Character Creation and Remote Gaming

So as long as I'm ranting about the downsides of character creation, here's another thing I noticed.  When playing via video-chat, character creation is a total pain(probably doesn't help when you're using your own customized system).  You can get through it but it takes time.  And it's awkward.  A player asks about some skill or dice roll and you're not looking at the same page, so it takes a while to understand the question and then for them to understand the answer.

Not to mention the logistics.  You have to send all the players character sheets, the list of skills, etc. and they have to open and read them, probably with multiple windows/tabs open at the same time.

OK, so one solution is to stick with something simple that everyone's familiar with.  Fair enough.  That at least solves the problem of questions, since no one should need to ask any.

The solution I find myself tending towards lately is random character creation.  Random creation is fun in it's own right.  You never know what to expect and it can be a fun process assembling the set of disparate numbers in into a living breathing character.  And it also saves a lot of time for video-chat games, players just need to click a button, give the character a name and maybe a sentence or so about who this guy is, and then print or save and you're ready to go.  Instead of 45 minutes of awkward questions and more-awkward silences on Google+.

So, DCC has a hilarious character generator that I would love to run a Google+ game session with sometime.  It's simple but has a lot of character.

As for the Polish Resistance game I've been running, my goal is to put my money where my mouth is and build an automatic character generator in the near future...

I Can't Be Bothered with Character Creation

So I had a realization while creating a character for the DnD Next playtest.  I just can't be bothered with the task of character creation.  Oh, I made one.  But I don't particularly relish spending the better part of an hour picking out specific skills and whatnot, especially with game sessions that last only 2-3 hours.

This wasn't always the case.  I remember as a teen buying TSR's Complete Book of Elves and spending DAYS reading and thinking about how to create my character.  (I likely spent more time creating the character than actually playing with him!)  Admittedly, this didn't eat into game time back then, since this was something I did on my own time.

But I guess that, in addition to having less time on my hands these days, I've learned from experience that the real fun starts with the adventure.  And character creation doesn't necessarily contribute that much to that.

Is this something that comes with age?  Or am I just impatient, wanting the adventure to start already?

Game Design Interview: Original XCOM

Speaking of XCOM, here is an interview where the designers of the new XCOM Enemy Unknown discuss the things that made the original XCOM UFO Defense great.  I found this video really entertaining and it has a number of good game design points.

Difficulty

 

Some interesting quotes from the interview:

• "the Original game was, like, unforgiving...those kinds of games have a renaissance right now"
• "succeeding in XCOM was like really succeeding"

One of the designers describes his introduction to the game.  He's all excited after hiring and equipping a squad of soldiers.  He even goes and renames them after his family members.  And then on the first mission four of them get killed in his first turn, walking out of the transport!

This reminded me of criticisms I've heard of later DnD products where enemies are carefully measured to be beatable by the party, as opposed to earlier products where character death lurked around every corner.

Meat Shields

They also describe the common XCOM tactic of bringing a few rookies along to act as 'scouts'.  They scout around, get shot by the aliens, and then your more valuable troops can pick-off the aliens now that you've located them.  In this way you can slowly build-up a team of hardened veterans, despite them generally being killable in one-shot.  (Of course, there are always those missions where you run out of rookies, or where you get flanked and your best guy gets killed!)

This struck me as similar to classic DnD where you hire Shield-Bearers as your front-line troops so that your valuable PCs are less-likely to die.

Horror

They also describe going on a night mission as a new XCOM player.  It's dark, you can't see much.  Plasma shots come out of the darkness.  And when you finally see the alien, it's strange looking and you can barely see it in the darkness.  And they expressed surprise that you could have such tension and horror in a strategy game.

I've written about this before, but for RPGs I think that Horror really comes down to DM-style.  How does the DM describe the encounter?  Does he present it with a sterile description: "you see 6 kobolds." Or does he build up the horror: first the party hears noises and a spear flying out of the darkness.  Then you can make out just the glowing eyes in the dark.  When you approach with a torch, you see a hunched creature, all teeth and claws, holding a bunch of primitive but razor-sharp javelins.  Creating an air of mystery/intrigue is much the same, giving clues the characters don't yet fully understand, etc.

Updating a Classic

They discuss a bit how they wanted to simplify the UI without sacrificing too much control.  And my opinion is that they succeeded in remaking a classic.  Their strategy in doing so was to assemble a design team of people with a lot of passion for and a good understanding of the original.  Then they could go and discuss what changes to make.

And it only took XCOM 8 sequels to get it right, so I can understand a little better what happened with DnD 4th Edition!

