I remember playing DnD as a teenager. There was a lot of dirty jokes, mindless monster slaying, and arguing about rules.
The height of humour for some of the gaming groups I was part of looked like this:
"You are all in a tavern, and a stranger comes up to you to give you a quest."
"Wait, screw that, are there any girls in the tavern? I ask them if they want to see my LONGsword. Get it!? HAHAHA!"
Typical teenage boy behaviour, basically. Thankfully we mostly grew out of it.
We grew out of the sexist behaviour and terrible pickup lines, I mean. We still slay monsters mindlessly and argue about the rules all the time. That is just how you play!
Recently Pinkie Pie told me she wanted to play DnD with her friends. Fine enough, I think. Running a game for 13 year olds ought to be easy as anything. Due to hilarious failure at communication though, several of the would be gamers showed up at my place not even knowing that we were going to be playing a roleplaying game at all. Still, they were eager enough to try it out.
They came up with names for their characters that weren't quite what I had hoped. One character was called "School Bell" because school bells are what kids hate most, amirite? Another was called Select because that is the kid's online handle. A third was named after an anime character. None paid any attention whatsoever to the naming conventions each race has, nor did they attempt to build something that felt real. Every decision was just an attempt to get the other kids to giggle.
I wanted to yell "These names are awful! What are you, 13?"
But they *are* 13. So that doesn't work so well as an insult.
Notably Pinkie Pie came up with a perfectly good name, one that fit with the lore behind her character's race and background.
We ended up playing for an hour and a half, then the kids got bored and wanted to do other things. They came back 2 days later, but again it only lasted an hour before they quit. I don't think this is going to stick. Pinkie Pie likes it, but the others aren't particularly into it.
So my first foray into gaming for my daughter and her friends was ... mediocre. They had some laughs, but in the end they just weren't that into it. Which is a fair result, I suppose, pretty much right down the middle in terms of the possibilities.
Tuesday, December 17, 2019
Wednesday, December 11, 2019
Too much of a thing that once might have been good
DnD has lots of mechanics that are holdovers from previous editions, some of which are good. Some... not so good.
I have been thinking about the mechanic where monsters are resistant to non magical weapons. In old DnD this would have been total immunity, which is a really nutty ability. It has a place in stories, no doubt, as 'oh no, we can't hurt the werewolf with our regular weapons, we have to find something better!' is a fine place for a story to go. I like that source, that idea. A few monsters have special powers that require special solutions. I dig it.
But lately there are way too many copies of this ability lying around. We have mostly fought our way through Gardmore Abbey and it was often a frustrating experience. In modern editions monsters aren't totally immune to nonmagical weapons, instead they are simply take half damage instead. While that is safer from a balance perspective, it isn't a good mechanic.
Magic weapons are already good. Making anyone without a magic weapon suck a lot of the time isn't making the story work - they don't usually have an option to get a magic weapon. If they did, they would already have gotten it! All this does is make the people without magic weapons feel stupid, and people with magic weapons feel powerful.
You can have lots of powerful monster abilities that totally wreck certain characters. That is valid! But if half of the fights involved huge AOE silences the spellcasters would rightfully be grumpy. Do it occasionally, and it becomes something to work around. Do it constantly, and they just feel like they chose the wrong class.
Weapon resistance is an example of this done wrong. Many of the fights in this module offered a variety of targets, all of which were weapon resistant. No strategy there, the characters without magic just suck. If you had a fight where some enemies are resistant and others aren't, that at least has some play. The characters without magic weapons can focus on the enemies they can affect. But when you toss weapon resistance around like crazy and don't give any opportunity to work around it you are just kicking the people who are already down, because they are weapon wielders who don't have magic weapons already.
As you might have guessed, I was one of the two characters without a magic weapon. The guy who got a magic weapon right away pounded through all the weapon resistant monsters with glee, while the other two of us sucked. Overall my character was still extremely powerful, don't get me wrong. Crossbow specialists are ridiculous. But the weapon resistant mechanic is not a way to cope with that, especially when it hits other characters too, making them weak. Get rid of this stupid mechanic, and nerf crossbow specialist somehow, that seems like a good compromise to me.
I am happy with some weapon resistance, especially when there is some counterplay available, or when it is a plot point. But making it commonplace means it isn't exciting, it isn't surprising, it is just a way to keep down the people who are already weaker.
I have been thinking about the mechanic where monsters are resistant to non magical weapons. In old DnD this would have been total immunity, which is a really nutty ability. It has a place in stories, no doubt, as 'oh no, we can't hurt the werewolf with our regular weapons, we have to find something better!' is a fine place for a story to go. I like that source, that idea. A few monsters have special powers that require special solutions. I dig it.
But lately there are way too many copies of this ability lying around. We have mostly fought our way through Gardmore Abbey and it was often a frustrating experience. In modern editions monsters aren't totally immune to nonmagical weapons, instead they are simply take half damage instead. While that is safer from a balance perspective, it isn't a good mechanic.
Magic weapons are already good. Making anyone without a magic weapon suck a lot of the time isn't making the story work - they don't usually have an option to get a magic weapon. If they did, they would already have gotten it! All this does is make the people without magic weapons feel stupid, and people with magic weapons feel powerful.
You can have lots of powerful monster abilities that totally wreck certain characters. That is valid! But if half of the fights involved huge AOE silences the spellcasters would rightfully be grumpy. Do it occasionally, and it becomes something to work around. Do it constantly, and they just feel like they chose the wrong class.
