Back in the mid 1990s I hadn’t really discovered “Euro” games yet, and my board game of choice during those days was a little something called Robo Rally.  My set got used so often that I basically had to stop playing because the cards were sticking together (I know, I know, I should get some card sleeves).

By modern standards, it’s hard to give Robo Rally a really high grade.  It’s not super easy to teach, and it can have a high frustration factor.  Most folks tend to set up racetracks that are a little too complicated for their own good, and and games would frequently end with one person coasting off into the sunset with the other three or four players mired in a push-fest or riding conveyor belts in circles.  This is a game where one or two little mistakes can really mess up an entire evening.

However, it is now possible to play Robo Rally via the magic of the Internet.  It takes a little bit of work – you have to head over to the Gleemax “Alpha” page and click on games.  You may discover that you need to create some sort of free account, and you need to have Java installed on your PC, and you need to convince your browser to run the java applet.  Getting the game up and running takes a few more key presses than would seem to be ideal or necessary, but at least you aren’t bombarded with stupid pop-up ads while this is taking place.

Despite the fact that WotC made some effort to create a “social” gaming space in which people could meet and play games like Robo Rally and Acquire electronically, the reality is that the handful of people who are using this site at any given moment are really just playing single player games.  This is just fine.  If anything, the computer AI in this Robo Rally App is just a little too good.  Oh, the computer controlled bots shoot at each other just fine, and its clear that they get their share of really bad hands and can’t always do much with their cards.  When they do get a good hand, however, it seems like they never make the mistake of playing “turn left” when they meant to “turn right”.  Thus you, as the human, will have to play pretty much error-free if you want to stand any chance of keeping these games close.

What’s so great about playing Robo Rally on the computer?  Well, for one thing you can set a reasonable timer like 90 seconds or two minutes per turn.  If you finish early, you don’t actually have to wait for the AI bots to finish – you can just sit back and “watch” the turn.  The computer never seems to make a mistake in running the game – the human players don’t have to worry about making sure to move all of the bots and board elements in the exact right order - the computer does all of this automatically.

Another nice thing about playing Robo Rally against a bunch of bots is that if you do something hideous in the first or second turn, or otherwise find yourself caught on the wrong conveyor belt with no chance of winning, at least you aren’t obligated to go through the motions for another two hours.  You can just reset, or in any case the game won’t take much more than fifteen minutes to finish.

Why are these games so fast?  Well, as I said, you can pretty much play at your own pace, and then watch the turns run in “real time”.  Most of the tracks are set up with very reasonable layouts – only one or two boards in most cases, and almost never more than 4 flags.  There’s a good fifteen or more tracks to choose from, so you do have a lot of replayability.

I have had some really close finishes – here’s my “bad beat” story from one game – I was doing pretty well and cruising towards the final flag, but I got slowed down by a couple of bad card hands.  On the fateful final turn, I saw that there was another AI bot poised to cut onto the flag ahead of me.  Still, I managed a program that would get me backing onto the flag on phase 5.  To my surprise, the AI bot managed to overshoot the flag on phase 2, and I could see my way to victory.  Just imagine my surprise when the AI bot comes back around on a conveyor belt, and backs off the belt onto the final flag just AFTER my robot had executed its backup card on phase 5, pushing me off the flag and denying me the win.  This was the worst possible last second swing from defeat to victory and then back to defeat again.

Anyway, you can easily make the case that this is one of those situations where the computer game actually improves upon the board game.  Try it yourself and see what you think.  When you are ready, you can send me a challenge via the comments below.

I’ve always felt that the DMG should be a meaty reference, filled with the kind of details and rules for atypical scenarios that would be too much for either the players or DM to care about on a daily basis, but are there when you need it at the right time. Of course, this is exactly what the 1^st-edition DMG was. That book, was, admittedly, also a huge mess – essentially a haphazard compilation of a scattershot of Dragon magazine articles. The was little to no cohesion between the various rule sets, owing to the myriad of authors and infancy of the genre. This was exactly the sort of Exxon Valdez of gaming that 2^nd-edition attempted (with little success) to streamline, and that 3^rd-edition (finally) overhauled into something more consistent, though just as heavyweight.

