tr class="powerbody"> <td><span class="powerbodyspan">Close burst 2; the zombie boomer makes a Vomit attack against each non-zombie creature in range.</span></td> </tr> <tr class="secondstats"> <td> <table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"> <tbody><tr> <td><span class="alignment"><b>Alignment</b> Unaligned</span></td> <td><span class="languages"><b>Languages</b> --</span></td> </tr> </tbody></table> </td> </tr> <tr class="secondstats"> <td> <table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"> <tbody><tr> <td><span class="ability"><b>Str</b> 13 (+2)</span></td> <td><span class="ability"><b>Dex</b> 11 (+1)</span></td> <td><span class="ability"><b>Wis</b> 11 (+1)</span></td> </tr> <tr> <td><span class="ability"><b>Con</b> 8 (+0)</span></td> <td><span class="ability"><b>Int</b> 3 (-3)</span></td> <td><span class="ability"><b>Cha</b> 3 (-3)</span></td></tr></tbody></table></td></tr></tbody></table><br />Boomers are a finicky beast. Due to the way hit points work they need to be of lower level (or have a general vulnerability, I suppose, or make them minions, which would be hilarious) than the other zombies to make them seem easier to kill. I also didn't get a chance to see how their signature vomit interacted with zombies in play; the boomer's only appearance in combat only hit one player and the only other zombie around, a horde, was blocked by the rest of the characters.<br /><br /><table class="monster" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"><thead><tr><td><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"><tbody><tr><td><span class="name">Zombie Tank</span></td> <td><span class="role">Level 3 Elite Brute</span></td> </tr> </tbody></table> <table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"> <tbody><tr> <td><span class="type">Large Natural Humanoid (undead)</span></td> <td><span class="exp">XP 300</span></td> </tr> </tbody></table> </td> </tr> </thead> <tbody><tr class="mainstats"> <td> <table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"> <tbody><tr> <td style="width: 150px;"><span class="initiative"><b>Initiative</b> +1</span></td> <td><span class="senses"><b>Senses</b> Perception +2; darkvision</span></td> </tr> </tbody></table> </td> </tr> <tr class="mainstats"> <td><span class="hp"><b>HP</b> 116; <b>Bloodied</b> 58</span></td> </tr> <tr class="mainstats"> <td><span class="regeneration"><b>Regeneration</b> 5</span></td> </tr> <tr class="mainstats"> <td><span class="defenses"><b>AC</b> 17; <b>Fortitude</b> 19, <b>Reflex</b> 15, <b>Will</b> 16</span></td> </tr> <tr class="mainstats"> <td><span class="damagetypemodifiers"><b>Immune</b> disease, poison; <b>Resist</b> 10 necrotic; <b>Vulnerable</b> fire, radiant; if the zombie tank takes fire or radiant damage, its regeneration does not function on its next turn.</span></td> </tr> <tr class="mainstats"> <td><span class="savingthrows"><b>Saving Throws</b> +2</span></td> </tr> <tr class="mainstats"> <td><span class="speed"><b>Speed</b> 7 squares, climb 4</span></td> </tr> <tr class="mainstats"> <td><span class="actionpoints"><b>Action Points</b> 1</span></td> </tr> <tr class="powerhead"> <td><span class="powerheadspan"><span class="dndicon">M</span> <b>Slam</b> (Standard; at-will)</span></td> </tr> <tr class="powerbody"> <td><span class="powerbodyspan">Melee 1; +6 vs AC; 2d6 + 3 damage, and the target is pushed 3 squares and knocked prone.</span></td> </tr> <tr class="powerhead"> <td><span class="powerheadspan"><span class="dndicon">m</span> <b>Smash</b> (against a prone target; sandard; at-will)</span></td> </tr> <tr class="powerbody"> <td><span class="powerbodyspan">Melee 1; +6 vs AC; 3d8 + 3 damage.</span></td> </tr> <tr class="powerhead"> <td><span class="powerheadspan"><span class="dndicon">a</span> <b>Rock Throw</b> (Standard; recharge <span class="dndicon">3456</span>)</span></td> </tr> <tr class="powerbody"> <td><span class="powerbodyspan">Area burst 1 within 10 squares; 1d6 + 3 damage, and the target is pushed 1 square and knocked prone.</span></td> </tr> <tr class="powerhead"> <td><span class="powerheadspan"><b>Swat</b> (when an enemy moves adjacent to the zombie tank; immediate reaction; at-will)</span></td> </tr> <tr class="powerbody"> <td><span class="powerbodyspan">The zombie tank makes a melee basic attack against the triggering enemy.</span></td> </tr> <tr class="secondstats"> <td> <table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"> <tbody><tr> <td><span class="alignment"><b>Alignment</b> Unaligned</span></td> <td><span class="languages"><b>Languages</b> --</span></td> </tr> </tbody></table> </td> </tr> <tr class="secondstats"> <td><span class="skills"><b>Skills</b> Athletics +9</span></td> </tr> <tr class="secondstats"> <td> <table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"> <tbody><tr> <td><span class="ability"><b>Str</b> 17 (+4)</span></td> <td><span class="ability"><b>Dex</b> 11 (+1)</span></td> <td><span class="ability"><b>Wis</b> 13 (+2)</span></td> </tr> <tr> <td><span class="ability"><b>Con</b> 18 (+5)</span></td> <td><span class="ability"><b>Int</b> 3 (-3)</span></td> <td><span class="ability"><b>Cha</b> 3 (-3)</span></td></tr></tbody></table></td></tr></tbody></table><br />Ah, the tank. The players appropriately grew terrified when the tank arrived, although due to its lack of entourage it failed to live up to expectations. And while its Slam and Swat abilities proved accurately powerful, I never got a chance to use Smash, which would have a significant chance of knocking a level-appropriate character unconscious. Due to the interior setting I also never used Rock Throw, but only pansies use that anyway. Unfortunately I could figure out no way to included the tank's ability to kill everyone with one punted log, car, or forklift and stay balanced.circadianwolfhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13863959331740613989noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-425533341379809941.post-9709735606790393422009-07-08T23:16:00.001-05:002009-07-08T23:18:08.216-05:00The fifth man: Summer D&D session 4, part II<span style="font-weight: bold;">The Boys are Back in Town</span><br /><br />My last campaign was a travelogue in structure; that is, the characters were on a journey (though their destination changed and at times they weren't exactly sure what it was) and thus rarely visited the same place twice. They had no "home base", in campaign structure terms: a town or other location which they visited after completing major quests.<br /><br />One of the many things different with my summer campaign is that I am trying to establish something of a home base, or at least let the characters stay in one location longer. But for that to matter you have to have an established setting with meaning and context, which means more than a map with a key and some brief description. I meant to reestablish (or really, establish, given the loose context in which the campaign began) the setting of the town of Winterhaven upon the characters' return, but, well, if you read these postmortems you know I mean to do a lot of things. (In retrospect, forcing the players to walk back to Winterhaven from the ruins of the Keep, and thus through the farms that surround it and through the gates and such, would have given plenty of opportunities for just this sort of thing. Oops.)<br /><br />Instead, the characters found themselves in the ancient stone tower at the center of the town, which had gone unremarked their previous visit. They briefly met the tower's occupant, an ancient sage named Valen who offered some brief comedy (by pushing one of the characters off the tower's roof and then casting Feather Fall just before he hit the ground), then met with Freddy Lipton, their nominal employer (of sorts) on the expedition to the Keep, who simply directed them to convert their loot into gold at the nearby store--whereupon they were arrested by Winterhaven's guard captain, Andre de Ker, who had previously stirred trouble with the characters.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Only as Good as the Villain</span><br /><br />Andre de Ker is, I think, one of the successes so far of the summer campaign. Villains are always interesting characters to me, in that I don't truly believe in "evil", just in the effects that fear and self-righteousness can have on people. De Ker is the kind of villain I appreciate and I think players appreciate a lot as well: not a villain with grand schemes whose opponent is the world, something that players have a hard time getting involved in, but a villain personally to the characters, whose evil is as direct antagonism against the players.