Small Fortune

So what have I been doing instead of blogging? Schoolwork, mostly, but I've had time for some game design as well.

I've put together a brief rule sheet for Fortune, the RPG system I'm working on. It's a barebones document that doesn't offer much in the way of explanation, examples, or game worlds, but it's the major rules of the system in a nutshell. It's also a work in progress, so just about everything in the document is subject to change.

If you're interested in RPGs or game design, download a copy of "Small Fortune" here. And of course feedback is appreciated.

Eventually, I hope to draw up a few setting sourcebooks (the two I've brainstormed so far are a 1950s/60s SF setting a la The Twilight Zone, and an over-the-top reality television setting.)

And that settles my 3d-gen console decision

Final Fantasy XIII will be released on the XBox 360.

(via Feminist Gamers.)

4th ed, 2d look

I took a quick read of the 4th edition Player's Handbook last night, and looked at a few more reviews online.

From a comment by rentagurkha at a review by Chris Pramas:

D&D is inspired by, and should be able to feel like, the works of Lieber, Howard, Burroughs, Vance, Tolkien, and Moorcock, among others.

That's the big issue so far for me, I think. This edition of D&D doesn't feel like it's inspired by them, but rather by the computer-based RPGs that were themselves inspired by D&D.

Some of this is game mechanics (the Vance-inspired spells are gone, as are the Moorcock-inspired alignments). Some of this is just an instinctive feel - AD&D always had this 70s/80s vibe to it. This edition seems meant to appeal to the folks who think Conan started with the Schwarzenegger movies, and would criticize Elric as being a ripoff of Drizzt.

Will I use 4th Edition? It depends. If there's enough people around to start a new campaign (and now that I'm near the university, that's likely), and that's what they want to play, then sure. Though it doesn't really have the same feel, it looks like it could be a fun tactical combat game. (On the other hand, I wouldn't be at all surprised if 4th Edition turns out to be the RPG equivalent of Windows Vista.) If it's totally up to me, I'd rather use a classless, more freeform system like FUDGE or FATE, and a non-fantasy setting.

You whippergamers, get off my lawn!

Jolt Country reviews D&D 4th edition.

Now I was actually a fan of 3d edition - I thought they did a good job of streamlining the game and avoiding some of the problems with the earlier editions. Of course, my main experiences with 1st and 2d edition AD&D were playing premade modules (including the original Ravenloft module) and SSI's "gold box" games; I didn't really get into serious campaigns until 3d edition had been released and popularized.

4th edition appears to be heavily influenced by MMORPGs, especially World of Warcraft. I'm not sure what to think of the "role" system and how it's tied to class (the 3d ed. multiclassing system, which was the only one that ever made sense to me, is scrapped), or the idea of "aggro" (does this mean it's not DM's discretion who gets attacked? Are heavily armored rodeo clowns now a viable combat unit?) The "powers" seem overpowered (a cleric can get an unlimited-use ranged attack that also works as a one-time bless at level 1? Seriously?)

While that sort of thing does solve the ages-old problem of magic-users being useless after they've used their daily spells, it really does seem to be an entirely different game at this point. And since they already have a World of Warcraft tabletop RPG, I don't seen the need for this kind of rewrite.

[Addendum: they changed the alignment system! "When they Chaotic Good is outlawed, only outlaws will be Chaotic Good..."]

>DRIVE PLYMOUTH SATELLITE

Nick Montfort of Grand Text Auto clues me in to Planet IF, an aggregate blog about interactive fiction. Most of the blogs represented there are ones I read already, but it's nice to have a distilled feed.

Drama stars

There's an interesting set of discussions going on at Tales of the Rampant Coyote and Blog of War about how to crack the save game problem, that problem specifically being that, in a situation where the outcome is dependent on a roll of the virtual dice, players will save and restore until they get the desired outcome. Sometimes it doesn't actually involve a save game - lots of old school RPGs encouraged obsessive-compulsive rerolling of stats and balanced the game accordingly.

I've done this before, Fallout 2 being the most egregious example to come to mind. There, I played my typical scientist/diplomat main character (because I like having as many dialogue options as possible), only to find out that, unlike the first game, you can't talk your way out of most fights. So instead, I just did a lot of save-scumming, restoring the game on a per-combat-round basis, to get through the tougher fights.