I say this with the breezy liar’s grace of never having spend significant time digging deep into the 2E, 3E, or 3.5E DMGs, whereas the 1E DMG had the Tolkien-esque magnificence and mystery to it, in that you could read it over and over and continue to find something new and interesting within its pages each time.

Now at 4E, at least four forces are at work that undermine the DMG’s once assumed role (by me at least) as enduring reference tome. The first is the push to make the players more complete participants in the running of the game – as evidenced by the dramatic increase of usable stuff in the Player’s Handbook. The second is the ongoing simplification and increasing logic of the rules; less and less of the DMG is needed to make sense of the arcane and weird corner cases, because they are all following intuitive templates now. The third is the ever-accelerating trend to move content out to expansion books (and now online), so where once upon a time the DMG would have been the ideal place to go deep into rules for outdoor or extraplanar rules, these things are now given the most cursory of treatments as a placeholder for the additional books that we all know are coming. Ironically, these books always feel like more than 50% fluff used to try and justify a page count, whereas a condensed, meaty take-away of new and useful rules could be boiled down to a dozen pages per book or less.

The fourth force at work is the killer though, and that’s the new breeze-easy D&D philosophy that’s repeated throughout the DMG. It boils down to two key elements: “If it’s not fun, skip it”, and “if it sounds fun, let your players try – down get too bogged down, just assign a difficulty and let them roll”. And I guess one more: “if we DO give you a rule for a special situation, you can bet that it’s gonna be a simplified one, yep: pretty much assigning a DC and letting the player roll a die.”

By and large these are good sentiments and I want to embrace them. But just as Magic: the Gathering is the “grown-up” version of CCGs and the kiddies are prodded toward Pokemon or Yu-gi-oh or Dragonball-Z until they’re ready for the training wheels to come off, so too with D&D as the “grown-up” RPG. Kiddies should stick with their shiny happy videogames until they’re ready to move up to a full-fledged RPG, and then the cost of admission is learning a certain amount of fluency and literacy with a body of rules. Yes, these things go too far, too fast, and I’ve abandoned CCGs as they spiraled out of controls in multiple measures, but the solution to this problem is not a full-frontal lobotomy. It’s balance.

Anyway, at this point I’ve got a 4E DMG that will either get about 8 pages photocopied out, tagged with post-it-notes as bookmarked, or simply cut right from the book if I could stomach such dramatic desecration of the printed word. The rest of it, well, it makes a nice read through once to get back in touch with your warm and fuzzy DM side, but you’ll never need to read it twice. By the end of your first time through, you’ll probably be skimming it. Which strikes me as a shame and a big waste of potential.

ANd here are some others from Film and TV I’ve been trying to find an excuse to use:

From Leon (aka The Professional):

From Heroes:

From Stargate:

From Army of Darkness:

And Lastly 2 from Star Wars:

