Month: June 2008

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Промоакции для игроков не только в шутерах — воспользуйся промокодом Vavada от наших партнеров и получи бонусы, которые подарят азарт и атмосферу, сравнимую с игровыми победами.

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Mostly True to Howard

If you start a new pen-and-paper campaign, it is important to get a sense of what sort of world you will be in. A good question for your new GM is what fictional world his most resembles. James Bond can walk into the villain’s lair with a tuxedo, small arms, and his wits; in a gritty realism campaign, that is suicide. Is this the sort of world that encourages the heroic charge or kills the first man to show his head above the trenches? High magic and epic adventures, or carefully ration your stock of potions?

My favorite example is the classic wall of fire. If you run through it, will you (a) shrug it off and crash into the cowardly wizard behind, setting him ablaze as you cleave him in two (in slow motion, with blood spray); (b) take a level-appropriate amount of damage, slightly softening you up before the big fight; (c) slip harmlessly through the gap in the jets of flame that you keenly identified; or (d) be instantly incinerated down to your skeleton, you idiot, why did you run into a giant wall of magic hellfire?

In the world of Conan the Barbarian, muscle beats magic. (This is by reputation; I have not read much of the original.) Spells are time-consuming, difficult and, easy to disrupt. If the wizard begins chanting as you enter his chamber, you will probably have time to dispatch his bodyguard, clear any obstacles, flex your mighty pectorals, and plant a large blade in his chest before he finishes his spell. Tying up your victims for sacrifice is popular when battlefield magic can get you killed.

Please see this Age of Conan spellweaving video. Explanation here. Yes, that person is spending more than two minutes straight spellweaving, with a few fun debuffs that leave him vulnerable the whole time. The special effects build in impressiveness as the magic reaches its crescendo. You can imagine the dark wizard summoning his forces of fang or flame about him, calling together eldritch power with a look that vacillates between triumph and terror as the hero catches his eye and rushes across the field of battle. The air becomes hazy and palpably vibrates. Our hero briefly contemplates throwing his axe before committing to the charge, weapon held high, ready to slash the wizard from throat to hip. Will the villain cry the last word of his spell, turning the blood in our champion’s veins to fire, or will he simply cry as he chokes on his own blood?

: Zubon

Mostly True to Tolkien

It was the recreation of the siege of Minas Tirith with gummi bears that pointed out to me that Tolkien named everything. Monsters and swords, of course, but why not a battering ram? The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢: Shadows of Angmarâ„¢ plays this straight, with a constant string of named quest rewards. Fill your character with named rings, cloaks, bracelets, weapons, hats, gloves, and shoes. (Yes, every letter there is a link. I have plenty of alphabet to go.) I assume that most of the names are words from Tolkien’s made-up languages.

Make sure your item’s name has an international character or two. Your sword is weak if it lacks a diacritic.

At some point, you start to wonder about all this magic loot. Here we are in Middle Earth, with some five wizards on the planet, and we sell packs of magic weapons as vendor trash.

: Zubon

PnP Ponderings: D&D 4th Edition Launches

My copies are still in the mail, but I had a chance to read someone else’s. Once I have time to read in-depth, I will have reviews at the book site, but I wanted to post some metagame thoughts. That is, while I have not played 4th Edition, there are many things to be said about the direction the rules have taken and how 4th Edition will work as a product line.

Continue reading PnP Ponderings: D&D 4th Edition Launches

Billers, Players, and Developers

Arnold Kling discusses Nassim Nicholas Taleb, distinguishing between two types of jobs. Billers are wage workers: high floor, low ceiling, meaning that you get your wage with little chance of bankruptcy or riches. Players are gambling on commissions, big payouts, etc.: no floor or ceiling. A great accountant will earn little more than an average one, while an author might sell millions of books or die in penury. This latter economic state is often described as a tournament: the winners win big, and the difference in winnings between #1 and #2 will be far larger than the difference in quality of #1 and #2.

MMO development companies are players. We have big winners, games that go bankrupt or nearly so, and scattered moderate successes and hangers-on in between. Despite their differing subscriber numbers, WoW is not 10 times better than EQ2 (whatever that would mean). Most indie games will fail, and others will be bought by EA or something.

