My Borderlands 2 experience with the Bloodshot Stronghold is starting to turn into Groundhog Day, where I am playing through the same session over and over every night. I thought I was rid of that place when I got to the next level, Bloodshot Ramparts, where after killing tons of robots I arrived at a teleporter situated just before the end boss. Now I had very little ammo left, and my repeated playthroughs of the stronghold had left me with lots of Eridium that can be used to buy more ammo capacity in Sanctuary. So I thought it would be a good idea to teleport back to Sanctuary, gear up, and come back for the final fight.

But the Bloodshot Ramparts teleporter turned out to be a trap. All the teleporters I had encountered in the game up to then worked both ways. This one was the first one-way teleport. There was a yellow globe over it, and once you fall into the trap you realize that this was supposed to be a warning that this fast travel station is different from the others. But as there is no dialogue window popping up asking you whether you are sure that you want to take a one-way travel, this is easily missed.

So now the only teleporter back leads to the start of the Bloodshot Stronghold, and I will have to play through that accursed place for a fourth time, then play through the Ramparts a second time, before I can finally continue the main mission. Fortunately I got some new side quests in Sanctuary, which I will do before that, to get at least a bit of variety into my Borderlands 2 evenings.

Spinks has a brilliant post up on the difficulty to use Kickstarter for a niche product like Camelot Unchained. Only 8,350 people backed that project up to now, and in spite of some willing to donate thousands of dollars it looks as if the funding goal might not be met. It appears that if you want to make a PvP game that in any case will attract only around ten thousand players, you're better off relying on government funding (and indirectly funding from the European taxpayers): Darkfall 2.0 just came out (and apparently still sucks).

As Spinks remarked, (Quote: "He (Mark Jacobs) had a very strong focus on how fun it will be to make your enemy suffer, watch your enemy suffer, lay traps and inhabit monsters to inflict misery on your opponent. ie. Have fun griefing the dungeon!"), you can't build a game which relies on griefing as main source of fun and attract a lot of people with it. Even the meanest player will get bored of that, and will probably have driven away lots of other players in the process. Empire-building can sell, but just torturing other players for fun isn't a viable design concept.

I got a mail this week asking me to promote the Kickstarter for Worlds of Magic, an indie turn-based 4X game claiming to be the "genuine spiritual successor" to classic 4X games like Master of Magic. For very different reasons this again is more of a niche product, and again there are just 1,500 backers; of course the goal is set much lower than for Camelot Unchained, so Worlds of Magic has a better chance of reaching its funding goal of a modest £30,000.

But even with Worlds of Magic I felt a kind of disconnect between what I think that the cost of making a game like this to high quality standards is, and what I think how many people are willing to pay how much for. How much of a game can you make for £30,000 (especially with 3D graphics animations)? How much of a MMORPG can you make for $2,000,000? And if you increase the budget to make a better technical quality of game, how are you going to finance it if there are less than 10,000 people around who would want to play it?

Borderlands 2 shares one annoying feature with many games designed for consoles: A save system where you can't save wherever you want, put your progress is automatically saved when reaching certain save points. Two nights ago I was two-thirds through the Bloodshot Stronghold when I had to stop playing to do something for my wife. And by quitting that "level" before getting to the end, the whole thing reset, and last night I had to play through it from the start.

So this time I reached the end and got to the save point of the next level. But I had gone past a red treasure chest behind a cell door without finding how to open that door. So I went back to look for the door switch. Then I ran into a crazy mob spawn that obviously wasn't designed to be approached from behind and died. And instead of reviving at the closest respawn point (there are several of those in each level), entering the level from behind had messed up the system and I respawned at the save point at the start of the stronghold. Dammit! Now I have to play through the whole level a third time this evening!

I wished there was a manual save option in addition to the automated save system. The automated save system works well enough as long as you play on rails, but isn't very flexible if you want to go exploring.

Some games I stop playing because I arrived at the end. Others I stop playing somewhere in the middle for no apparent reason. Thus the first Borderlands stands out in my memory as a game where I had a specific reason for stopping in the middle: I had experimented with the multi-player part of the game, and not only not liked it much (too chaotic, plus bad loot system), but also found it had messed up my character (especially the quest log) for the single-player part of the game. Currently I am playing Borderlands 2, and I am enjoying it so much, I'm starting to consider to start the first game of the series over from scratch after finishing the second part.

What I enjoy about Borderlands 2 is how the solo game enables a less restrictive game design. MMORPGs usually have game mechanics which prevent "clever" gameplay, like creating situations in which you can hurt the mob while the mob can't hurt you, or logging off and on again to make treasure chests respawn. Borderlands 2 simply allows that sort of stuff. Who cares whether some abuse of game mechanics is "cheating" in a single-player game? And for those who just consider that sort of play style as clever, it is a lot more fun if there aren't too many artificial barriers everywhere to prevent it.

I am rather average in my abilities regarding first-person-shooters. The Borderlands games accommodate that well: These are old school shooters without complex cover and sneaking mechanics, thus not much of a learning curve, and easy to get into the game even if you just play it casually from time to time. The penalty on dying isn't all that harsh, and I have never gotten "stuck" on an boss fight. You could always get more levels and better gear if that would happen to you. And there isn't too much of a story to worry about either. Overall excellent casual shooters.

World of Tanks is running a change your password event in which they reward every account which changes its password to something more secure with 300 gold, their real-money currency. That idea is brilliant on so many levels, you have to wonder why nobody ever thought of it.

The Nosy Gamer regularly reports on CCP's "War on Bots" in EVE Online. I don't follow the discussion very closely. But in his latest post I stumbled over a quote: "Hmmm. 26 of my 29 accounts banned for APHack use. After using it for 4+ years. See you 19 May Eve… if ever again…".