I am thinking that maybe the nature of the disconnect is based in where I get inspiration from. I’ve always tried to make my games like novels. I like books. No, I love books. I’ve read hundreds of Fantasy and Sci-Fi books. Whenever I am feeling uninspired and don’t know what I want to do next in my game I’ll reread some of my old favorite books. That’s what refreshes me. When I dream up plots and story arcs I think of them in terms of books. When I started my campaign I wrote out 35 chapter titles with brief ideas of where the party would be. I would probably have done more except that after chap 35 the party would be in a position to determine where things went next. I mean they could have derailed one of the earlier chapters but at the end of what I had planned I really dumped it in their lap. Since then I’ve been more or less building the world in front of them as they go. I have an idea of where they should eventually end up but I don’t know how they going to get there. I’ve now figured out that I am definitely in the minority in this viewpoint. Over the past year I’ve listened to a lot of gaming podcasts and one of the things that I’ve come to realize is that the gamer community has a greater connection to movies than books. It’s one of the reasons that ‘Who would play your character in the movie?” is such a great character creation question. It’s also why Prime Time Adventures is such a great game, even if it is based on TV instead of Film. (By the way you all should check out the Star Wars Episode Fifty PTA games session recording. They can be found at the Canon Puncture web site.) The problem I have with movies as basis for games is that the plots are always so limited. It has to wrap up in couple of hours so you can only do so much. I like movies as much as the next guy. I must see Dark Knight, Hellboy 2, Mongol, and am looking forward to Watchmen (check the trailer here.) But these things do not inspire me. I don’t see them related to my game in any way. Even fantasy movies, rare that the good ones are, don’t inspire me. (Excuse me for a minute while I silently rage about LotR II & III again for a minute… okay all better.) I’m starting to think that if I can get my head around designing my game as a movie, or a series of movies, it might be more understandable by my players. My problem is that it feels so much more limited. Movies are self contained and I like having the players effect the world. I want their actions to have consequences. Like in their last world their actions pointed out that the rampant capitalism that was the norm was bad for society and the monarchy needed to exert more influence the merchants. This is going to have a huge impact when/if they go back. I like things like this for two reasons: one, it gives the world a more complete feel, and two, it gives me something to think about as I develop more of the setting. Maybe I should start thinking in terms of a TV miniseries or even a show like BSG, episodic but cumulative. Maybe that would put me on the right track.

Anyone out there have any advice? What do you think of your own games? Are they like TV shows, movies, book, comics, or something else? Where do you get your inspiration when you write adventures?

Recently playing a fair amount of 2–player TTR on the original USA map got me looking at the expansions. TTR: Switzerland is billed as being very much for two or three players, and once you own the main game, it’s only about $25 for the expansion, depending on where you shop or how much you pay for shipping. That’s potentially a pretty good deal for the playability you get, so I went for it.

I’m happy to report that Days of Wonder’s Ticket to Ride: Switzerland (2007) is a fantastically good expansion. It goes well beyond the novelty of a new map (and geography lesson) and achieves some sort of holy-Grail of expansions – for all the same mechanics and order of play that you know and love from TTR, it nonetheless comes out feeling like a much different play experience.

The board is a lot tighter, of course, as befitting the reduced player count, and you get five less pieces to work with. And you have the special tunnel rules that debuted in TTR: Europe. The map is small enough that you can potentially get to anywhere, but that means you need to be that much more judicious about whether you should. With fewer alternate paths to get from any A to B, you also have to be a lot pickier about the color of the locomotive cards you take, lest you end up with a lot of junk you just can’t use. It has a fast-paced, clock-is-always-running feel to it, though it’s strangely relaxing to play nonetheless.

But as much as anything it’s the deck of destinations that makes this board click. There’s city-city, city-to-country, and country-to-country tickets. By and large the scores on these cards are lower, and that reduces the risk of failing a connection. While my experience in standard TTR is that you draw additional tickets maybe once or twice in a game if things are going well, in TTR-S you will draw a lot more, and in every game. You might end up with 8–12 destinations by the end of the game. Knowing this is of course a key strategic point, since you’ll want to define early where on the map you have the luxury to sprawl about, and where you need to conserve or even avoid. As per the original game, the one weakness that you’ll likely hear about is the lottery feel of drawing up more destinations and essentially getting free points for stuff you’ve already mostly or totally connected to. It seems fair enough in this incarnation: it’s a bit of a duel and as such you ought to know what to expect in the destination deck.

