Hey Man, well this is Babylon

I’m slowly falling out of love (again) with Dungeons and Dragons 4th Edition. My love affair with this game has been a tumultuous one, I admit. When I first perused the leaked PDF copies pre-release, I practically loathed it. It did not seem the game for me. When I finally got a chance to actually play it, I was wowed by the tightness of its combat mechanics, the interoperability of the team roles, and the constant awareness of all your available options. In recent times I fought a brief addiction to the process of character-building, very similar to a previous addiction I had when first introduced to 3rd Edition’s drastic rules changes.

But now I feel that fling coming to an end (again?). The big kicker for me this time are the jolting unnatural transitions between the game’s core modes of play. In no other tabletop game do the words “Okay, everyone, roll for initiative” make me cringe so deeply. The switchover from Talk-Time to Fight-Time is so drastic, sudden, and severe that it breaks me out of my imaginative reverie and reminds me that yes, I really am only here to grind mobs for XP.

Consider these transitions as if they were part of a Japanese video RPG. These games have three basic modes. In Exploration Mode you move Your Guy around a typically disproportionately-represented dungeon, town, or world map. Sometimes you interact with the scenery when exclamation points appear above Your Guy’s head. Sometimes you talk to other NPCs in the game setting, most of which just repeat the same lines of dialog every time you select the talk command. Read more

After some awesome demo sessions yesterday at Free RPG Day, I’ve updated the Quad rules a wee bit:

• Removed “Substance” mechanic. Health and such have been incorporated into the core Tiks mechanic.
• Improved the Degrees of Success mechanics. Now based on matching dice instead of subtracting lows.
• Updated examples to illustrate new changes

The new rules can be downloaded here.

Thanks to everyone who played in my games yesterday. I’m glad “Mecha-Taliban” and “Operation Hot Goblin” were such fun sessions!

I got this little fella in the mail today from a good friend in Atlanta. Thanks, Kathryn. He now joins Darth Tater and the Meth Monkey to cause rampant mischief in my domicile.

(I totally meant to post this Friday, but when saving it I forgot to set the auto-post time-thinger and only realized it today. Might as well add a few more notes to it, then.)

I was going to mention this last week but got side-tracked: the Alliterated Games Forums are down for an indefinite period of time. No one was using them, and they were just collecting spammers and bots. If I bring them back up in the future, it will likely be as part of…

The new website I’m putting together! The current AG website isn’t all that easy to update without me breaking things, so I’m setting up a content management suite to handle the basics. My first order of business is to get the basic game pages set up and an official newsfeed. After that, having a forum again would be nice, but it isn’t a major priority. I also want to set up a cart application, so folks can buy things directly from my website, without me having to handle fulfillment through Paypal.

Alpha Protocol continues to rock my knickers. I am only halfway through the game, and I’m already itching for a second play-through. My current style is the suave, stealthy master of the silent kill. My second play will be all BigGuns McDoucheBaggins, the no-questions-asked bullet-loving commando. I am looking forward to see more of the drastic changes in story and play I’ve already sipped with the handful of checkpoint replays I’ve experimented with in the game so far.

One thing about it that I really dig – and wish other games would pick up ASAP – is the Social Mission. A lot of Alpha Protocol’s game play involves hands-on espionage, sneaking into secret complexes and doing all that cool stealth-action spy stuff that makes movies like The Bourne Identity awesome. But almost as many game missions are purely social: you arrive on scene, meet a guy, try and make a deal of some sort, and hopefully walk away with a new ally or piece of information. The clothes you wear in these missions frequently makes a difference, so you should remember to switch out of that tactical armor before heading off to have dinner with the syndicate honcho, otherwise you might piss her off with your incredible social faux pas. I love this, and aside from Mass Effect 2 – which only has a small handful of missions like these – I’ve not seen it implemented in other mission-based games.

This coming weekend will be Free RPG Day! Every year I get excited about this one, as my favorite local game store Guardian Games always has a big shindig to celebrate. This year I’ll be running the new teaser adventure Final Sanction for the upcoming Deathwatch RPG from Fantasy Flight Games – the newest RPG in the Warhammer 40K product line. I’m not well-versed in the W40K universe, but this one looks nice – it’s the equivalent to me of the Starcraft storyline: Space Marines in massive suits of power armor fighting wave upon wave of infectious buglike monster hordes.

I leave you with a video for a song that’s been stuck in my head all morning:

Bold statement, that, yes? And I mean every syllable of it. Let me explain.

Despite mostly-mediocre or slightly-above-average reviews, I have fully immersed myself in this game over the last few days, and plan to keep that up for the next few to follow. After completing the first two “chapters” of the game, I am convinced that like Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2, Alpha Protocol is one of the best representations I’ve ever seen of core tabletop RPG concepts being implemented in a digital gaming format.

So far, I’m in love with this game, and want to tell you all about all of its awesome components, right there alongside all of its annoying and downright awful ones. But this isn’t a review. Don’t get me started on how I feel that most graded online game reviews are totally bunk. I’ll save that for a later time. No, this is more of an essay.

When asking gamers to declare “what defines a game as a RPG,” you’ll get a good variety of answers. Most console gamers will be quick to define a RPG as a game with a skill-based advancement system, where the internal mechanics of your character improve as you invest rewarded experience points into them. Many tabletop gamers will tell you that yes, advancement is fun or even crucial, but the ability to make choices for their characters is also pretty requisite. Without choice, you’re really only playing a limited combat-based board game with progressing development mechanics. Without choice, you’re not playing a role. Read more

I’ve found lately that I have been listening to two specific albums more than anything else while working on my design projects. They are:

1. Forbidden Forest: Impressions of George Winston by Taliesin Orchestra. There’s something about this album which deeply inspires me in the way no other music does. I’ve listened to all the original piano pieces upon which these tracks are based, but the originals just don’t compare to the orchestrated renditions. Starting with the very first track on the album, “Tamarack Pines,” I am swept away into a different realm of my creativity. Thanks immensely, Chris, for introducing me to this one.
2. Silent Hill Shattered Memories – original soundtrack by Akira Yamaoka. This is so far my favorite of the consistently amazing Silent Hill soundtracks, narrowly edging above the previous favorite, Silent Hill 4: The Room. Mary Elizabeth McGlynn’s vocal performances are stellar, as always, and in my opinion this album showcases the best work she’s done so far on the series. Something about the haunting ethereal underscores mixed with stellar (and sometimes totally rocking) vocal tracks keeps this one consistently repeating in the background while I work. I actually attempted to make a mix of nothing but McGlynn’s vocal tracks, but the project was only partially successful: the playlist was pretty damn awesome, but I found I couldn’t stop rocking along with the music long enough to get any actual work done.

There are a few others in rotation, including Danse Macabre by The Faint, Vegas by The Crystal Method, Nothing Lasts… But Nothing Is Lost by Shpongle, and the musical score to the movie Master and Commander. These play pretty frequently on my background mixes, but it is the two albums detailed above which always start it off, and which I always kick back into play when I hit a lull in the process.

What are yours?

Been a damn busy week. Not enough time for blogging! So here’s my weekend update, a day late.

First, a link. Check out Universal Dead, a new low-budget web series about zombies. It’s… not bad. Not bad at all.

For the last few days I’ve been going back and forth between Dragon Age and Alpha Protocol. My current goal in Dragon Age is to play as a solo Archer Rogue + Dog combo for as long as I can manage, outside of the few spots in the game where other companions are forced upon you. I’ve always been a fan of odd “challenge runs” in video games, and I figure this one would be called the “Post-Apocalypse” DA run – survivor + dog, in other words.

Alpha Protocol has been fun. I see a game series in the making here, and this one’s a good start. It reminds me a lot of the original Mass Effect – awesome in many ways, but marred by some rather aggravating design choices. I’m only a few hours in, though, so I’ll save my full decision for a later time after more hands-on experience with it.

I met a few awesome folks and sold a few more copies of Cannibal Contagion this past Memorial Day. Guardian Games hosted their second annual “May of the Dead” celebration, and I was there pimpin’ my game and hanging out with my fellow nerd. Had some great talks with a fellow from the local chapter of the Zombie Squad, and ran a hilariously fun session of my game for a new crew of survivors. Thanks for playing, folks!

I’ll close this post with some thoughts on video game trailers. First, read this article. Go ahead, it’s a good read. Watch all the trailers.

Done? Understand that I get where the writer is coming from, and I whole-heartedly disagree. I want actual game-play footage in my video game trailers, goddammit. Without actual gameplay footage, I might have made the mistake of purchasing any number of generic “guns plus one cool trick no one else does” first-person shooters. I want to actually see how this game is different. You can take a shitty game, give it an awesome story, and fill the trailer with so many awesome cinematics and popular industrial tunes and the consumers won’t know the depth of your deception until they pay for it and hate it, because you never showed them the actual game.

I want to see the game. I don’t give a rat’s ass about marketing cinematics which most likely won’t even be in the final product, and probably look better than that product will, too. Yeah, that new Deus Ex trailer looks cool, and shows us a wonderful cyberpunk world with a compelling story. SO did the trailers for Neocron. Remember how much that game sucked?

Over the last two nights I’ve played a few hours of Alpha Protocol, Obsidian’s new “Espionage RPG.” I mostly like it – it’s basically Mass Effect with spies, but I’ll write more on that in a later post. But something about it rubs me the wrong way…

Okay. Have you ever noticed how, with few exceptions, just about every video game out there that incorporates stealth into its play defaults to the old “Stealth = Crouching” setup? Alpha Protocol does it, and so do Fallout 3, Second Sight, Escape From Butcher Bay, Metal Gear Solid, Rogue Ops, and pretty much all the others that I’ve ever played¹. In all of these games, “stealth mode” is usually triggered by pressing or holding a single button (frequently the “L3″ button beneath the left trigger), which throws your character into a crouch which frequently looks comically ridiculous, reminiscent of old Looney Tunes characters sneaking along by their toes while rapid the sounds of a xylophone play.

I find this to be both unrealistic from a gameplay perspective, and flat-out lazy from a design perspective. One notable and wonderful exception to this ever-present crouching rule is Thief: Deadly Shadows². I previously mentioned thief in my post on lighting mechanics as an excellent example of that concept, and it serves well here, too. In this game, stealth is accomplished simply by *gasp* walking slowly. The game does have a crouch mode, but it only marginally affects your stealthiness and is primarily used to access smaller places in the environment. In T:DS, the slower you move, the quieter you move, softening your footsteps and blending more into those “deadly” shadows.

While at the gym this morning I had an idea for a new way to implement stealth in console game. Both the PS3 and the XBox 360 have controllers which feature pressure-sensitive triggers. My idea involves having the left stick move the character around the screen, always at a full run. Use one of the triggers, then, to pace that movement. The further down you hold the trigger, the slower and more stealthy the character moves. Incorporate that with a context-sensitive cover mechanic (good examples of cover can be found in Mass Effect 2, or Wanted: Weapons of Fate), and you will have a much more enjoyable and intuitive stealth system that doesn’t lazily default to crouching. This would make stealth itself something of a pressure-inclusive mini-game. To make it more RPG-compatible, put a gauge of some sort on the screen showing a scale running from “completely stealthy” to “completely obvious.” The scale would contain certain set areas of stealthiness, and an arrow would float between them as you move. Raising your Stealth skill or related abilities would widen the stealthy areas, shrinking the less-stealthy areas, to the point that a true stealth-ninja master would have a scale mostly comprised of the “maximum stealth” area.

I would love to play something like this. I would keep this mechanical idea a secret for my own video games, but who the hell am I kidding? I just don’t have any intentions to design them myself, so perhaps someone will steal this idea and make something awesome.

Footnotes

¹ I admit I’ve never played any of the Splinter Cell games. How are they? How do they handle stealth?
² I’ve also never played the first two Thief games, ’cause I’m just not a big fan of stealth in First-Person Shooters. Of course, I’m not much of a fan of non-stealth FPS games, either. For me to like a FPS it usually has to be a truly fabulous paragon of its kind.