Now I was aware that due to the fact that in EVE Online only one character per account gains skills, many people have multiple accounts. Which is why CCP *never* reports number of players, but only number of accounts, because that looks better. But I had thought that the average player had 2 accounts, and then a few players had 4 to 6. So 29 accounts appears rather excessive to me. That of course is not a question of money. I presume that these accounts paid for themselves by producing more than 1 PLEX per month through botting.

So now I'm wondering how many actual EVE Online players there really are, if people have so many accounts. And I wonder what happens to the game if CCP succeeds to ban all those people with lots of botting accounts. Both the in-game economy as well as the real economy for PLEX might be affected if you remove thousands of accounts that bot-mine for PLEX.

I would even entertain the weird thought that bots are good for EVE Online. Because the alternative would be forcing players to mine. Which is not a very fun activity.

I find it interesting that there is a term ("whales") for people who spend a lot of money on a Free2Play game, but nothing equivalent for people who spend a lot of time. People like me, that is older gamers with a good job, a family, and lots of other things to do every day, are more likely to spend more money on games. Younger people with less disposable income, but more disposable time are more likely to grind their way to success. That isn't really a question of changing attitudes, it is simply a consequence of the fact that a unit of money or time changes value with age for most people: $1 gets less valuable over the years, while 1 hour of free time gets more valuable. People simply spend that what they have more of.

One game I am currently playing every day is Anno Online (in German beta, the English closed beta will start next week). You can't possibly play that for hours in one session, as you run out of resources after building a few new buildings, and then need to wait hours to produce those resources again. That makes this a perfect game for me, playing it for under 15 minutes each twice a day and making nice progress. You can play for free, but then the sequence of needs of your population, rarity of space to build on, and limited number of islands you can colonize will much restrict your options. So I spent money on buying three (out of four possible) island slots, which not just increases the speed at which I gain resources and thus progress in the game, but also gives me significantly more freedom, and the option to optimize things by moving production chains from one island to the next. But as those island slots get exponentially more expensive, the third island slot was already very much a luxury that I wouldn't recommend to everybody. Overall I ended up paying twice the price of a full-price game for this browser game, which isn't quite whale territory yet, but nevertheless more than most people would be willing to spend. But me, I don't regret that purchase, and continue having a lot of fun with the game. And I much prefer Free2Play models where you buy something that has a lasting effect on your game to those where what you buy is temporary or outdated after some time.

But I realize that we live in a culture where spending $100 on a game is considered somewhat weird, while spending 100 hours on a game is considered not very much. It reflects a time to money exchange rate which values 1 hour very low in $ terms, and is more in line with how somebody much younger than me would value his time vs. his money. And that makes me wonder whether we aren't heading for some shift in culture in that respect. First of all, games aren't just for young people any more. The average gamer is 30 years old, and the average age of the most frequent game purchaser is 35. And second we need to consider not just the value of games to gamers, but also the value of gamers to the people who make games: It is obvious that a game company would much prefer customers spending a lot of money on their games to customers that only spend a lot of time.

The reason I believe in a possible shift is somewhat Darwinian: There is an oversupply of games and too many game companies trying to survive, at at some point that turns into the survival of the fittest. And the fittest is the game company that at the end of the month can pay its bills, regardless of whether there are some people complaining in the forums about their business model being "Pay2Win". Which is a rather badly defined term anyway. I am pretty certain that in the long run you need to offer players some in-game advantage for their money, selling just hats isn't likely to be a valid survival strategy. Of course there are many different variations of selling advantages for money, some of which are perceived as being more fair than others. But ultimately success is based on using that difference in perceived value of time and money, and offering the same advantage EITHER for time OR for money, which tends to make the largest possible number of people happy, including the game company.

Just to let you know, I just enabled the new function to add Google+ comments to the blog. Feel free to experiment on this thread and tell me what you think!

I turned Google+ comments off 5 minutes after having enabled them. I tested it out, if I enable Google+ comments, you can ONLY post comments with a Google+ account here. That isn't what I wanted, I would like to just add the comments from Google+ to the existing comment system. :(

Personally I have a very simple model of role-playing games, be they pen & paper, single-player on a computer, or massively multiplayer online: In general these games consist of a "basic repeatable unit", usually combat, which happens in minor variations over and over. And between those repeatable units of combat, there is something that chains them all together into some sort of story or world. By definition the combat part is more repetitive than the non-combat part, because even if you always fight different monsters, the player(s) will always use the same set(s) of abilities.

Of course no model is ever the absolute truth. But quite a lot of games follow this pattern of fights repeatedly happening inside a story. And for me that has consequences on how I approach combat in a pen & paper setting: I think combat is something the outcome of which is best left to a rules system and random dice rolls. I am not a huge fan of Deus Ex Machina interventions from the game master. Nor of excessive role-playing of combat action which influences the outcome.

That is not to say that in my campaign nobody can "swing from the chandelier" as an action in combat. Innovative use of terrain or abilities is very much encouraged, and can have positive modifiers on dice rolls to determine an outcome. But I sure don't want long descriptions of how the fighter is swinging his sword with a large influence on whether he hits of misses based on his description. It is because I assume that the fighter is going to swing that sword very, very often over his career that I consider role-playing that swing of the sword to be superfluous.

I am well aware that there is a risk of people just rolling dice and not describing any action in combat. But as long as this is just for combat, of which there are many, I don't really have a problem with somebody not role-playing in combat. Quite often I find there are interesting or funny situations arising just from people using their combat abilities or movement. And some people are naturally more likely to role-play what they do than others.

So what do you think about role-playing combat actions? How much of it is just fluff, and in how far should it affect the outcome of combat? Can you play without it?

EA is shutting down their range of Facebook games, like Sims Social. Calling that a "news Flash" is actually a pun, because I do have a theory why Facebook games are currently in a death spiral, and even Zynga had to shut down lots of those games. And my theory is that this has to do with the fact that these games are Flash games, and thus do not run on most mobile devices.