XCOM: Enemy Unknown

They finally did it.  They made a sequel to XCOM that does justice to the original!

OK, let's back-up a step.  For those of you unfamiliar with the title, 1994's XCOM: UFO Defense is a best-selling, critically acclaimed video game.  In it, the player commands the XCOM organization, tasked with combating the growing threat of alien invasion of Earth.  There's a major strategy and resource management aspect to the game, but the main activity is the turn-based, squad-based combat.  The player flies their squad around the world to different types of missions where they have to face-off against alien forces who outnumber and outgun them.

There have been a number of sequels, but none of them saw the same success, and more importantly, all of them have lacked the core elements that made the original great.  The game has a bit of a cult following till this day, and a number of fan-based projects exist to ensure the the original can play on modern computers, and to make clones of the game.

This month, however, Firaxis Games released a remake of the original, XCOM: Enemy Unknown.  I downloaded and played the free demo on Steam and, while there have been a number of changes, all the best elements of the original are there.  In particular:

• Tactical Combat: great squad-based combat
• Interesting Monsters: makes for fun variety and lots of room for tactics
• Sandbox World: missions are randomly generated, so you don't know what to expect in advance and it's very re-playable
• Character Improvement: squad improves over time
• Good AI: makes for difficult combats
• Character Death: makes for very tense battles

 

Tactical Combat 

 

The Tactical Combat in XCOM in particular is great.  This, incidentally, is one of the things that originally attracted me to the Cyberpunk 2020.  I think that the two main ingredients for this are weapon ranges and a powerful cover mechanic.  The result of these is that each side tries to flank the other in order to negate their cover.

Admittedly, there hasn't been much of this in Polish Resistance, but I just got some game mats and erasable markers, so maybe that will encourage more tactics in combat.

XCOM Links

Anyway, here's an entertaining review of the game.

There are some amazing videos of multiplayer sessions on youtube. Some real games of cat and mouse.  For instance:

• here
• here
• here 
• here 

Tales of the Grotesque and Dungeonesque Contest

I've been having fun working on my entry for this...

DnD Next Playtest 3

Well, it's been a while since my friend ran the last playtest, so while this is our 3rd playtest session, I think it might actually be the 4th playtest packet.

In Praise of the Character Sheets

First-off I would like to praise the blank character sheets.  We started out with updating our sheets from last time with the new rules.  With so many character facets to take into account(Race, Class, Background, Specialty), having a character sheet that keeps them separate really helps with keeping a handle on the whole mess.  I'm not saying that I like this direction of so much character detail, but I'm saying the character sheet made it much more manageable for me as a new player--I basically had to just read each facet's section and copy down a short list of skills/abilities for each.  I found this much more manageable than my old 4e computer-generated sheet which took me several sessions to really get a handle-on.  Basically I would say that DnD next seems to be better at Data Encapsulation.  Character Creation took a while but I would guess that it would get a lot faster as we get used to the system.  This as opposed to 4e which basically demanded a computer program in order to create characters(too many dependencies to manage manually).

Manouvers

Another new thing was combat "Maneuvers".  Each class can pick a short list of maneuvers, which are very similar to 3e Feats.  Basically they are dissociative abilities which are, in my mind, more associative than 4e abilities.  Things like Sneak Attack and Leap Attack as opposed to Cleaving Strike and Dragon Punch.  So I still agree with my observation in our first playtest that it looks like they are going back to DnD 3.5 and going-on from there.

Combat Speed

So the combat took fairly long, but I think it would get faster quickly as we get used to the system.  Again, slower than 2e, faster/simpler than 4e.  The skills/maneuvers are more associative than 4e, so the title gives you much more info about what the ability does.  As such, I only had to read the description once to remember it, so, closer to 3.5 Feats.

So I feel that DnD Next is shaping-up to be a move in the right direction.  Still not my DnD of choice to run, I would probably go with one of the popular retro-clones if I was running a DnD game, since all the additional skills and maneuvers don't really add much to the game experience for me.

Sandomierz Megadungeon Architecture

Old Town, Sandomierz

Nathan & noisms recently linked to a Megadungeon design guide. Some of the great maps there gave me the dungeon design bug, so I threw together the map below.  Basically I took a tourist map for the Old Town of Sandomierz, highlighted the relevant buildings for Polish Resistance, and added a side-view of different dungeon sections.  It starts with the Basement Level but then goes deeper.

I'm not sure exactly how to make this work with the Ad-Hoc Dungeon Generator.

Oh, and Life immitates Art.  Apparently the Old Town really does have an extensive tunnel system up-to 12m deep in some parts.