MMO developers are billers. If you work for Sony or NCSoft, you get a paycheck rather than a percent of the take. Just like you the player, your friends on the development team are not going to get rich and drive into the sunset with a Ferrari full of hookers and blow. Well, Nicodemus plans to, but he’s a special case. When you think about WoW being flush with money, you can remember that their community manager is still eating ramen.

And a few places (mostly indies) skirt the line because developers have stock, options, a share of the company, etc. If the game hits it big, folks who are vested will cash in. Or they will continue to work long hours for free Mountain Dew.

My perfect example is 38 Studios. Professional athletics is the usual example of a tournament game, where a great pitcher gets millions while someone 2% worse hopes to keep a spot on the Mud Hens. Now that money is invested in a game studio. If you work there for a wage with no profit sharing, that wage is what you get. Curt Schilling stands to lose millions, and you risk needing to find a new job. Or he might be the owner of the next WoW. We’ll see how that tournament works out.

: Zubon

Place and Space

Something The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢: Shadows of Angmarâ„¢ has that City of Heroes lacks is a sense of distance. There are a few huge zones in CoX, so you dread going all the way across Independence Port, Nerva, or a Shadow Shard zone, but for the most part movement is very fast. Two monorail lines (or one villainous ferry) visit almost all the zones. You have teleporters in your base and at least three extradimensional waystations that serve as mini-monorails. Once you are in the zone, you move quickly, leaping tall building in a single bound or running faster than speeding locomotive.

In The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢: Shadows of Angmarâ„¢, you walk. On foot, you cross a zone in 5-10 minutes, assuming you can run in a mostly straight line. Hunters run a bit faster, and you can get a horse at higher levels. The rental horses are pretty quick, and there are a few teleport abilities (again, go Hunters).

To me, moving two zones over feels like a huge project. Maybe I have been lulled by convenience, starting with Asheron’s Call’s portals and ingrained by years of CoX, but I do not want to spend 10 minutes traveling before the adventure begins. If this is a fellowship, finding members and bringing them together is potentially a half-hour or longer project. Even in-zone, fifteen minutes is not unusual.

Continue reading Place and Space

I Have a Lair!

Are you ready for this weekend’s D&D 4th Edition release? I have high expectations. Which is to say that I have high standards, with hopes that they will be met. (High standards, hah, look at what we play online.)

My favorite promo is the gnome‘s movement to the Monster Manual. He and Francis are adorable. He is very polite to share the stage with that horned upstart. You can see the change in the vision of the gnome. While 3rd Edition and WoW both took Dragonlance’s tinker gnomes and ran with them, 4th is returning to the 2nd Edition forest gnomes and running past them into fey.

Penny Arcade and PvP Online have a podcast series going to introduce you (and them). You get the fun mix of the Wizards of the Coast professional, long-term player, long-ago player, and complete newb. The first podcast focuses on introducing rules and picking names. If you flip to 3:09-3:19, you can hear the prospects of “Jim Darkmagic” and “Chet Awesomelaser.” The module introduction is a bit more narrative than I am used to from DMs. They resisted the urge to say, “I double-click on the NPC to get the quest.”

: Zubon

Don’t Balance Based on That

Life differs as a creep. Instead of starting against level 1 rats that have no chance of killing you, you start against level 50 freeps, any of which can kill you. And yet kill them you must, because your only way to advance as a creep is through infamy, from defeating players. You have all your basic skills at rank 3, start getting racial toys at rank 5, and are about equal to a level 50 freep at rank 7. (Unless it is a Burglar, who you can only beat one-on-one if you are rank 7+ and he is lousy, poorly equipped, drunk, and AFK.) And then the freeps can add raid gear and consumable buffs.