In case you hadn't noticed it yet, tablets and smart-phones are currently hot as surfing and gaming platforms, with PC sales down by 14% due to that. Now if you used to play Facebook games and bought an iPad, you will quickly realize two things: You can't play your Facebook games on your iPad, and there are a lot of iPad games available with similar gameplay to Facebook games, but a lot less need to constantly spam your friends. Why play Farmville if you can play Hay Day instead?

Flash basically negates the advantage of having a game online and accessible from everywhere. I assume players would be quite interested to be able to check on the status of their virtual farm or city on their smart phone during a lunch break, but the technology gets into the way of that. But if it isn't possible with a Facebook game, it is possible with native iOS games that work on the same farm- or city-building gameplay and run perfectly well on an iPhone. I don't own an Android device, but I read that they don't officially support Flash either. There are "flash browsers" available for iOS and Android, but the one I tried on the iPad ran Facebook games horribly.

So I think as PCs stop being the casual surfing device of choice for many people, the reliance of Facebook games on Flash is going to hurt these games savagely. And that could ultimately even lead to a lower interest in Facebook itself, as so many of its users use it for playing games.

In the previous session the Favorites of Selune had entered Castle Ravenloft, in search of a way to kill vampire lord Count Strahd von Zarovich and thereby escape from Barovia. After the butler Igor had welcomed them first, and then left them, they were free to go wherever they wanted in that castle. Deciding to explore the ground floor first, they started opening doors, with the rogue in front.

After finding some empty servants quarters, the next door proved to be more interesting: The office of Lief Lipsiege, an elderly undead gentleman doing the accounting for Strahd (cue in lots of "Count" jokes). Lief proved to be quite friendly, especially after the rogue helped him get a file on taxes from one cabinet he couldn't reach, having been chained to his desk for the last 30 years. Behind the office the group found the library, being dusted by Helga, the maid. With Lief's help (he had the register) the group found not just a book of arcane rituals in the library, but also the Book of Strahd, telling the history of how Strahd became a vampire. From that book they learned that to weaken Strahd sufficiently to be able to kill him, they had to disperse the grave earth from his coffin in his underground tomb.

Helga, apparently worried that Strahd would punish her for letting the players take his books asked to accompany them further, and ultimately bring her back to the village, and the players agreed. They didn't trust her completely, but figured that if she was an enemy, it would still be better to keep an eye on her. So they all went together into the next room, at the opposite end of the castle from the main entrance, where a ruined chapel was found, with a broken church window letting in the elements. Helga was chatting about the need to clean up that place, and how she had heard that there was a treasure in the bell tower of the chapel. A thick rope was leading up to a trapdoor in the ceiling, apparently closed by a simple bolt.

Hearing of the treasure, the wizard conjured up a ghostly hand to open the bolt of the trapdoor. The trapdoor swung open, but instead of a treasure five big and one huge spider came out and engaged the group in combat. And the maid Helga turned out to be a vampire, and attacked the group as well. While the spiders did have some nasty poison attacks, I think the players overestimated the danger. Lots of daily powers were used early on in this first fight of the day, a tactic known as alpha strike. Works quite well on the spot, but risks running into a lack of resources later in the day. As D&D players constantly kill stuff it isn't easy to get an atmosphere of horror and surprise going, but I think I succeeded quite well with Helga tricking them into that spider attack.

After the fight the adventurers took a short rest in the chapel, during which they saw a ghost which strongly resembled Ireena Kolyana. Having already read the Book of Strahd they could identify her as his lost love Tatyana, who was betrothed to Strahd's younger brother. Strahd killed his brother, Tatyana jumped through the chapel window down the cliff and her body was never found. The ghost apparently was replaying this scene, with Tatyana's ghost fleeing and ultimately jumping through the hole in the window. But the heroes managed to calm her down long enough to ask for her aid, and the ghost told them where Igor had hid the holy symbol he had stolen from the dead burgomaster. They found this  Holy Symbol of Ravenkind, and it turned out to be quite useful for the cleric, improving his turn undead power.

Once the ghost was gone, and the players had now achieved two of the goals that the tarot cards had foretold them, they tried to go after another hint from that tarot reading about searching behind fire. But the search behind the fireplace in the library turns out to be fruitless, and we ended the session there.

If I had to summarize the events of my current D&D campaign up to now in a paragraph, it would look something like that: The players started out being sold into slavery from an orphanage, were shipwrecked on an island, escaped with the help of the goddess Selune and were teleported to what has become their new home base in the Nentir Vale. There they investigated a mysterious death and disappearing standing stones in a village, discovering that a demon was inadvertently liberated there. They helped a barony to reinstall their rightful ruler in a rebellion, before hunting down the demon in an underground temple with a rift to a parallel plane. On killing the demon they were transported to that parallel plane, and are currently in a vampire castle where they need to kill the vampire lord to get back to their own world.

As you can see, a lot of things happened over 5 levels of gameplay. And only very little of it involved dungeon delving. And while I am not necessarily representative of anything, I do think that this sort of adventure with lots of story, lots of NPCs, and different interesting locations is very much what "modern" D&D looks like. It is a game of interactive story-telling, of role-playing mixed in about equal measure with combat.

Now Wizards of the Coast is working on the next edition of D&D, called D&D Next. And there is something like a beta test for this edition, with WotC handing out early versions of the rules plus adventures to test the new system. And one thing I noticed is that the adventures provided are not of the modern style described above. Rather they are all of the "classic" dungeon delve, hack'n'slash variety, like the Caves of Chaos, or the newly included Mines of Madness. The Mines of Madness adventure starts with the players in front of the entrance to said mines, being told that they are looking for some fabulous artifact in there. End of story. The decisions they have to take are of the type "you come to a crossing, do you go left or right?", and instead of NPCs to interact with there are series of rooms with monsters and traps.