There have been plenty of methods employed to limit this behavior, the most common being save points, prerolling and "roguelike" saves (i.e., where quitting automatically saves, saving automatically quits, and dying forces you to start over). Save points are often annoying because they parcel out the game into chunks that aren't always manageable (if I have 20 minutes of free time, there's little point in playing a game that spaces the save points around 30 minutes apart), and because they can give away the pacing of the game. Prerolling involves making decisions involving randomness far in advance of when they would actually be checked - for example, determining the contents of a treasure chest at the start of a level rather than when the chest is opened. If the player wants to try for better treasure, he or she will have to replay the entire level. This works tolerably well for something like treasure, but not at all for something like combat, where there's not much way to determine outcomes in advance. Roguelike saves work for roguelikes because those games involve randomly generated content; for a story game, replaying the beginning stages will quickly become repetitious.

The Rampant Coyote has come up with an alternative mechanism to discourage save-scumming: "drama stars." These work analogously to the "drama points" used by many tabletop RPGs - if you engage in what the game deems risky behavior (e.g., "dangerous" dialog choices, and presumably anything requiring a nontrivial skill check with consequences for failure) or when bad things happen (e.g., a character getting knocked out or killed in battle), you accumulate "drama stars" which can be redeemed for in-game benefits like reviving a fallen character.

The system reminds me of a variation I thought up a while back of a battle system proposed by Shamus Young for lightsaber duelling, wherein the concept of "hit points" was stupid (nobody gets scratched by a lightsaber). My system had various types of analogues for hit points, from armor that took damage to magic potions that wore off over time (I aimed for "interesting" and "varied" more than "realistic"), but the version that applied here was a character whose survival was based on "luck." "Luck" was a kind of RNG karma; unlucky circumstances (e.g., failing to hit an opponent) would build up karma and lucky ones would build karma. Enemy attacks, however, would always miss, using up karma dependent on the likelihood of hitting and the ferocity of the attack, until the character's luck ran out. Under such a system, you don't want to be the golden boy/girl who succeeds all the time, because that'll deplete your karma and you'll lose faster. (I'm not sure how one "recharges" one's fortune - perhaps going to a casino in town and losing money?)

The tricky bit in the "drama stars" system, though, and the one that really discourages save-scumming, is this: drama stars aren't saved. You restore your game, you're back at 0. Thus it's arguably better to play out poor consequences, because the drama stars earned more than negate those effects. However, this creates a new challenge: how do you maintain game balance when some players play in 20-minute "coffee breaks" and others play marathon sessions? One suggestion in the comments was to allow a "progress save" that works like a roguelike save - you want to stop playing, you save and exit, and when you come back your stars are intact. If you restore any other save, though, you're back at 0.

All in all, it's an interesting concept, and I can't wait to see more about Frayed Knights. (Why does this sort of thing only seem to show up in indie-game discussions, anyway?)

Milliways

Waxy.org has a great article about the development process, such as it was, of Milliways, Infocom's vaporware sequel to the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, now slightly less vaporware due to a playable early version.

I haven't tried the game yet, but I wonder what it'd be like if someone from the contemporary IF community took it over. The question, then, would be who? My first choice would probably be Nick Montfort, though Jon Ingold or even Graham Nelson himself would probably do an excellent job. (This is all idle speculation, of course, as there are all kinds of intellectual property issues in the way of such a thing ever happening.)

There are also interesting design ideas, such as a MEANWHILE command to switch viewpoints and several proposed methods of scene-changing. The puzzle design is definitely from before The Craft of Adventure, even before the more player-friendly LucasArts games. In the first game synopsis, the notes for the very first puzzle state that "this is a nasty trick puzzle because if you solve it, you lose the game." (Despite this, unlike the author of the article I like the first synopsis better than the second. A Barry Manilow CD is a very specific cultural reference that isn't particularly entertaining and feels out of place among the intergalactic weirdness.)

The other thing that struck me in the article was the time involved in creating these games in ZIL. Amy Briggs complained that it was impossible, even with a completed script (I'm not sure if "script" means general plot points, or all the main text, or what), to code a game that size in nine months. And yet it seems that, these days, that's about the median for a comp-length (i.e., ~2 hours to complete) written by an amateur in their free time. I suspect an adaptation that's already got a script Which makes me wonder - what if Infocom had had Inform at their disposal, rather than ZIL? Maybe they'd have been able to produce even more great works. Then again, people asked "What if George Lucas had CGI at his disposal?" and what we got were Episodes I-III.