<br /><br />As the players realized as they worked out de Ker's past as a failed adventurer (from comments by Valen and de Ker's strange obsession with the Keep), de Ker is not so much evil as pathetic and jealous of actual successful adventurers. Making the conflict personal made the players hate him, not just the characters (leading to some hilarious moments in session 5).<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">You are Number Six</span><br /><br />Not so successful was the concurrent introduction of our new fifth player. Introducing new characters is an art I have little experience with (and never on the DMing end), and the circumstances were did not help the situation: I helped the player create her character in the hours before the session, and our only discussion of how she might fit into the ongoing campaign was during the brief car ride over to our playing location.<br /><br />I do think that the character creation process itself was slightly better. Since I knew for some time we'd be adding a new player, I gave some thought as to how to introduce the concept of character creation in a less haphazard way than with the first four players of this campaign. I realized that power sources, often ignored by more experienced players, are actually a very good way of presenting choices to new players: since I imagine most people unfamiliar with RPG mechanics come into the game wanting to play a magic user, a weapon wielder, a divine caster, etc., the power sources are, it seems to me, a better place to start than with classes or races, of which there are of course many. And if they do have a grasp of basic RPG mechanics--enough to grasp the class rolls, at least--then you can easily narrow down the myriad choices. In this case the player liked the sound of the Primal classes and, since she had wanted a companion similar to our ranger's beast companion, a shaman became a natural choice.<br /><br />The actual character's introduction was unfortunately more-or-less nonexistant. The characters met her as a fellow prisoner arrested by de Ker but I never actually prompted an appropriate introductory dialogue. Once the players were freed (due to a zombie attack and most of de Ker's guards being slain in the initial onslaught), they simply brought the shaman along with them, since she was now a member of the party, of course.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">ZOMG</span><br /><br />There was a period of time while designing the Keep that I had no idea what would come next. I pondered various possibilities and eventually returned to one of the basics: an undead attack. It flowed naturally from the established background of the Keep (though the players have yet to figure out the exact connection) and gave an opportunity to run a series of encounters I have personally wanted to do for some time: Left 4 Dead, D&D style. I actually experienced a L4D-inspired encounter in a campaign I play in (and thus all the credit goes to that DM for the idea), but for my own I created custom versions of all the L4D zombies (minus the witch, although the imagery of the witch did come into play).<br /><br />I didn't get to use them all as planned, unfortunately: the series of three combat encounters, always lengthy in 4E, in the back half of a session meant combat fatigue set in and the climatic battle--set in the Clue manor, standing in for the home of Winterhaven's Lord Warden, and featuring a tank, a smoker (which previously ambushed the characters while they were outside), a hunter, a boomer, and a horde, I ended up cutting the final encounter down to a brief confrontation with a horde and a boomer (which simply ran when the horde fell) and one-on-five fight with the tank, who despite his elite status (and due to my forgetting his regeneration) fell quickly.<br /><br />The cliffhanger--approaching the final accessible room on the first floor to hear crying--proved quite effective, though.circadianwolfhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13863959331740613989noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-425533341379809941.post-10462211618757463142009-07-08T19:27:00.000-05:002009-07-08T19:27:18.806-05:00End of the line: Summer D&D session 4, part I<span style="font-weight: bold;">Took a Level in Badass (Or At Least Not Dying)</span><br /><br />The players returned the next session facing that the bad news that their characters would not be getting an extended rest, meaning the rogue remained at 1 HP with all healing surges used, and the good news that they reached Level 2. Leveling takes a while, but luckily many of the players, despite their relative newness to the game, had by now gotten enough of a handle on the Character Builder to do most of the leveling up on their own (an action I was initially quite wary of), with only a bit of overview on my part to ensure everything went well. Unfortunately the time won by this was offset by the extra time taken to set up a new player--time well spent, of course, but it nonetheless meant the session started much later than normal.<br /><br />Leveling also reduced the rogue's problems, as to combat his constant shortage of surges he took the Durable feat (the bonus surges which I immediately granted him) and the cleric took Cure Light Wounds as his utility power, which he promptly cast on the rogue as well.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">You Can't Go Over Water . . .</span><br /><br />The players began actual play fitfully. They remained worried about a boss encounter ahead they felt ill-equipped to fight, and so it took some encouragement from me as DM to get them to venture forward to the next open room, which contained one of the most important parts of the Keep, a complex device that players figured out after some time (with the help of outbursts from the angry voice) was some sort of power generator and containment system for the planar rift that the deva's flashback had established the Keep was built to defend against.<br /><br />The description of the centerpiece of the room--a group of metallic circles spinning in a spherical formation, with three large, finely carved gems set at the intersections of the circles--attracted the players, so much so that they were afraid of doing anything with it (correctly assuming that messing with whatever was containing the rift would have serious consequences). In the end I had to keep prodding the players, who eventually came up with a plan to instead cut the power lines connecting the generator to the rest of the facility (and specifically the magically locked door to the final room). But since in this case the generator's collapse was the inciting incident for the next act of the campaign, cutting the lines simply led to a feedback loop within the generator that brought the containment down just as well (and opened the door).<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Something of an Anticlimax</span><br /><br />The players entered the final room prepared for a boss battle and possibly the rescue of a prisoner (the fifth player waiting to be introduced this session). They found instead only a small but well-furnished room (everything was gnome sized, as they realized) and a ranting robot, now too confused and upset by the containment failure (I threw in a "resonance cascade" reference that no one got, unfortunately). The room also quickly began falling apart, along with the rest of the facility (the implication being that some sort of magical field or other device had been keeping the ancient ruins stabilized), but an escape quickly presented itself: one last false wall, revealed by its not shaking along with the rest of the room, behind which was hidden a teleportation circle.<br /><br />Originally I imagined the finale of the Keep as a complex skill challenge involving an Indiana Jones-style escape as the ruins collapsed around the characters; I'm honestly not sure why I went with the hidden teleportation circle instead, aside from the ease of getting the players back to town. It certainly would have been a bit more exciting, though for once the skill challenge to activate the circle got everyone involved with useful skills, as the cleric and wizard used Arcana to decipher the circle itself, the ranger used Perception to search the room for useful information, and the rogue made one last attempt to get information out of the robot with Bluff--not to much use, but he did end up dragging the robot along as a man-sized trophy.circadianwolfhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13863959331740613989noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-425533341379809941.post-48758468532075226922009-07-06T21:37:00.003-05:002009-07-06T22:16:55.082-05:00Because version numbering is a meme that will never die: Summer D&D session 3.5<span style="font-weight: bold;">The Last of the Traps</span><br /><br />When we returned from dinner, the characters had just recovered from a fight against themselves and discovered a way out of their illusionary prison. This short corridor led to what was originally planned to be one last illusion, more annoying than anything else--a hole in the floor of the corridor and the apparent doorway out on the other side, with the quick revelation that the "other side" was actually just a blank wall and the hole in fact led to the next level--that once again fell flat on its feet (and once again, to no detriment to the party, thankfully).