Now before becoming DM in my current campaign I was a player in a campaign which could go on without any combat for months, and as this is with the same group of people I'm sure they noticed that my campaign has a lot more combat in it. In the vampire castle they are in there is the possibility, due to the castle's sandbox-y nature, to have several fights in a row. But there are also a lot of interesting NPCs to interact with, roleplaying scenes where the players need to decide whether to trust somebody, clues to find, and interesting choices to make. I am not a fan of hack'n'slash dungeons, where there is no logical rhyme or reason to an accumulation of rooms full of exotic monsters which seem to have no purpose whatsoever than to engage adventurers in combat.

And I am starting to wonder whether D&D Next as a rules system is designed for this "classic" style of adventuring. Which would be somewhat weird, because one of the main complaints about the current 4th edition of D&D was that the rules were too much designed for combat, and didn't give enough room for roleplaying. When I listen to a podcast of Mines of Madness, there is a lot *less* roleplaying going on than in my 4E campaign. In fact in that Mines of Madness games the player characters are apparently treated as disposable pawns, with multiple deaths in the dungeon each dealt with by the introduction of a replacement pre-rolled character coming out of nowhere.

What do you think? Are "classic" hack'n'slash adventures back in fashion? Have people given up on more involved stories where dialogue with NPCs is actually necessary and not just some random exchange of words with a tavern keeper or blacksmith between dungeon crawls? What kind of adventures would you like to play in D&D?

In discussions on the internet, when discussing groups of people, quite often these people are divided into two groups: The haves and the have-nots, the good and the bad, the intelligent and the stupid, the hardcore and the casual, and so on. Statements about these two groups are usually made as if there was a clear distinction between them. In mathematical terms, if you plotted something like video game skill on the x-axis and the number of people having this skill on the y-axis, people talk of it as if the distribution was bi-modal; that is as if the curve would have two distinctive humps, one of good players and one of bad players.

Scientifically speaking that is utter nonsense. The Central Limit Theorem says that if you make for example this plot of video game skill of a large enough population, what you will get is a bell curve with a single hump in the middle. That is why this curve is called a "normal distribution". The nature of this curve is that 68% of people are withing one standard deviation of the average. For example 68% of people have an IQ between 85 and 115, and are thus of average intelligence. Of course people are notoriously bad at estimating their own IQ or other qualities, so that if you rely on self-assessment you end up with the observation that most people are above average, which is a mathematical impossibility.

Why is that important in a discussion about games? For example I was reviewing a pen & paper roleplaying system yesterday and remarked that it was designed for experienced game masters and groups. And I got a comment saying "The rules system ain't helping a crap GM.". You see the pattern of thinking I described above: If a GM isn't experienced, he must be crap. The reality is that most game masters are average, and what I wanted to say in my review was that this system wasn't suitable for the average group. Yes, a "crappy" game master can ruin any system. But "crappy" GMs are exactly as rare as brilliant ones, and most GMs are simply average. And in my opinion certain rules systems are more suitable for average GMs and players than others are.

The same consideration is true for any other discussion about e.g. video game skill or dedication. Most people have an average skill and average dedication to a game. For a game to work well, it needs to work for the average, because that is most of the audience. "The good" and "the bad" are two more extreme, and much rarer cases, and are thus less important to consider in game design. Of course the extremes can be important for business models, for example the Free2Play whales who subsidize the game for everybody else. But that only works for games with specific business models, it would be a lot more difficult to give thousands of dollars to Blizzard for World of Warcraft, even if you purchased all possible pets and mounts. And while I am on a spending spree trying to buy every possible 4th edition D&D book and adventure, I doubt that will make a noticeable impression on the finances of Wizards of the Coast.

Designing for the average is actually rather difficult, as they aren't easy to get hold of. Various games for example had extensive beta tests, and then found to their surprise that average players in the release version of the game behaved very differently than the beta players, who by definition were a more dedicated part of the total audience. People voicing their opinion on game forums are likewise usually not average players. So if you design for the vocal minority of either extreme, you can run into problems with the silent majority.

In summary, I find it helps to think of people as being mostly average, as opposed to dividing them into two groups. Most of the people talking about "bad players", or "morons & slackers", or any of these terms are just chest-thumping to demonstrate their inflated opinion of themselves. The reality, as usual, is much more mundane. Most people are average.

Tim Westhaven sent me a free downloadable copy of his indie pen & paper roleplaying game Shattered Moon, and I promised to review it. Now I am aware of the difficulties of getting the word out on indie pen & paper games; nevertheless I'm afraid my review isn't going to help Tim very much, because I think there isn't much overlap between the readership of this blog and the target audience of Shattered Moon. Shattered Moon is what I would call a hardcore system, for experienced roleplayers who think that a game like D&D is too simple. Hardcore pen & paper roleplayers do exist, but they don't tend to hang out at places like mine.

Now how does one review a pen & paper roleplaying system? Basically by looking at two relatively separate things: The lore or setting on the one hand, and the rules system on the other. You could call that "world" and "game". Of course there is some overlap, for example a wizard casting a fireball will have certain implications on the nature of the world, as well as on gameplay. If you want to know how NOT to review a pen & paper roleplaying system, you only need to visit YouTube, where videos promising a review of some game system usually end up being half-hour rants on how wrong the hair-color of one sub-race of elves in that system is. :)

The world of Shattered Moon is a grim one, which could be described as post-apocalyptic fantasy.
That is it plays on our Earth, in the future, after an apocalypse; but that apocalypse wasn't the usual nuclear one, but was magical of nature. The moon shattered, thus the name of the system, the dark goddess Lilith "returns" to Earth, as does magic. And the players are nuoSidhe, "reawoken" dwarves, elves, goblins, ogres and trolls whose souls used to be trapped in human form. Like all post-apocalyptic settings, this is not a happy place. And the world (supported by some game rules) is designed to give rise to a lot of horror and unpleasant moral conflict. This is not an "a figher, a cleric, a wizard, and a rogue walk into a dungeon and come out with lots of treasure" kind of setting. And it is definitively not suitable for children, as if you hadn't guessed that.