Cerise: Let's Talk About Sex

The November issue of Cerise, focusing on sex in gaming, is out. I particularly recommend Latoya Peterson's Immaculate Reception:

Gamers are getting older but our games are still rated PG.

I think this is a little bit of a problem....

Think of Lulu and Wakka from Final Fantasy X. The entire game they remain a respectful distance apart, with Lulu remaining cold and aloof. (Yes, I know, grieving for Chappu, but still!) The game ends, Lulu and Wakka are in love…and she’s still aloof. Then they give birth to a child, Vidina.

To be honest, I would not have been surprised if SquareEnix had mentioned that sex was not involved in the conception of little Vidina. Obviously, Lulu and Wakka cast Babyaga, and after the third perfect cast, they were rewarded with a child.

*sigh*

Twilight Heroes

There's a new free online RPG out called Twilight Heroes. It looks similar to Kingdom of Loathing, but with a superhero theme and a more subdued sense of humor. It's timing out a lot for me right now, but it looks pretty cool when it's running.

Now you're thinking about portals.

I've started playing Portal. It's a ridiculously fun platform puzzler that's really well designed (some jumping is tough for me to execute, but failure doesn't usually set me back very far). And there's all sorts of neat little touches (the cake is a lie!) to lend atmosphere to what's pretty much a series of boxy puzzle rooms .

Shamus Young has some speculations on portal physics, building off of his review of the game. Really, this is like the various conundrums about time travel; when you break the laws of physics in one way, there's no reason to expect the rest of it to accommodate that breach. But it's still fun to think about. (I've been wondering why I didn't slice my character in half when I tried walking into the portal's edge, aside from the fact that doing so would make the game fiendishly difficult, because every just-missed jump would result in the character's death.)

Woot.

Finally ascended in Kingdom of Loathing. Going for a teetotaler run next.

Sports game design issues

Speaking of game design, I read a lot about designing RPGs and strategy games, but not so much about other genres. There's some book from Adobe Press, but that's pretty much it.

What brought this to mind? Power gauges. You know, that interface where you hold down a button, the gauge fills up, and you release the button, and how full the gauge is influences the power of your throw/hit/jump.

If you think about it, it doesn't make sense. When is the last time you actually threw something considerably harder or softer than you intended? Accuracy is the difficult part. (There are some games where high power makes accuracy more difficult; I think this is the way to go.)

Some other sports game-specific issues:

• In a game based on real athletes, how much of the result should depend on the athlete's skills and how much should depend on the player's? Sim games (where it's all dependent on the athlete) are fun, but a game where Barry Bonds and Julio Lugo are equally capable hitters is just pointless.
• What should the range of performance be? Should a great player be able to reliably outperform a sport's records?

Assassin's Creed and game AI

There's a gameplay video of an upcoming game called Assassin's Creed. Apparently it's a big deal. I'm only an incidental gamer these days, and this is a game in a genre I don't play for a system I don't own, so I hadn't been following this, but the video is interesting - thought not in the way the designers intended.

I'm not sure about the setting - it appears to be a city in the Middle East around the time of the Crusades, which I half suspect is intended to cause controversy, as you're killing the European crusaders. The folks who complain about games like Grand Theft Auto are going to have a fit if you're playing an Islamic assassin. But the dialogue was so nonspecific that any interesting aspect of that was lost.

I've also heard that the game involves multiple time periods (whether through time travel or multiple characters a la Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem, I don't know)

Though I don't typically play shooters or "sneakers," I've played enough to know that this isn't an impressive demo. The gameplay appears to consist of the following elements:

• Observe "cut scenes" of the figures talking (since you can move around during these, there's an interesting design decision - how do you ensure the player gets all the relevant information he or she needs?)
• Prince of Persia-style climbing and jumping around.
• Instantly lethal thrown weapons that apparently never miss. But instead of using these on the actual target, the player jumps down into a crowd of soldiers to kill the leader.
  
• Fighting enemies with tactics out of Hercules or Xena - stand around and wait your turn to fight one on one.

Now a game about assassination *could* be interesting. Ideally, it'd engage the moral arguments, and be much more difficult (though a lot of the difficulty is escaping afterward). But this doesn't look to be it; they've gone for the historical-fiction hitman approach instead.

Abandoned-ware

There's an interesting article at Destructoid about The Endgame Syndrome, or why we abandon games without completing them. (Actually, I tend to abandon most games in the midgame.)

IFComp 2007!

I'm about two weeks late with this one, but the 2007 Interactive Fiction Competition is underway.