An odd thing is that some abilities seem to be balanced for the long-term. If a rank 0 skill has a rank 2 upgrade, you pre-nerf the rank 0 skill so that it is not overpowered at rank 2. After all, you can hit rank 2 in less than a week, and you never go down. But the same is in effect when the upgrade is at rank 7 or 11. I have been told, but not confirmed, that when Reavers got their high-rank critical upgrades, their low-rank critical ability was downgraded. Maybe they come out ahead, but consider:

Assume that you get 500 infamy per night. Some people do far better, but some people play a lot or are very good. I would be happy with 500. (Freeps tend to do far better, for the first paragraph’s reasons. If you always win with equal numbers, you tend to get a lot of kills.) That puts you at rank 1 at the end of your first night and rank 3 at the end of your first week. You hit rank 5 a month after that. Rank 7, when my Blackarrow gets the “heartseeker” shot that every level 50 Hunter has, comes at 94,500 infamy, more than 6 months of doing this every night. This is also when Reavers get that critical upgrade I mentioned, but they have a second one (to finish it out) at 11. That is 4.6 years at 500 infamy a night. Based on the infamy-rank pattern, I estimate that puts rank 15 (final) past the two decade point.

One Stalker has been hardcore enough to hit rank 10 in a year. Several freeps are also there (nom nom nom on those newb creeps!). It is probably a mistake to balance creeps around the assumption that they will all be high rank someday. A few will play the game long enough to be really high rank, and I think we are okay with having a few really powerful monsters running around. Considering spider nerfs in Book 13, there is obviously no problem with gutting them further down the line.

(Estimated time to level 50, past your first character: one month. The (f-ing constant) goldspammers in Bree advertise level 50 in 10 days.)

: Zubon

The Next (two) Best Things (pt. 2)

Last time we talked about user content, and how it would inevitably have to be brought in, and properly managed. But now we’ll see the other next best thing we’ll surely be talking about in ten or fifteen years: Population Control.

This one is funny because it immediately gets people’s panties in a bunch, and forces them to think. That’s why I like it so much. It’s also a bit more nebulous and theoretical than user content, so we’ll have to draw from a few places in order to offer something presentable. Namely, the history and evolution of both the real world and virtual worlds, human nature and a nice dose of prophet complex.

Continue reading The Next (two) Best Things (pt. 2)

Seen in May

Jeff Freeman discusses pricing models and ponders gaming one-night-stands.

Brian “Psychochild” Green (I think he legally changed his name to that, complete with quotes, since I never see him called anything else. I forgot to check his license at IMGDC) spoke of the early stages of MMO development. This one is good enough to come back to single time, but I’m telling you now so that you can read it a few times before we discuss it. (via)

Alex Taldren suggests that Princess Peach should get a job.

Alex also suggested that MMO Gamers are lazy and not really gamers.

Should this t-shirt remind me of Scott Jennings?

Saylah at Mystic Worlds discusses We We Solo in MMOs. (Okay, that was April, but I read it in May.)

How about (the apparently nearly most influential person in the MMO world) Scott Hartsman on being organizationally broken? Bonus chance to hate on Dell, if you like. I have commented previously on an outsider’s view of organizational failures in MMOs.

“The Midnight Squad” trailer from City of Heroes is pretty good. I have some editing disputes, but their call. The other one for Issue 12 is less entertaining, but it has some fun with costumes in the crowd. If you missed the magic and Rikti connection in Issue 10, this is a good time to hit that part of the story again.

Many people reviewed Age of Conan. Many many many, too many for me to remember whose I’ve seen. Here are Ethic, Saylah, Keen and Graev, ferv0r, and pretty much all of Tobold and Bildo’s sites for late May. Need a leveling flowchart? Jalum’s review that I linked earlier is probably non-relevant, especially since the miracle patch(es) seems to have miracled pretty well (by varying accounts). I hear a strange mix of “great launch,” “meh, yet another WoW clone with 5% difference,” and “game-breaking bugs and exploits” (to say nothign of the early launch).

Are you reading Ding!? Also pre-May (February), but I think it is a recent addition to our blogroll. WoW-themed webcomic from Scott Kurtz.

Another new friend on our blogroll: The Battered Shield. He has some interesting stuff to say.

Ending off-topic, Greg forms words to list 100 Must-See Movies.

: Zubon