But what is really hardcore about Shattered Moon is the gameplay, which is one of the weirdest and most challenging rules systems I've ever come across. In general roleplaying rule systems can be sorted by complexity of rules, ranging from systems which basically are improvised theater, have no rules and rely completely on the game master to make up the rules on the fly, to systems which have tons of rules and math and tables where you need a computer to figure out the result of a combat action. Shattered Moon manages to have both tons of rules and math and need for a computer PLUS being based on game master decisions instead of dice. It is a diceless system (although it does have a deck of fate cards to produce random results if needed) without the dicelessness getting rid of the math. If you believe that 4th edition Dungeons & Dragons is "too game-y" with its miniatures and battlemaps and dice, you might be surprised that Shattered Moon manages to be a lot more game-y and complicated without dice.

So how does this work? It is beyond this review to explain the whole system, and I won't even pretend that I have understood all the details. But basically it is based on player-controlled activity pools [AP] and FatePoints [FP]. Any activity costs AP, and the outcome can be further influenced by spending FP. Different types of activities have different activity pools, calculated from different stats and modifiers. To determine success the AP is compared to the difficulty of the action, determined by the game master and called activity rating [AR]. That is relatively easy if the action is "passive", that is not actively opposed by another player or non-player character; rules for "duelled activities" are a lot more complicated, with even something like a debate being played out like a combat, with spending points and using abilities. In combat, AP also serve to determine initiative, thus the character or monster with the highest AP acts first, spends some AP while acting, and thus drops down in the initiative order. All this is further complicated by FP, which can be used by players to do things like "induce a catastrophe", or "call a miracle". Players not only state what they want to do, but constantly also have to expend various resources to influence results, which makes gameplay very tactical.

Reading the rules for the first time is likely to make your head spin, the example of a combat taking 3 rounds takes 11 pages of the rulebook to describe. But looking at it from a zoomed-out view, the game is a curious mix of results that are very deterministic and results that are very arbitrary and depend very much on the game master, called The Fate in Shattered Moon. For this to work you absolutely need a very experienced game master and players who trust him to be fair. Shattered Moon is definitively not a game you want to use for your first roleplaying campaign ever, nor for any casual campaign. However the advantage of pen & paper systems is that you only need one table full of people who want to play the same thing to make any system work, however complicated and arbitrary it might be. So even if Shattered Moon is not a suitable game for the mass market, I would consider it likely that there are experienced groups of players out there who would very much enjoy this game.

As final part of this review, a word on what bang you get for your bucks. The Shattered Moon rulebook currently costs $19.99 on RPGNow for a pdf with 321 pages which contains everything you need to play. It is basically Player's Handbook, Dungeon Master's Guide, and Monster Manual in one. And while in a perfect world full of honest people every player would buy his own copy, we know that in reality it is likely that a complete group of players just buys one copy of the pdf and shares it. Which makes Shattered Moon a comparatively cheap system to try. There are even free character sheets and player material available at RPGNow. On the downside there is not a lot of additional material available yet, so if you are looking for adventure modules and the like, you are currently out of luck.

As I said before, I cannot give an unguarded recommendation to Shattered Moon. It is a niche product, and as far as I can tell it offers good value for money for a group of hardcore pen & paper players. But personally I am not planning to play this, as I have a far more casual campaign. Plus I prefer rules systems in which dice play a large role to determine outcomes, and there are fewer debates on whether a decision of the game master was fair or not. But all this are factors which depend on the people at your table, so your mileage may vary.

I finished Mass Effect 3 last weekend, and as I didn't have much time this week during the evenings, I only played Anno Online every day. But somehow I was repeatedly wondering what I should play as the next "big" game during the coming weekend. Basically I am wondering whether I should continue playing Dishonored, which I stopped playing somewhere in the middle for no good reason, or start something else instead.

I am pretty certain that if I don't go back to Dishonored anytime soon, I might as well uninstall it, because then I never will. Dishonored is one of those many games which A) have a story, and B) have complex controls which you get used to while playing. Not having played Dishonored for three months, I already forgot a lot about both the story and the controls. Thus it is a bit like starting a game in the middle, which is annoying. But I certainly don't want to start over from the beginning either. Somehow these games are not very "pause-friendly".

That contrasts with games like Civ5, or World of Tanks, or to some degree XCOM, where one "game" lasts only a limited time, and by design you then start the next game. Even if I was in the middle of a Civ5 game when I stopped, I probably would start a new game if I came back months later. In World of Tanks I don't even have the choice, every "game" is just 15 minutes, and you "start a new game" every time you log on. The new SimCity, with its far too small towns, then also ends up in this category, you probably would want to start a new city after a pause.

The other extremes are MMORPGs, which to me seem the least pause-friendly. If you made a pause of several months in a MMORPG, not only do you tend to completely have forgotten what you were doing last and why you are carrying all this stuff in your back; but also the virtual world around you has most probably changed, so whatever you were doing when you stopped is probably not relevant any more today. An expansion pushes that irrelevance of what you were doing before to the point where it actually feels like starting a new game. It doesn't really matter where you stopped in Cataclysm when you come back to Mists of Pandaria. So expansion somehow make MMORPGs more pause-friendly, and usually cause huge numbers of players to come back.

The Free2Play business model has gone from "you can't do that in the West" to one of the dominant business models for MMORPGs in a few years. While it certainly isn't a panacea, it certainly can get more people to try out your product than other business models can. That makes me wonder whether this could be a solution for pen & paper roleplaying games as well. Dungeons & Dragons has a rather unfortunate business model in which every few years a new edition comes out which is largely incompatible with all the books you bought before. The currently worked on edition, officially "D&D Next" is sometimes also called 5th edition, but if you consider that there was an edition 3.5, and some editions of D&D in parallel to AD&D, the total number of Dungeons & Dragons editions is in fact even larger. That understandably pisses a lot of people off. A part of hate spewed on various forums in the "edition wars" is in fact people trying to justify what fundamentally is a good economic decision, sticking with what you have instead of paying hundreds of dollars for a slightly different version which might or might not be "better".

Understanding this it becomes obvious that the attempt of Wizards of the Coast of winning old customers back by making D&D Next play "more like" previous editions, while still forcing everybody to buy new books, is not necessarily going to work. If they look at people's sound economic reasons for not buying a new edition of D&D, it becomes clear that game design is not a solution. WotC has to work on their business model. And Free2Play might just be the ticket.

How would that work? Easy, the basic rulebooks of D&D Next should be free: Player's Handbook, Dungeon Master's Guide, and Monster Manual, maybe with a little booklet on how to play with one solo adventure and one real adventure thrown in, like in the Red Box. Players would be able to download that package as PDF for free from the Dungeons & Dragons website. They could even inscribe themselves on that website to receive a softcover version of the material for just the cost of shipping. For people without internet, game stores would sell pre-paid postcards priced at the cost of shipping, which you fill in, send to WotC and receive your basic D&D Next books.

Wizards of the Coast would then make money by selling everything else at the usual prices: Deluxe hardcover versions of the PH, DM, and MM; all further rulebooks with new classes, monsters, and the like; adventures that come in nice boxes with maps, handouts, tokens and everything else needed to play the adventure; and so on. Just like in every other Free2Play model the idea is to get a lot of people playing your game for free, and then trust that a good number of them will get hooked and pay for your non-free parts of the game.

Of course this would be a rather daring and novel approach in the pen & paper roleplaying business. But it would be a logical extrapolation of previous attempts of making the basic product relatively cheap. Wizards of the Coast could really make a high impact here, beating both their big competitors like Paizo and the various indie RPGs which rely on cheaper online distribution. Ultimately a lot of these products are rather similar to each other, and it could well be the best business model which wins the day here.

Over the years the regular readers of this blog change, especially when I start writing about different subjects. Thus with me writing more about pen & paper roleplaying these days, it has become necessary to write this reminder about my terms of service, especially the comment moderation part.

This blog is dedicated to the intelligent discussion of various subjects, mostly related to games. As anybody who visits various forums can attest to, discussion on the internet is not always intelligent. Specifically some forms of comments are obviously more designed to shut up somebody else than to contribute anything constructive to the discussion.

I do allow any opinion in the comment section of my blog, whether I agree or not. If I disagree, I will most likely voice that disagreement and give my arguments why I do not agree. But while every commenter has complete freedom of opinion, I do impose restrictions on how that opinion is voiced. Basic rules of politeness have to be adhered to. Thus if you start insulting me or other commenters, START SHOUTING AT ME OR OTHERS IN ALL CAPS, start dismissing every counterargument as "bullshit", or go Goodwin on a comment thread, there is a strong likelihood that this will end in your comments getting deleted.

I do not edit comments. First of all Blogger doesn't have the possibility, and second of all I think that would be a greater attack on your freedom of expression than simply deleting the whole post. Thus comment moderation happens in the form of comment deletion, either of a single comment found to not adhere to these rules, or by a deletion of the whole series of comments, including mine.

My table, my rules, as the pen & paper roleplayers would say.

Electronic Arts just managed to win the title Worst Company in America for the second time in a row. Lots of commentary on that is justified. But I don't think all of it is. In particular I keep seeing one argument popping up again and again, in a replay of last year, that "EA has also presided over poor endings and seemingly rushed sequels to several highly acclaimed game series. Mass Effect 3's final act was so poorly received that fans demanded, and received, a revised ending, and EA was sued for false advertising.". And I don't think that is a valid complaint.

Take for example the 1942 movie Casablanca: If you had asked what ending the audience would have liked to see, it would probably have been Humphrey Bogart ending up with Ingrid Bergman instead of Claude Rains. Not having the most popular ending possible is part of why that film is considered art.

While I didn't like the ending of Mass Effect 3 either, and have already read a lot of people complaining about the end of Bioshock Infinite, I don't think such complaints are valid. I would very much argue that in a video game the gameplay should be more important than the story. But if you only look at the story and accept that telling a story is a form of art, you must accept that the artistic vision of the creator of the story might differ from your own. It is the very core of art that "beauty is in the eye of the beholder", and can't really be judged.

It would have been rather easy for a company like EA to create an ending of the Mass Effect 3 trilogy based on what is most popular with some focus group. Not doing that and sticking to some artistic vision deserves plaudits and not a Worst Company award. After all EA is doing enough other things wrong to deserve this award for things like the botched SimCity launch, excessive milking of their customers, or compromising gameplay with paid-for-by-advertisers DLC. Not making their stories have the most popular ending is one of the few things they actually got right.

Oh man, sometimes this blog makes me feel my age. I simply don't understand the entitlement kids of today. In yesterday's thread several people justified video games piracy by games being "too expensive", a "financial burden" on those poor kids, whose abject digital poverty was described in the following terms:

One thing that frequently annoys me about discussion on the internet is that people tend to avoid arguing the real question, but instead conjure up the horrors of some secondary evil. Talk about drugs, and people will tell you about people committing crimes to feed their drug habit. Talk about prostitution, and people will tell you about "white slavery". Talk about RMT, and people will tell you about account hacking. Talk about always-on DRM, and people will tell you about server outages.

I am not saying that these secondary evils don't exist. But if they were the core of the problem, it would be sufficient to solve those secondary problems and still have the primary feature.