<br /><br />The last actual trap--the gnome's security system of pressure plates and magic crossbows (straight ouf the DMG, for once)--sparked some unintentional but welcomed humor as after detecting them each of the group managed to get across the pressure plates--except for the exceptionally agile rogue, who fell flat on his feet and activated the crossbows. Further humor ensued when the rogue asked as they fought the crossbows if the doorway was in fact still open--yes, I responded, hoping to give the party an opportunity to end the encounter quickly if they wanted to. They disabled the crossbows anyway.<br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">The Voice in Your Head</span></span><br /><br />The characters finally entered the meat of the Keep, beyond all the defenses. The first major detail I described was of a tinny voice shouting at them from somewhere distant but all-around them, a voice angry at their breach of the facility and ordering them to leave. The cleric attempted to negotiate with the voice once the players realized it could hear and respond to them, but quickly realized they would get nowhere.<br /><br />I originally liked the idea of the characters being able to convince the voice that they were servants sent by the "master" it kept referring to, a bluff that the cleric in fact tried, but I was forced to discard this when I considered that a successful bluff would leave force a radical alteration for my plans for the dungeon. This was due to early plans focusing more on puzzles than combat--essentially, the players would have been helping the voice (a robot placed in charge of the facility in the gnome's absence, they would eventually find) restore the facility to functionality rather than just exploring its ruins and fighting the remnants of its production. I am still intrigued by this idea (and it would have led to far more sinister implications later on), but unfortunately I couldn't come up with ideas for puzzles that I liked enough and weren't simply following what the voice told them to do and so fell back on combat, a system which 4E of course handles much better.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Robot Factory (Minus the Machinist)</span><br /><br />Players always grapple on to ideas you don't expect them to, hanging on even as you try to make clear that you have no plans for that eventuality--which is really your fault as a DM anyway; they should be allowed to cling onto the ideas they come up with based on what you've presented them. In this case there were two things the players grabbed on to: the ruins of the robot assembly line, which, accepting unfortunately that I was not about to deal with the players getting it running again for their own purposes, I simply had them able to start long enough for it to fall apart completely; and a "clockwork mechanism" they recovered amid rusted debris in a storage room, an item which I originally intended as simply a useless gadget to be sold (i.e., a clever way to give the players gold in a place where there would not reasonably be much gold to be found). The mechanism, a much more ambiguous item, has instead become a part of my ongoing plans.<br /><br />The cleric also opted to spend the gold to use his Unseen Servant ritual and order it to search the storage room (and later the other rooms) instead of searching it themselves (although in the ten minute casting time I would have allowed them to find all available loot); I embraced this plan by having it find the mechanism immediately and wait for it to turn up the rest of the room's loot (4 healing potions) until after he returned to check up on it. Rituals are a part of 4E I feel are unfortunately under-used, and I continue to consider steps to make them easier and more useful. The PHBII classes' ritual casting features are a good start, and one that I plan on passing to my PHBI class players, allowing clerics to cast Gentle Repose once per day without components and wizards (supposedly the ultimate ritual casters after all) any ritual they know up to their level once per day without components (though this of course requires restrictions on creation levels to prevent enchanting item abuse--perhaps a limitation to only rituals with a set component cost?)<br /><br />After a brief visit and raid of an armory, the players moved on to the next room, which did not come across as planned, to possible detriment. I described the room as full of mechanical equipment built around a low long metal table--intending but failing to evoke the imagery of Frankenstein's lab. This was, in fact, the "animation room", the place where the gnome's robots, after assembly in the construction room the characters already explored, were brought to "life". The players didn't figure that out (which was my fault, of course), and although this did not have negative consequences at the time, I fear it will come back to bite me in the ass later. (Of course, most of them read this, so now they know and will theorize accordingly, I suppose.)<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Damned Respawns</span><br /><br />The exit of the players from the animation room triggered the next combat encounter, the only actual one on the Keep's second level: a group of security robots (Warforged Soldiers and a Captain, leveled down) sent by the angry voice still yelling at the characters for their intrusion. The quirk to this encounter as the nearby open doors to a storage room where dozens more unactivated robots stood ready, with another activating on each turn, supposedly leading to a desperate in-combat skill challenge to close the doors before too many robots emerged.<br /><br />But while the players quickly recognized the panels they needed to reach to close the doors, the Captain's tactical positioning of itself in front of the panel and his high defenses made the struggle instead simply to kill the Captain. The main culprit of this was the lack of forced movement powers among the party: although the wizard has Phantom Bolt as an at-will, the Captain's high defenses made it too difficult to use. As a result, I simply stopped adding robots after a number of rounds, though I continued to describe the threat of the activating robots, and the first few rounds proved to put enough fear in the players to make them very thankful when they did manage to kill the Captain and close the doors, at which point the session ended with the characters in bad shape--the party's rogue, downed during the fight with no remaining surges, managed to roll a 20 on a death save and thus was walking with 1 HP--and the players anxious and worried about what lie ahead, presuming a looming boss fight with the voice overhead and requesting an extended rest that I informed them (following the rule of needing twelve hours between extended rests, but also knowing that there was no further combat coming) would not be coming.<span style="font-weight: bold;"></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"></span>circadianwolfhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13863959331740613989noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-425533341379809941.post-64224357641504751662009-07-05T22:34:00.008-05:002009-07-06T22:18:04.538-05:00HeathrowWhen the mind is sick, sometimes even stranger things come out.