In two-player mode on a tight map, the game can easily tilt to the confrontational side, but since you can’t help but compete over certain key avenues, in some ways it’s more acceptable. From our plays so far, it seems that one result of this is that you tend to start your builds at the map edge, where there’s fewer options when things go bad, and work your way towards the central hubbub around Zurich. (I suppose it’s possible to play a whole game and not connect to Zurich, but I think it’s unlikely, and even less likely that you’ll win…)

So the good news overall is that if you’re a TTR fan, you have great choices for different boards to play depending on your number of players. Even better news is that Days has just announced that their other small map expansion – Nordic Countries – will be generally available coming this fall. To date, the game has only been available in Scandinavia. And if you want to move your TTR experience into a slightly more complex direction, there’s also the Ticket to Ride: Märklin standalone version, reviewed by our own Metaljim in April ‘06.

Happy rails to you!

I had tothumbnail this last one. It is the ultimate answer to the question ‘What alignment is Batman?’

Let me explain. This is a saying of mine that was born out of AD&D. The thirteenth level fighter has been the pinnacle of badassery ever since 1^st edition AD&D. Ninth may have been name level but it was at thirteenth that a fighter reached the highest attacks per round and by then he’d also be into the single digit THAC0s (7 or 8 I can’t quite remember.) Think of it as a 2^nd name level. At 9^th you’d become a Lord and at 13^th you’d become a Badass Lord. This stuck with me and whenever I saw an action hero kicking ass and taking names I’d think of him as a 13^th level fighter. This was especially true when he would be put in a situation where he wouldn’t have access to his signature weapon or fighting style. All the other characters would be amazed that he won and I would think “Of course he won he’s a thirteenth level fighter.” It showed that a high level Fighter can kick ass in any situation. Here are 2 video examples (courtesy of Youtube): Quigley’s final fight in Quigley Down Under and Tom Cody’s duel with Raven in Streets of Fire. Quigley has to fight with a pistol which he “doesn’t have much use for” and Cody has to fight in melee where up until that point he had only shown aptitude with guns. Of course they both win, and why? Because they are goddamn badasses, just like 13^th level Fighters. Even in the THAC0-less days of 3^rd edition Fighters retained some of this ability. The huge Base Attack Bonus and the bonus feats to use said BAB gave a high level Fighter just as much punch and versatility.

I wrote last week about a pretty good PC game called Mass Effect – an interesting hybrid of an RPG and a shooter.  I was able to finish the game, and now I am thinking about going back and playing the entire game through a second time, only this time with a different character class and, more importantly, an evil character.

Flash back a long way in time, to a galaxy far, far away…

I’m talking about 1997’s Star Wars: Jedi Knight Dark Forces II.

The old classic Jedi Knight PC game had two main “paths” that you could explore depending on whether you kept building up your “dark side” powers as opposed to your light side powers.  A lot of the game’s levels played out more or less the same, but the story had a different feel and you got two very different endings.  In the “evil” version, you were more or less setting yourself up as a rival to the main baddie by the end of the game. 

Now, I am flashing all the way back to 1997 because I think it is one of the last times that I really remember doing a full replay of a single player RPG-like game just to experience a small amount of alternate content.

Well, then again, I did play DiabloII all the way through with at least 3 or 4 different characters.  I played all the way through Nightmare mode with at least one of those characters.  The random maps and the random treasure sure help to keep the replayability high in that game.

So, all of this brings up a few interesting survey questions…

1) Do you enjoy sometimes playing an “Evil” PC in a single-player RPG even though you know that most of the content in the game is probably designed to make it easier for the “good” heroes to finish the game? 

2) Do you feel that you haven’t really finished a game unless you’ve seen more than one of the possible ending cinematics?

3) What counts for more when it comes to re-playing video games?  A) Trying it again on a harder difficulty level, B) Exploring different aspects of the story, or C) Just trying alternate character builds and searching for uber-loot?

4) Alternatively, do you find it so hard to finish any single player video game these days that you don’t even waste any time thinking about a do-over?