The latest story here is that the next XBox will probably have always-on DRM, that is you won't be able to play anything on that console while not connected to the internet. And of course everybody talks about server outages or people without internet. Or uses the inherent lack of data to claim that DRM never works. And nobody addresses the real question:

Once all technical problems are resolved, should a company be allowed to put restrictions on the use of their game hardware / software to prevent piracy?

Again, this is assuming a working technical solution, and not discussing company double-speak that tries to sell you a restriction as a feature. I really *only* want to discuss the question whether a company has the right to put certain restrictions on their regular users in order to prevent some people playing illegal pirated copies of games.

For me the answer to this question has always been yes, a company making game hardware and/or software has the right to put in restrictions that limit piracy, even if those restrictions inconvenience legit users. Just like a supermarket has the right to impose certain restrictions on their customers that prevent theft. And from that point, everything else becomes just a technico-economic problem: What sort of technical solution can the company find which causes a minimum of inconvenience to paying customers while having a maximum effect on pirates? It is easy to demonstrate that there must be a break-even point somewhere, where the added income from people "forced" to pay for the product exceeds the lost income from people prevented from buying the hard- or software due to the restrictions. It is basically a business decision, and companies have the right to make those business decisions.

That is not to say that things can't go wrong. I am pretty sure that in the specific case of SimCity the overall net effect on EA was negative, with more damage done to the company by their non-working DRM solution than piracy damage prevented. "Always Off" is not a feature you can sell to anybody. But ultimately that isn't different from any company releasing a flawed product and having to deal with the consequences, whether the flaw is non-working servers or horse meat in "beef" burgers.

The important thing is that there is no such thing as a "right to piracy". You cannot go to a court of human rights and claim that Microsoft or EA has an obligation to let you copy their games for free, or that the always-on internet requirement is a breach of your human rights. Saying that Microsoft should be obliged to provide an XBox that works without internet is like saying that Wikipedia should be obliged to provide their product without internet, or any other provider of some service over the internet (including me, you can't read my blog without internet either).

If Microsoft really decides to make the next XBox work only while connected to the internet, I fully support them in as far as they have the right to do so. And I fully support the right of everybody to not buy such an XBox because of those restrictions. How much money Microsoft is effectively gaining or losing due to that business decision will depend on how well the technical implementation is working. And unless you have a parallel universe at hand in which the restriction-free XBox is a reality, it will be impossible to know the real numbers. Everybody will just claim completely spurious estimates depending on whether he is for or against piracy.

My newsreader is full of blog posts complaining about LFR in World of Warcraft, and a lack of healers. Meanwhile Pete from Dragonchasers writes about Defiance saying: "In theory you could set yourself up as a kind of healer but I’m not sure there’s enough there to make that a rewarding career path.". To me the two cases look like two sides of the same coin, with the same core problem. And it is a problem all collaborative multiplayer games with different roles have, even pen & paper ones.

Basically people have favorite classes and play-styles. Thus if you take any population and let everybody play whatever he wants, you get a "natural" distribution of everybody playing their favorite role. But in a group of a given size there is a mathematical optimum for maximum efficiency of the group that depends on the role distribution. That mathematical solution will differ not only for different group sizes, but also for different games, because it depends on factors like how much damage do players deal, how much can they withstand, and how much can they heal. The fundamental problem is that the mathematical optimum is rarely a fit with the natural distribution of everybody playing their favorite role.

The overall effect is that if you take one group of hippies with ultimate freedom, allowing each member to play whatever he wants, and compare them to one military group in which who plays what role is determined by a tyrannic leadership, the military group will always be more efficient. If you pursue maximum efficiency, the needs of the collective beat individual freedom. Which is a somewhat weird concept if you consider that you started out by joining a game to have fun, and not the military to fight for your countries survival.

I haven't played Defiance, and wasn't planning to after reading the first reviews. So I can't say exactly how efficient a healer is in that game. But there is always an optimum solution for efficiency, which could be zero healers, but also could be something higher, depending on group size. Whether that is a "rewarding career path" only matters as long as you let every player decide for himself what he wants to play. As soon as you get some sort of guild structure or similar organization, and players find out that having X healers around is improving their win chance over not having them around, somebody will be "forced" to play a healer. Or inversely, if zero healers is the optimum, somebody choosing a healing spec for fun will be looked down upon.

This is pretty much why I don't play in any guild structure in any game any more. I value my personal freedom very much, especially in a game that I choose to play for fun. I already submit to the greater good of the collective when for example I am at work, or with my family. I find the choice of either playing what the collective needs or spoiling everybody's fun by being selfish to be an unpleasant one.

What is the difference between a game and a toy? The dictionary definition will tell you something about a game being "structured playing", but basically it comes down to there being rules and win conditions. You can "beat" a game, there is a challenge to overcome; but to achieve that you have to live with the downside that there are rules that limit what you can do. Roleplaying games are very much an attempt to achieve the best of both worlds, having both game elements and unlimited freedom. But that can never work 100%: If you have unlimited freedom, you end up with a toy, not a game, and you lose the advantages of games, there being a challenge and a win.

When you read discussions about pen & paper roleplaying, this fundamental conflict pops up everywhere. The D&D edition wars are very much about the fact that 4th edition is more solidly on the game side than previous or next editions. People fight about the use of battle maps with grids on them, and miniatures, because some find those "too game-y". And there are endless discussions on the subject in how far a DM should fudge dice rolls to achieve a desirable outcome instead of a random one.

My personal observation on this is that games work better for a group of people than toys do. In a game, or a game-y roleplaying session, the rules are agreed upon in advance, and the players can rely on them. When you move towards "there are no rules, DM decides all" systems, the balance of power shifts towards the DM. And like all tyrannies that is more likely than not to end badly. Players lose motivation, attendance drops, campaigns crumble to dust.