<br /><br /><img src="http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v215/jsRedwall/heathrowsm-1.jpg" alt="Heathrow" border="0" />circadianwolfhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13863959331740613989noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-425533341379809941.post-83717557576015389382009-07-04T00:26:00.000-05:002009-07-04T00:26:10.177-05:00Supporting the community<blockquote>"Mankind." That word should have new meaning for all of us today. We can't be consumed by our petty differences anymore. We will be united in our common interests. Perhaps it's fate that today is the Fourth of July, and you will once again be fighting for our freedom... Not from tyranny, oppression, or persecution... but from annihilation. We are fighting for our right to live. To exist. And should we win the day, the Fourth of July will no longer be known as an American holiday, but as the day the world declared in one voice: "We will not go quietly into the night!" We will not vanish without a fight! We're going to live on! We're going to survive! Today we celebrate our Independence Day!</blockquote>It is my understanding that <span style="font-style: italic;">Independence Day</span>, the 1996 summer blockbuster, was nearly universally reviled in Europe and, well, everywhere in the world that is not the United States, with many critics pointing to the speech above as the epitome of unironic American egocentrism. After all, what is a clearer statement of American arrogance and ignorance than the supreme success of a movie predicated on an asinine analogue between the American Revolution and an alien invasion?<br /><br />This is not the point of this post.<br /><br />American egocentrism is nothing new and to say something new about it would be difficult and, more importantly, not particularly meaningful. To attack it on the American Independence Day would also be a poor move: a nation's citizens should have the right to celebrate their nation on the anniversary of its founding if no other day, should they not? Perhaps, then, we should attack nationalism, or the positively connoted synonym patriotism, which Samuel Johnson famously declared "the last refuge of the scoundrel". After all, Americans have only recently emerged from eight years of opponents to government actions being summarily dismissed as "unpatriotic".<br /><br />This, too, is not the point of this post.<br /><br />Or at least, not exactly. The genesis of this post lies with a bumper sticker I saw some weeks ago: I have meant to write this since then, but the Fourth has finally given me the motivation to actually do so. The sticker's text was something along the lines of, "The PATRIOT Act is Unpatriotic". Pithy, of course, and a standard line since the infamous legislation that legalized so much dangerously unsupervised surveillance. But I argue that the line is an intrinsic contradiction; that it fails before it begins by accepting a vocabulary whose baseline assumptions already make the winner the side of centralized authority, secrecy, control, power.<br /><br />It is no news that what passes for "liberal" in the United States--or rather, what is allowed to pass for liberal in the mainstream political and media spheres of the United States--would barely pass for center-right in any other modern political discourse. But even among those ostracized, "radical" members of the American Left, there are many who still suffer from a great and terrible fear of being labeled "unpatriotic". They find the PATRIOT Act offensive not just because of its contents but because of the audacity of the name, the vile contradiction between signifier and signified that they perceive from it. They rise to anger when mouthpieces denounce them or others as "unpatriotic" because they are the "real" patriots: because they support what the United States was truly founded on, the values they espouse, which are contrary to the centralized authority proffered by the "other side".<br /><br />It is not simply that they fight a battle, not realizing that they have lost the war, it is that they fight a war on terrorism with terror. It is that they fight a war to end war. It is that they are arguing from a position whose central tenets, if examined closely and truthfully, can only result in the conclusion that war is peace and freedom is slavery. And thus, of course, ignorance is strength.<br /><br />Their failure, their first and damning mistake, is that they accept the premise of the "nation". That the idea of the United States is a noble one, that it is a real and living entity that must be defended from those who would prey upon it, that a legitimate purpose of government and politics is the vitality and morality of the nation.<br /><br />This is bullshit.<br /><br />The idea of the "nation" may, in fact, be the most dangerous bullshit ever thought up by the minds of men--or perhaps not. But certainly the nation, the successor to the empire (though of course empires persisted long past the rise of nations and persist today, America's being the most notable), is one of the greatest tools of oppression ever devised.<br /><br />A nation is an artificial community. People naturally group themselves by connections of family, locations, resources, anything that can connect people together. Human beings are a social species; their strength is in networks. Alone (although we are never truly alone, of course), we are weak; it is by working together, by giving and taking from each other, that human beings have accomplished what they have.<br /><br />Networks, however, can be difficult to build. Beyond the blood ties of family, human connections can be notoriously tenuous--barring childish "friendship bracelets" and the like (though they of course are similar symptoms of the same desire for signification), there are no permanent marks of friendship. Friendship is a connection based on trust, but trust, of course, is something that is difficult for many people to give. And so we create visible signs and symbols of our connections, to make sure they are based not simply on trust (as if a physical embodiment gives a connection more strength--though of course often it does, in that a person who defies a signified connection becomes known as a betrayer): we have contracts, and laws, and titles, and business cards, and in the process the network solidifies and becomes an institution.<br /><br />The essence of a network is its fluidity: it is flexible, mobile, easily redefined--in fact, it exists in a sort of quantum uncertainty at all times, so that it has no definition at any particular moment except when one is asked for. It is the strength of networks: they cannot be tied down, or destroyed by one link in a chain being destroyed, for there are no necessary parts. Everything is replaceable. But this is also the danger of networks, for humans: we are replaceable, and so the only thing we can rely on to keep us from being replaced is the goodness of the other parts of the network.<br /><br />An institution is a network without fluidity, a network frozen in a moment of time, so that all the connections that existed then become a permanent structure, never to be in danger of being replaced, and never to be added to. It is a structure: a tribe and a chieftain, a fief and a lord, a kingdom and a king. The titles of nobility, the levels of the church, every hierarchy, every artificial social construction designed to give rigidity to social networks, the epitome of which, of course, is the nation: a social institution so vast it can contain 300 million people (or over a billion), manifest as a bureaucracy with such vast reams of legislation and levels of governance that no individual could ever conceive of the entirety at once, so that instead it is reduced to one or two words, a bite-size vocal meme to be repeated in lieu of any real understanding of the vast complexity of the social sphere the institution superficially encompasses, a golden idol to bow before in lieu of any real conception of the nature of God (which is, of course, simply another idol. But that, too, is not what this post is about.)<br /><br />Besides churches or other organized religion, there is no other institution that has acquired as much legitimacy as the nation--and in the postsecular world of today, even religion's supremacy is arguable. In the years after the beginning of the Iraq War, the "Support the Troops" ribbons became a tired punchline of ignorant consumerism; but the criticism, of course, was always simply that those who purchased such ribbons had not actually done anything to "support the troops". It was and remains and unquestioned assumption that everyone should, in fact, support the troops.<br /><br />I do not mean to suggest that American soldiers deserve to die--but I do believe that no one deserves to die. And thus it is without qualms that I can say, I do <span style="font-style: italic;">not</span> support the troops. I do not say, I merely criticize the administration that sent them there, or even the new administration that keeps them there. I criticize the cultural worship of the nation that leads people to accept that it is a noble thing to kill or even to die for an artificial construct with as much real impact on the average person's life as, well, any major Western power. It is easier to see the lack of influence of the nation when considering another: there are many nations in which the American government has more influence than the local national government, most obviously, but the people living in those nations do not pledge their lives to the cause of the United States.<br /><br />The nation's success, I think, lies in its coopting of the notion of "citizenship". You may be members of a club, employees of a company, or followers of a church, but you are a citizen of a nation, and that word enjoys many special connotations that the others do not. While again there are similarities with religion, for most people, citizenship implies far more duty, loyalty, and responsibility than membership in any church. This is because citizenship is at its core a word for the type of give-and-take interaction that is the nature of every real, nonartificial community.<br /><br />Citizenship is not a bad word--it is, in fact, I think a very good word, and a very important word, deserving of respect. Citizenship means being an asset to your community and not a burden--the problem is in the definition of "community", which has of course expanded far beyond any rational borders (though such borders would of course be nebulous, as any true network is) to include the entirety of modern states.<br /><br />In such a context the values of citizenship becomes impossible to follow because there is no way to ascertain what benefits the "community" of the nation and what does not--beyond, of course, what the national government says. Which is the entire point of the nation, its great danger and its great promise to those desiring power: when a person can no longer contextualize their community, when the network of people they know and rely on becomes too vast for them to even begin to understand, they turn to institutions and structures to provide simple labels for them to use instead, and simple values for them to use instead of true evaluations of benefit.<br /><br />And thus young men willingly fly hundreds of thousands of miles around the world to kill and be killed by people they know nothing about and believe that they are being good citizens.circadianwolfhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13863959331740613989noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-425533341379809941.post-43062956398807126352009-07-01T20:13:00.004-05:002009-07-01T20:18:48.335-05:00Usually I just link to these things and let them stand for themselvesBut this is from a physical newspaper and I don't feel like looking up an Internet link.<br /><br /><blockquote><span style="font-weight: bold;">Government backs down on Internet-filter mandate</span><br /><br />In a rare reversal, China's government gave in to domestic and international pressure and backed down Tuesday from a rule that would have required personal computers sold in the country to have Internet-filtering software. Just hours before the rule was to have taken effect, the government said it would postpone the requirement for the software. The government did not say whether the plan might be revived. <span style="font-weight: bold;">Top U.S. officials had protested the plan after it was imposed abruptly in May, calling it a barrier to trade.</span></blockquote>(Emphasis added.)<br /><br />Remember: Internet censorship is only a problem with it puts a burden on the manufacturer, because the only job of government is to ensure the market runs smoothly.circadianwolfhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13863959331740613989noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-425533341379809941.post-83961464704401288952009-06-30T14:09:00.000-05:002009-06-30T14:09:34.353-05:00Three licks to the center of a tootsie roll pop: Summer D&D session 3, part 1<span style="font-weight: bold;">Same Bat Time</span><br /><br />Session 2's end found the rookie adventurers taking an extended rest in a formerly ghost-filled hallway. Normally I try to end sessions on at least a minor cliffhanger, either some surprising revelation or the start of a combat--it gets the players excited for the next session and leaves them with at least some idea of what they'll be doing. I managed to do this in session 1, ending with a tease of the encounter with the mud lord, mostly by accident, but I couldn't get one for session 2.<br /><br />This is more due to scheduling than anything else--unlike my previous campaign, which played a set day every week for a set time, and thus I planned every session to last that time and could plan the end appropriately, we play this summer campaign on a much more ad-hoc basis, essentially getting together when we can and playing until people need to leave. Without a good idea of how long any particular session is going to last, cliffhangers become much more difficult to pull off (although I did manage to half-way establish one at the end of session 4).<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Trap, Crackle, Pop</span><br /><br />Session 3 began after the player's first extended rest. I used the opportunity to try to recover a little bit of the sense that this hallway was not just a corridor where some ghosts once hung out by describing the characters experiencing disturbing dreams of ghosts--my personal explanation, though the players didn't get this and thus it was rather useless, was that after surviving the intial trap they were immune to further illusionary attacks, but their minds were more vulnerable in their dreams. I also started my work on connecting the players into the ongoing story, by having the party's deva (a reincarnating embodied angel) dream instead of what he quickly figured out was the Keep's past, implying that in some past reincarnation he had been at the Keep. The players also seized on the memory--of soldiers fleeing back down the hall towards where the players had entered--as foreshadowing of something particularly dangerous ahead of them.<br /><br />First, however, they had to make it through the remaining traps. I had originally planned for the first level to have multiple paths through multiple traps, simply because I am trying to create more open-ended encounters and nonlinear paths (though honestly your players will always create their own paths as long as you give them the leeway to), but in the end the t-junction the characters found at the end of the hall became something of a false choice (at least as the players experienced it).<br /><br />The players went right first and found a classic fantasy dungeon staple: an open room filled with fire crossed by a narrow beam. The fire was illusionary, of course, but once again I failed to have come up with a way of sufficiently hinting at this (and once again it didn't really matter). The skill challenge to cross the beam went quite well and produced an interesting and surprising narrative despite the failure of the trap's intention. The two acrobatic characters, a ranger and a rogue, crossed with little difficulty, leaving behind the less agile wizard and cleric. They found on the other side of the beam a passage of magical darkness that they could physically enter but could not find any way of seeing in. Cleverly, they came up a plan to stab a javelin recovered from the bullywugs into the mortar between the stone bricks of the walls and tie a rope to the end of the javelin, ensuring that they could make their way back. I had not considered this possibility (though it obvious in retrospect, of course), and so I quickly improvised a way to trap the players despite the rope.<br /><br />Originally the dark room was supposed to lead quickly to the next and ultimate trap, the disassociation of the darkness necessary for the next trap to work well. With the rope, however, the players could reasonably find their way back to the fire room; thus I came up with an illusionary wall that only appeared to those who had passed far enough along the passage, trapping them there but allowing others, such as the eladrin wizard who realized he could fey step across and promptly came after the others, to follow the rope through to the other side--and become trapped as well.<br /><br />The cleric, meanwhile, decided to explore the left option, which led to what I called in my notes the "crushing room", inspired, as my players quickly identified once the trap was sprung, by the trap from <span style="font-style: italic;">The Temple of Doom</span>. I tried to introduce another hint to the illusions by describing to the cleric how the room was empty, but as he entered he tripped and found skeletons at his feet that had not previously been there (they had been hidden by the illusion until he made physical contact). Fortunately (or not), after activating the trap and realizing that the walls were closing in, the player rolled phenomenally and managed to shove open the door far enough to escape. (If the character hadn't escaped, he would have after taking some damage ended up in the next trap with the others--though I never quite came up with an explanation why, given that the previous trespassers had simply died in the room.)<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Mirror's Edge</span><br /><br />After a short interlude in the darkness whereupon I separated the players by describing how as they proceeded further their other senses dulled as well, eventually reaching the point where they could no longer tell if they were still touching each other, the players arrived at the final trap, a situation I had immediately thought of when I began contemplating an illusionary dungeon but feared would be easily spotted and extremely difficult to pull off well. Luckily, unlike everything else in the dungeon, this trap came off far better than anything I had considered possible.<br /><br />I explained that the players awoke in two separate groups, both in small lit rooms and both surrounded by a number of monsters. I then asked the players if I could separate them--playing the two encounters out in two separate physical rooms as well--to enhance the feeling of separation. Trusting their DM, the players accepted with little second thought. I did explain as we went that this was something some DMs did, and explained my nervous and more frequent than normal pauses and considerations and combat note-taking as my having never split a party before in this manner--all of which was true, if missing the real point.<br /><br />I alternated between groups each round; some of my players suggested it would be faster to just do multiple rounds with each group and then switch, but I brushed this off by saying I didn't want to make the others wait too long. Once again, I think the newness of the players and their trust in me as the DM and knowledge base of D&D traditions helped a lot; experienced players would recognize immediately that this was a very odd situation and probably would have caught on much more quickly.<br /><br />As was, the players completed the encounter without recognizing the trap. The contigencies I had planned for, such as the players attempting to speak to the monsters (the monsters' responses would just be unintelligible angry growls), never came into play: the players simply attacked until they killed the monsters, or, in one group's case, was felled by the monsters. Then I described to the wizard's group how he finally got a grip on the strange magical aura that seemed to be permeating the entire level--and saw through the illusions that were the monsters, now revealed as their own party members.<br /><br />It was a fascinating fight to run just for the strange dynamics of it as DM: I didn't do any normal tactical thinking for the fight as I made no decisions except for the one real monster in the room ( a fell taint drawn by the illusions), and so my energy was instead occupied with keeping track of who was attacking whom, who moved where, how much damage they did, and figuring out how to translate all that into the other group's map. It also gave me a chance to play with describing monsters I don't normally use--the stand-ins for the party consisted of a dark creeper (the rogue), a koa-tua whip (the wizard), a troglodyte crossbowman (the ranger), a foulspawn seer (the cleric), and a basilisk (the ranger's beast companion).<br /><br />The players' reactions--both during the fight and after--were also immensely gratifying. During the fight they grew frustrated with me over the monsters' unusual healing abilities (especially when after "killing" the dark creeper it stood back up on its next turn) and high damage (all players used their daily attacks during the fight) and eagerly claimed the loot they were sure to get once the encounter was finished: "I want his staff!" After the fight, the players worked their way through the descriptions of their respective encounters, figuring out what monster action corresponded to their own, and generally reveling in how fooled they had been. They were so generally pleased and surprised by the encounter, in fact, that we decided to simply break and go to dinner rather than attempt to immediately continue the game.circadianwolfhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13863959331740613989noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-425533341379809941.post-79997083178485220982009-06-24T12:30:00.000-05:002009-06-24T12:57:56.081-05:00They say it's better the second time, they say you get to do the wierd stuff: Summer D&D session 2Session 1 ended on a small cliffhanger as my new players approached the ruins of the Keep, the object of their quest, and a mob of bullywugs emerged and surrounded them, led by a giant half-dead staff-wielder (a Mud Lord with the Deathhunger template from Open Grave applied and a few custom changes). When the time came for session 2, the players were eager to blast some zombie frog.<br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Plan of Attack</span></span><br /><br />Between sessions 1 and 2 I finally decided most of the details of the inner Keep: an underground dungeon with two levels. The second level, which I planned first before I was even certain there would be a first level, would be the laboratory of the ancient gnome artificer whose work would be the focus of this first quest. One of my players was surprised upon reviewing the Monster Manual that there were "robots in D&D": I was already strongly considering including warforged and that comment just cemented it. The lower level thus evolved fairly quickly as a facility for the production of warforged, albeit it with some more sinister details (which I will not discuss as the players have yet to discover them).<br /><br />The first level proved much more difficult. My thoughts returned frequently to an illusion-based security system: the first level would in essence be a giant booby-trap designed to discourage and ultimately eliminate trespassers. Gnomes, of course, are known for illusions, and I liked the idea of players gradually recognizing that their experiences were not real (it appeals to my postmodern/self-referential sense, I suppose). Actually coming up with mechanics to produce that experience, though, proved quite difficult, and in the end mostly failed, with the exception of the final trap, which succeeded far beyond my wildest dreams.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Session 2</span><br /><br />But first the players had to face the bullywugs. The initial description of the mud lord's escort, a pair of bullywug twitchers wielding javelins that seemed much better made than the previous twitchers' rough wooden spears and actually had metal tips, prompted the first great meme of the summer campaign: one of my players asked seriously if the bullywugs made the spears themselves or stole them, as "they don't appear to have metalsmithing capabilities". This comment prompted uncontrollable laughter from one of the other players, apparently amazed that anyone would consider such a question. To reward the first player for his thoughts, I told him what I had actually planned to inform them after the fight was over: the javelins bore Dwarven runes that suggested they were in fact stolen.<br /><br />When we finally started combat, the players already demonstrated a firmer grasp of both combat mechanics and tactics. The players recognized the bullywug croakers for what they were: minions with a close blast attack that made them extremely dangerous while the party was grouped together and thus important initial targets. After those had been dispatched, the players focused primarily on the mud lord, reasoning that although it was obviously tougher than the other enemies, its death might cause the others to flee (a suspicion that was in fact in my combat notes). The combat took some time due to the mud lord using his template's abilities to heal himself: I tweaked the death hunger's abilities to allow it to intentionally sacrifice one of its own (in fact, a twitcher at full health) to use its Consume ability, describing it grisly grabbing the adjacent bullywug and biting off its head, which successfully incensed the players at both the brutality of the description and the mechanical effect of the healing.