Weapon resistance is an example of this done wrong. Many of the fights in this module offered a variety of targets, all of which were weapon resistant. No strategy there, the characters without magic just suck. If you had a fight where some enemies are resistant and others aren't, that at least has some play. The characters without magic weapons can focus on the enemies they can affect. But when you toss weapon resistance around like crazy and don't give any opportunity to work around it you are just kicking the people who are already down, because they are weapon wielders who don't have magic weapons already.
As you might have guessed, I was one of the two characters without a magic weapon. The guy who got a magic weapon right away pounded through all the weapon resistant monsters with glee, while the other two of us sucked. Overall my character was still extremely powerful, don't get me wrong. Crossbow specialists are ridiculous. But the weapon resistant mechanic is not a way to cope with that, especially when it hits other characters too, making them weak. Get rid of this stupid mechanic, and nerf crossbow specialist somehow, that seems like a good compromise to me.
I am happy with some weapon resistance, especially when there is some counterplay available, or when it is a plot point. But making it commonplace means it isn't exciting, it isn't surprising, it is just a way to keep down the people who are already weaker.
Tuesday, December 3, 2019
ICBA
ICBA usually means I Can't Be Assed. Today though, I will suggest a new interpretation - InterContinenal Ballistic Arrows. In Civ 6 archers can fire enormous distances, far enough that it strains any sense of immersion for me. Even firing into an adjacent hex is a huge stretch since a hex is somewhere between 100 and 1000 kilometers wide, but at least that would require them being on the same landmass. However, as it stands archers can fire 2 hexes, often shooting over bodies of water as large as Lake Superior or the English Channel.
It just feels wrong to me to have an archer in London deciding to bombard a target in northern France.
I can usually overlook silliness like this. After all, this is a game where the Eiffel Tower takes up a full hex, and requires you to plow under thousands of square kilometers of land to accommodate it. Scale is ... inexact in Civ 6.
But I don't like the way archers operate mechanically either. The AI isn't good at figuring them out, and every time I go against it I am on the same plan. Make a pile of archers, declare war, let their enormous army pour into my territory, mow them down with archers for a dozen turns while I make melee units, then rush into their territory when they are out of units and crush them.
When I am attacking the AI I mostly just laugh at their units while I rotate out blockers to heal, and keep pouring on the damage with archers. When *they* get archers though... ugh. I lose units constantly, because any time I get into their territory they rush archers up to me and tear apart my lines. When I encounter their archers in neutral territory they aren't good at protecting them so I can beat them up, but when I am on the attack it is a nightmare.
I don't like that the default solution to difficulty is to give the AI tons of units and then you just kill them all with ranged units.
My plan to fix both this immersion and technical problem is to give all ranged units a range of 1. Nobody gets to have ICBAs. If you want to shoot 2 hexes, wait until you get balloons and artillery in the WW1 era, where longer shots from your ranged units makes a lot of sense. Naturally this makes archers bad, so I compensated by raising the strength of ranged units of all types a little bit.
I tested this out a few times and I love the results. I can't just maul the AI with ranged units without thinking anymore. I still like building some of them to assault barbarian huts, defend cities, and peck away at fortified units, but they aren't the one size fits all solution. Archers against the AI in unmodded civ 6 is like using a baseball bat to fight a baby - it feels too powerful for the job. The new ranged units feel like a nerf hammer - still enough to beat the baby, but it feels like more of a fight.
The more critical component here though is that things *feel* a lot more sensible, especially in the early eras. You can't blast away at targets from absurd distances, Quadriremes are a lot more reasonable to build, and you actually have to get up in people's faces to fight. I like it on all fronts. It does lead to chokepoints being really hard to assault though, so you have to plan to lose some units beating through good defensive locations. I like that though, even when it costs me.
It just feels wrong to me to have an archer in London deciding to bombard a target in northern France.
I can usually overlook silliness like this. After all, this is a game where the Eiffel Tower takes up a full hex, and requires you to plow under thousands of square kilometers of land to accommodate it. Scale is ... inexact in Civ 6.
But I don't like the way archers operate mechanically either. The AI isn't good at figuring them out, and every time I go against it I am on the same plan. Make a pile of archers, declare war, let their enormous army pour into my territory, mow them down with archers for a dozen turns while I make melee units, then rush into their territory when they are out of units and crush them.
When I am attacking the AI I mostly just laugh at their units while I rotate out blockers to heal, and keep pouring on the damage with archers. When *they* get archers though... ugh. I lose units constantly, because any time I get into their territory they rush archers up to me and tear apart my lines. When I encounter their archers in neutral territory they aren't good at protecting them so I can beat them up, but when I am on the attack it is a nightmare.
I don't like that the default solution to difficulty is to give the AI tons of units and then you just kill them all with ranged units.
My plan to fix both this immersion and technical problem is to give all ranged units a range of 1. Nobody gets to have ICBAs. If you want to shoot 2 hexes, wait until you get balloons and artillery in the WW1 era, where longer shots from your ranged units makes a lot of sense. Naturally this makes archers bad, so I compensated by raising the strength of ranged units of all types a little bit.
I tested this out a few times and I love the results. I can't just maul the AI with ranged units without thinking anymore. I still like building some of them to assault barbarian huts, defend cities, and peck away at fortified units, but they aren't the one size fits all solution. Archers against the AI in unmodded civ 6 is like using a baseball bat to fight a baby - it feels too powerful for the job. The new ranged units feel like a nerf hammer - still enough to beat the baby, but it feels like more of a fight.
The more critical component here though is that things *feel* a lot more sensible, especially in the early eras. You can't blast away at targets from absurd distances, Quadriremes are a lot more reasonable to build, and you actually have to get up in people's faces to fight. I like it on all fronts. It does lead to chokepoints being really hard to assault though, so you have to plan to lose some units beating through good defensive locations. I like that though, even when it costs me.
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