On the one side the DM is always the ultimate power, the least replaceable person at the table, the one doing most of the work, and the referee. On the other side the role-playing game is only a part of the social relationship between the group of players, and if viewed as a group of friends there is a clear social need for a more egalitarian structure. Having the DM visibly bound by the same rules and the same randomness of dice rolls as the players are create a feeling for fairness, which is necessary for this social construct to work. If whether the enemy is in range of your attack is clearly visible on the table, there is no argument; but if the DM has to decide that question the suspicion can sneak up that the DM treats one or the other player unfairly, and that creates a tension which is bad.

The same egalitarian considerations of fairness make me prefer rules systems which are more balanced over rule systems in which certain classes are clearly better than others. This is why I play 4th edition, the only edition of Dungeons & Dragons where there is a reasonable balance of power between high-level wizards and high-level fighters.

In the heated discussions on the subject of how much power a DM should have, or how much balance a rules system needs, I observe that those shouting most loudly for imbalanced systems are those who then want the position with the most power. It isn't the players who demand that the DM is bound less by rules, nor is it the fighters who demand more power for the wizards. I find that somewhat short-sighted. In the long run the best system is the one which maximizes fun for everybody. If you disadvantage part of the people at the table, the table might well end up empty in the long run. Fairness and balance is more important to the long-term health of a pen & paper campaign than the power trip of some individuals.

I have always argued that subscription numbers of a MMORPG six months after release do allow us to say something about the quality of a game. If people are still playing then, they must be having fun. It is very hard to argue that they got lured into the game by false advertising and haven't found out about it half a year later. But that is subscription MMORPGs, a dying species. If we look at single-player games, it is a lot easier to imagine that people bought a game they ended up not wanting, and thus the sales numbers that state which games people buy aren't necessarily an expression of which games they want.

Case in point: SimCity. It apparently sold over 1.1 million copies over its first two weeks. How many of these 1.1 million players regretted that purchase? How many got the game on pre-order, or bought it based on hyped previews, before the significant flaws of the game became apparent?

The perverse consequence is that probably the *next* EA Maxis game will sell less well, regardless of quality. But somebody who tries to find out "what gamers want" based on sales numbers would think that SimCity was an excellent game to emulate. Even if you don't look at the game itself, but only at the server issues, somebody looking at the sales numbers will conclude that people don't mind buying games with always-on DRM. Because the SimCity server debacle is more likely to hurt the *next* games sales.

Although I am not a big fan of Kickstarter from a customer protection point of view, I would say that Kickstarter might actually better at measuring "what gamers want" than sales of triple-A games. There is less influence of hugely expensive advertising campaigns or lobbying to game journalists on Kickstarter numbers, and more of an explicit expression of desire for a certain type of game.

I find it quite likely that in the case of single-player games the usual economic consideration of the "homo economicus" who buys what is of use to him isn't true. People buy what they *think* might be a great game, lured in by pre-order bonuses, advertising, and hype from game journalism. Quite often they want to buy the game on release, to be playing the game everybody is talking about, to be with the in crowd. By the time they notice that the game they bought isn't the game they wanted, it is already too late. Sales numbers are in, there are no refunds, and beyond not buying the next game(s) from that company there isn't much they can do.

One of my favorite quotes is Sid Meier's "A [good] game is a series of interesting choices", because I very much agree with that definition. I am currently playing Mass Effect 3, which I got for free from EA as compensation for having wasted my money on SimCity. And when I write that phrase, I wonder if "playing" is actually the right verb. I'd need something which is half "playing" and half "watching", because a lot of the time I am either just watching some events, or I am technically in control of my character but whatever choices I make still end up with the same result. Maybe "experience" is the verb I'm looking for.

Now many people will protest and say that Mass Effect 3 is the game that has the biggest number of choices to make during the game, and one of the few games where those choices have an influence on how the story evolves. Which is true, but only to the degree how much you actually care about the details of the story. Do you care whether Ashley lives or dies? Do you care whether the genophage is cured and the Krogan can repopulate and potentially overrun the galaxy some centuries later? If you do care, Mass Effect 3 is the game for you, because you can make decisions that determine those outcomes.

But if you don't care about the details of the story, and just want to play and win the game, you quickly realize that your decisions don't matter. Many, many dialogue choices come down to "Either say something nice, get paragon points, and something happens; or say something intimidating, get renegade points, and exactly the same thing happens". Then of course anybody who ever played any game with an alignment point system knows that it doesn't matter whether you are good or evil, as long as you are consistent and always choose good or always choose evil to maximize the effect of the accumulated good or evil alignment points.

A much smaller number of choices actually effect winning or losing the game. And that ultimately comes down to a single number, your effective military strength, which determines how exactly the game ends. The higher your score, the nicer the end. And so curing the genophage is not just a moral decisions, but also affects that score, because it makes a difference whether you get the support of the Krogans or the Salarians. While the effect on effective military strength is complex (as it depends on what you did in Mass Effect 2, as well as some decisions later), you can "minmax" all your decisions in Mass Effect 3 to get the highest possible score at the end.

Ultimately all dialogue decisions in Mass Effect 3 basically just determine what cut scenes you will get to watch. They don't effect gameplay in the way that the decision "should I wield a shotgun or a sniper rifle?" does. Which ends up being the most interesting choice you can make in Mass Effect 3. The rest of the game plays a lot like Dragon's Lair, you press a button and see what happens in a limited tree of possible outcomes. Overall the course of the main story doesn't change, whatever choices you make, you only get to influence some details and the score for the ending. And doing a lot of side-quests consisting of picking up stuff in missions or doing a boring mini-game of planetary scanning is ultimately having a much bigger effect on your final score than any decisions you can make in this game.

I'll try to "experience" Mass Effect 3 to the end, because it is mildly entertaining, but I'm not a huge fan. Too much passive watching of events, combined with the annoying inability to skip scenes or to save the game when they are running. Not enough interesting choices.