<br /><br />After a brief interlude in the surface ruins of the Keep, the players proceeded to the first underground level, where I made my first major mistake of the session. I had continually returned to the idea that the gnome had not only set up illusionary traps but also attracted the bullywugs or other creatures in the past as savage guardians by posing as a Wizard of Oz-esque god. The first room, containing a crude, blood-soaked altar, was to have this illusionary figure appear when the players entered, but I forgot to put it in my notes, having never decided exactly how I wanted the effect to work, and thus did not implement it. This didn't impact the players much, luckily: the relationship between the bullywugs and the Keep's lower inhabitants was in no way an important part of the (meager) plot I had planned.<br /><br />The first illusionary trap, an artificially lengthened hallway in which apparations appeared to attack trespassers, also failed to work as planned, due once again to my conceiving of an idea but not figuring out the details necessary to make it work. Thus it appeared to the players that they were simply being attacked by ghosts, a misunderstanding which, as before, did not really negatively impact the players. After the encounter with the ghosts, the party's third fight of the day, many of the players were almost entirely out of healing surges and thus they requested an extended rest as we ended the session. I considered it over the time inbetween and agreed, recognizing that the number of upcoming combats and/or possible damage would require a rest at some point.<br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"></span>circadianwolfhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13863959331740613989noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-425533341379809941.post-70304489019700631372009-06-21T14:00:00.004-05:002009-06-21T18:40:43.111-05:00A beginning is a delicate time: Summer D&D sessions 0 and 1I was quite surprised when an old high school friend texted me a few weeks into the summer asking for help with a tabletop game of Hunter: the Reckoning. What followed was a few hours hanging out with friends I had hardly talked to in two years (good--the hanging out part, not the two years part) and reading through the Hunter manual the following day (not so much bad as ugly). Since none of the others had ever so much as played a tabletop RPG and I had just finished DMing a game of D&D 4E, they trusted my judgment when I said the Hunter manual was a mess and D&D would actually be easier for everyone. (They figured Hunter was something like "D&D lite", and it certainly has less rules, but that also means less structure, which is generally a bad thing for new players.)<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Session 0</span><br /><br />Our first session was simply character creation; since I didn't even know what game we were playing until a few hours before, I had no real preparation at all and simply brought four blank character sheets and a laptop with the official Character Builder on it (an extremely useful tool, though not without its quirks). After character creation, though, the players asked me to start the game . . . so I put it back on the players: how do you meet? Beginners, of course, need a bit more guidance than that and had no real ideas (my own fault for not coming with some kind of hook/basic intro prepared, but understandable given the circumstances I hope), but luckily one of my players had a bit more knowledge and suggested we go with the cliche and start in a tavern. After each player spun a bit of backstory for their characters--two, to my surprise and delight, connecting themselves prior to the official start--we were off, slowly, awkwardly, painfully, through a brief bar fight and theft. Then we adjourned for the night and my players decided on our next playing time--the following evening.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Theme Theory</span><br /><br />My first recognition was that this campaign would be very, very different from the one I had run previously. My last (and first) campaign was built on around a world and narrative arc I had been contemplating and slowly evolving for almost a year before the campaign itself started (far before I had any idea of who my players would be or what characters they might play); thus I had a good idea of where I was going from the beginning but left little room for nonlinear exploration or character development. My players were also all as experienced as myself with the game; perhaps not always as encyclopedically knowledgeable about the system, but they understood the rules and all of their own characters' abilities (and indeed all of them had DMed a game of their own at one point or another). The campaign had a strong rooting in my personal thematic concerns toward D&D: it was in many ways an intentional deconstruction of many traditional D&D trends, notably the entire basic conceit of the players as powerful characters who nobly decide the fate of the world. (As one of my players said after its conclusion: "We didn't actually accomplish anything . . .")<br /><br />This summer campaign had to be different, obviously. While I had toyed with ideas for another campaign towards the end of my first, they were all founded on 4E's paragon tier and meant to continue my deconstructive tendencies--not a framework that would work well with all new players, who clearly were best started at first level in a more traditional D&D adventure (as I had myself started). And so I essentially began from scratch--but with only one day to plan before the first true session, I didn't make everything anew. Instead I looked to the official D&D adventures--the first time I ever really considered substantially borrowing from others' material. I took the village from the (now free) first 4E adventure module (<span style="font-style: italic;">Keep on the Shadowfell)</span>, Winterhaven, and began plotting a short first adventure involving an ancient ruined Keep--which also became the basis of my first genuine dungeon crawl (excluding a short cave run in my first campaign which had only one actual combat encounter).<br /><br />While I couldn't use many of the themes or plots I had considered for a second campaign and I was borrowing liberally from official D&D adventures, I did set out to follow another aspect of my thoughts for a follow-up campaign: increased player agency. My primary dissatisfaction with my first campaign was its linearity and the lack of influence my players had on its outcome--while some of this was the point (they weren't the ones to save the world), I wanted them to be able to influence their personal stakes, which also necessitated their personal stakes be a much bigger part of the campaign. I haven't quite gotten to this yet in the summer campaign's actual play, but it is a major consideration of my plans for the future.<br /><br />I also want to cater to my <span style="font-style: italic;">players</span>' desires more, and this I have been able to do more quickly: during character creation one of my players looked through the Monster Manual and found the "frog monsters" (bullywugs) hilarious; I noted this and made the first true enemy the party faced on the way to the Keep a tribe of savage bullywugs. (The player on figuring out what was attacking him: "Are these those frog things?!") My players seemed particularly amused by the idea of monstrous gnomes as well, which led to my deciding that the ancient wizard whose laboratory they would find in the ruins of the Keep would be a gnome.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Session 1</span><br /><br />Due to my limited time I didn't get the power cards (an almost necessary tool for 4E, in my experience) finished before the session; therefore I simply brought index cards, made a few examples, and gave them to my players to do themselves. This I think was actually helpful (despite my replacing them next session with better printed ones) because it forced my players to actually read each of their powers all the way through, and although they still didn't have a complete grasp on the rules and terminology and thus what each power actually did mechanically, they did get a better idea of their capabilities. (One of my players picked up on his chosen encounter power being an immediate reaction and asked if he could use it in our first combat when he was attacked; I hadn't even remembered he had it.)<br /><br />Not so successful a mistake was my lack of planning for player eventualities; for some reason I have a tendency to come up with a plot or way for things to play out (itself not a very good habit as a DM) and then not develop the necessary justification for it to players. (I just tell myself that's a small thing I'll get to in time--and then rarely do.) This is the realm, of course, of hooks; how to get players to bite on the adventure you've prepared. Coming off an extremely linear campaign in which there was rarely alternative courses of action (in a way that mattered to the general plot of the campaign, at least), I'm still rather inept at making hooks work well, especially in the more open world I'm trying to present. Nonetheless, players generally make up for such DMing ineptitude by recognizing a plot hook when they see it (even if they haven't gotten enough justification for their characters to pursue it) and eventually biting just because they realize there's nothing else for them to do (which is helpful for the DM but obviously quite damaging for player immersion).<br /><br />Once on the quest, however, the path became linear and things proceeded more smoothly. I tried to gradually introduce the aspects of 4E combat through the first encounter (with a bloodthorn vine and a group of bullywugs), and while the party rouge would wait until next session to figure out how sneak attack worked, everyone seemed to get a decent handle on how combat worked. I even managed to introduce some of the various types of terrain and obstruction (a favorite toy of mine).<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Tools</span><br /><br />This is my first time using miniatures; I bought some near the end of the school year simply because they were cool and cheap, and I only use them for player characters (or otherwise important characters that I don't have a token prepared for, such as the wizard's summoned fire warrior in the second session). I'm still somewhat split on the idea of minis: obviously they're cool-looking, but since there's intrinsically less choice than with custom tokens (especially when you have as few as I do) I worry that their image will overcome the internal image of the characters in a way that custom tokens don't. So far, however, this doesn't seem to be a problem, even with my players having barely experienced role-playing before.<br /><br />I've continued to use custom tokens for enemies and NPCs. These are simply 1" wide washers (at their outside; washers are measured by the diameter of their interior hole, however, so buy accordingly) with images formatted with RPtools's Token Tool pasted on top. This time I've also added a second image on the bottom with a red ring to represent bloodied, which is both a nice visual reminder and a reward for players who enjoy flipping over the token when they bloody a monster. The images are also glued using liquid Elmer's Glue instead of a glue stick this time, which is much stronger (no more problems with images always falling off as we did with my first campaign) but also can cause warping and/or strange discolorations (my set of tokens for the second session all somehow ended up color-shifted green after gluing).<br /><br />My combat maps are drawn on vellum graph paper left over from an old school project; the sheets are 11" by 17", marked off in one-inch squares, which is generally sizable enough for any normal arena and when folded in half fits neatly into a standard file folder. I generally create a general layout of a map on the computer with a tool such as Ye Olde Map Maker (an online flash program) and then transfer it to the paper pap and draw in details with pencil. For this campaign I've also begun retracing the pencil in pen and then erasing the pencil to make a cleaner look and maps that I can if necessary draw notes on in combat and not worry about erasing the underlying terrain.<br /><span style="font-style: italic;"></span>circadianwolfhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13863959331740613989noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-425533341379809941.post-39105185317860988532009-06-02T19:00:00.002-05:002009-06-02T19:06:26.979-05:00The most concise, piercing, and bitter social commentary I have ever heardPardon for the lack of updates.<br /><br />"Everyone's a Hero" from <span style="font-style: italic;">Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog</span><br /><br />It may not feel too classy<br />Begging just to eat<br />But you know who does that? Lassie--<br />And she always gets a treat.<br /><br />So you wonder what your part is<br />Because you’re homeless and depressed,<br />But home is where the heart is,<br />So your real home’s in your chest!<br /><br />Everyone’s a hero in their own way.<br />Everyone’s got villains they must face.<br />They’re not as cool as mine,<br />But folks you know it’s fine to know your place.<br /><br />Everyone’s a hero in their own way--<br />In their own not-that-heroic way.<br /><br />So I thank my girlfriend Penny--<br />Yeah, we totally had sex--<br />She showed me there’s so many<br />Different muscles I can flex:<br /><br />There’s the deltoids of compassion,<br />There’s the abs of being kind.<br />It’s not enough to bash in heads;<br />You’ve got to bash in minds!<br /><br />Everyone’s a hero in their own way.<br />Everyone’s got something they can do.<br />Get up, go out, and fly--<br />Especially that guy, he smells like poo!<br /><br />Everyone’s a hero in their own way,<br />you and you and mostly me and you.<br /><br />I’m poverty’s new sheriff<br />And I’m bashing in the slums.<br />A hero doesn’t care if you’re a bunch of scary<br />alcoholic bums!<br /><br />Everybody!<br /><br />Everyone’s a hero in their own way.<br />Everyone can blaze a hero’s trail.<br />Don’t worry if it’s hard,<br />if you’re not a friggin' ‘tard you will prevail!<br /><br />Everyone’s a hero in their own way,<br />Everyone a hero in their--circadianwolfhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13863959331740613989noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-425533341379809941.post-91200433329743216622009-05-18T22:25:00.001-05:002009-05-18T22:26:37.525-05:00The Prisoner's Dilemma<span style="font-style: italic;">Another piece from Creative Writing.</span><br /><br />Linnaeus has failed us:<br />The old taxonomy<br />Now shows itself to be<br />Only a pretty dress.<br /><br />We try molecular<br />Phylogenetics—not<br />Good enough. Such a plot<br />Cannot explain our scar.<br /><br />Beneath our K-T line<br />Our history is swept<br />Clean: all truth lost except<br />The mass extinction's sign.<br /><br />What chondrite struck us then?<br />Where is our Chicxulub?<br />Caked with ash we can't scrub<br />Off: how came this bleak pen?circadianwolfhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13863959331740613989noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-425533341379809941.post-73892659092844559682009-05-17T16:21:00.003-05:002009-05-17T16:26:27.663-05:00The Name of the Star<span style="font-style: italic;">This was written for my Creative Writing class last fall. For various reasons I haven't posted it until now. I wrote it for an assignment with a multitude of unrelated requirements aimed at inspiring something new and weird.</span><br /><br />She is a dire radiance, a star blazing dark<br />Against the gibbering mouth of pity and self-<br />Indulgence. Her words dissolve this landscape to stark<br />Clarity: expose these relics upon this shelf<br /><br />Of ancient wormwood—sturdy-looking, smelling foul<br />As decapitated roses—as nothing more<br />Than hollow tokens, the hooting of a barn owl<br />Captured by the deaf scribe scratching upon the wet shore.<br /><br />Because she soars, burning, the world turns—the sun rises—<br />And the soul of that cursed man, Merlin, master wizard,<br />Soars above the fields of Albion, no guises<br />Or masks or crude lies. At long last he hears the word.<br /><br />With ash on his tongue, the Revelator did speak:<br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Et nomen stellae dicitur Absinthius</span>—thus,<br />The name of the star is Wormwood: she shall blaze bleak<br />Against the dark sky and, pitiless, destroy us.<br /><br />Like Carthage, Babylon, Ilium before, all falls.<br />The fields burn, and the cities, and the land and water.<br />Two star blaze dark together beyond all the walls<br />Of Earth, the crumbling relics, the noble slaughter.circadianwolfhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13863959331740613989noreply@blogger.com0