Some of the above probably does apply to people who play World of Warcraft.  Anyone out there willing to admit that they’ve reached Level 60 with at least one Alliance and one Horde character?  Do you keep playing World of Warcraft because you want to keep exploring all of the content, new dungeons, etc., or do you just keep grinding it out because you want to have slightly better loot than the guy standing next to you on the goblin airship?

As for me, I am more of an “explorer” when it comes to video games.  I’m not really drawn to playing evil characters, but if the game is good enough I might try the “evil” path just to see some of the other quests and content that is only available on that path.

Comments are welcome.  I’ll try to check in a few times over the next couple of days, but I will probably skip posting next week as I am in the process of moving from my small apartment to a rental house that is all of three miles down the road.  In many ways this move should be very easy, but I have a lot of crap that needs moving (books, games, etc.) so it will take me a few days to get re-established once I am moved.

So I’m still on my character creation kick, carrying on from

I’ve been thinking of writing a few simple computer utilities for running and playing my upcoming campaign. Time is tight, though, so I sure don’t want to reinvent the wheel. On the other hand, I can easily come up with all these pie-in-the-sky wish lists that go way beyond what some of the existing tools do. The only problem is that first I have to reinvent that particular wheel, and then I have to take it further, and if I run out of steam along the way, all I’ll have to show for it is a bright and shiny re-invented wheel. Rats!

OK, some of that is a lie. In particular, I really don’t go around looking for D&D tools, so I have no idea what the possible wheels are to begin with. I was surprised (though I shouldn’t have been) to see that Random’s already checked out three or four 4E character sheets. People are a-moving out there!

I don’t really want to use a laptop during play: I’ve find it more a distraction than a help in the past, though maybe that will change. More likely I want it to help with adventure planning and book-keeping, and my big needs come down to character creation for both NPCs and enemies, and monster encounter creation.

I’ve spent some time musing about what I’d want in a character management system, and the answer is the cryptic title of this week’s post: dCharacter/dt. Here, those little d’s don’t refer to dice, but to differentials as per your beloved high school calculus course. I’m talking about tracking the evolution of the character, and using that as a basis for a creation and presentation system.

As always, I like to separate the data from the view. What we normally consider the “data” of a D&D character is really more of a snapshot in time, how that character is right now. This is more apparent in characters than monsters or NPCs, especially if your campaign treats the latter as speed bumps, but it’s true for all. You can fully describe your character in a chronological series in events, from abilities to race and initial class, though all the various leveling-ups and item acquisitions.

Sure, you mostly will only use the “now” character for play, but I’ve always kept a notebook full of “earlier” versions of the character to refer back to. My, how he’s grown! Now imagine having a scrollbar that allows you to instantly move back in time to any part of your character’s history, and see or print out that sheet. Whoa!

Now imagine being able to go forward in time to plot out future levels and feats and skills. You know you’re doing it anyway! Sure, reality will change as you get there, but if you ever wanted to see how your master plan is going to look level by level, there you go.

Now imagine the same tool for NPCs, maybe this one shows that value of all the character possessions and compares it to some benchmark for that level. Imagine being able to start by saying “I need an eighth level ranger”, and later revisit the same guy and promote him to 12th level for when the party runs into him a year later.

Finally, imagine the “view” being configurable, too, so you can choose to output to a one-page or two-page sheet, or just a small card for minor enemies, with different layouts (and allocation of space) provided for different classes and the like. That would be pretty sweet.

I think it would take a lot of data to drive such a system. And a lot of that data might run afoul of the 4E license, whatever that specifically entails. But it’s fun to think about, and I might try a couple little experiments to see how it works.

Meanwhile, I’d love to hear what D&D computer tools you folks have been using, presumably in 3.5, and what you’re wanting most for 4E.

Now I have to start reaching…

Okay Cap is a stretch but that happens to be my favorite part of the whole Civil War event. Plus it opens up the door for this one: