The great failure

Shadowlands has been by and large a strong expansion for WOW.  In particular I commend Torghast and the first raid as being especially fun.  There is one thing that stands out as being a horribly designed disaster though:  The new mission table.

I like the idea of recruiting heroes and sending them out on missions.  Ever since this mechanic appeared in Warlords of Draenor I have been a fan.  It made me feel less like an errand boy delivering goods and more like an important leader, which is appropriate considering the lore and history of the world.  Each expansion has brought a new implementation of the mission table, and this new one is the first catastrophic failure.

It looked good at first glance.  Heroes all have unique abilities, and positioning matters since each side has a front row and a back row.  Some units attack in a cone, or attack the furthest away unit, or defend their teammates.  In theory this seemed like it could be a deep tactical subgame for WOW.

In practice it is a pure numbers grind, and the numbers are rubbish.

Attacking targets in the back row *seems* like it is a way to take out casters.  However, because all of your units bash into the front line and the back line has plenty of health, you want every attack to smash into the same enemy in the front.  Attacking back line enemies is useless.  Units have all kinds of special abilities but they can simply be summed up by figuring out their damage per round and ignoring any unique traits.  All you do with most covenants is fill up your ranks with random heroes and make sure your level is high enough to plow through the enemies.  Strategic decisions are nearly irrelevant to the outcome.  It simply doesn't matter that enemies have a cone attack, or a bleed, or a heal.  You deal with every threat the same way.

So the system is a complete failure when it comes to delivering on its obvious promise of strategy.  How does it do otherwise?  Since there isn't any strategy that matters, you would imagine it would be trivial to balance at least.

Unfortunately the balance is completely busted.  The Night Fae have troops that permanently reduce enemy damage done by 20%.  You put four of those in a group with a healer and they can beat any mission.  The rest of your heroes don't matter, you just send out that one comp and it beats everything.  The game has challenging plot missions and as you do them the level of the missions you face rises.  After awhile of smashing everything with your broken comp none of your other heroes can beat anything and they are utterly worthless.  You have level 30 heroes going up against level 50 missions and they are helpless.  

The Night Fae situation is a disaster because of one stupidly overpowered ability.

Kyrian, on the other hand, has troops that are utter garbage.  Instead of 'all enemies do 20% less damage, stacking', the Kyrian troops do 'a few allies take 10% less damage, not stacking'.  The Kyrian don't have any powerful way to do anything, and their heroes are weak.  If I want to beat a level 30 mission as Kyrian, I will need to slowly grind my way up to level 40 to even stand a chance, and I might need be level 50.  Those level 30 missions can be beaten by Night Fae at level 15 without any difficulty.

Simply put, they completely screwed up the numbers.  Many heroes are nigh worthless, and there are some outrageously broken ones.  That would be fine if every covenant had a mix of both, but they don't.  If you are Night Fae you get tons of materials, cash, mounts, pets, and other rewards.  Kyrian get basically nothing.  Both of these situations are wretched.

This basically comes down to the system having some cool ideas at the outset, and the numbers being written in 5 minutes by some intern.  I could easily take the ideas presented in the system and make numbers that would make sense and be enjoyable for players.  What players want is a way to level up heroes, defeat missions that seem appropriately challenging, and eventually earn the big rewards.  They don't want to grind endlessly for seemingly nothing, and they don't want to instantly crush all opposition without thought or creativity.

The mission table is a small part of the game admittedly.  This isn't wrecking it for everyone.  Still, covenant choice is not supposed to work out this way, and it is clear that the subgame was incompetently built.  It is so messed up though that I don't expect any fixes soon.  My guess is they will just write it off entirely until a big update happens in six months and then rebuild it from scratch.  It is a black mark on their record, no doubt, because this isn't some tricky thing that is tough to notice.  Anyone who played it through would have seen how wretched it is, and if they didn't then either there was no testing or the testing was as badly done as the original design.

Let them play

In game communities there is a lot of judgement about how other people choose to play games.  The casuals deride the hardcore players as sweaty neckbeards with no life, and the hardcore players mock the filthy casuals and their lack of skills and dedication.

I got hit with a wave of this over the past few weeks as I have been carrying people through the Torghast dungeon in WOW.  Torghast drops important resources for crafting legendary gear and people want their shiny loot, so off to Torghast they go.  Even though most people seem to enjoy it, they often don't enjoy how challenging it can be.  They could practice harder and git gud, but many of them choose instead to pay me large sums of gold to beat the dungeon for them instead.

I have no problem with this.  

Partly this is because it is making me rich, naturally, but also I just don't see the issue.  It doesn't matter to me if they could get better by themselves or if they just can't do it.  It doesn't matter to me if they are doing easy content where they don't 'need' the legendary anyway.  They like playing the game, they want to get more powerful, and this content is being a struggle.  They would rather pay so that the experience they can have is one where some tough dwarf paladin tanks all the monsters while they shoot at them.  I would rather have the experience of having 50,000 more gold, and I don't mind being a tough dwarf paladin tanking all the monsters.

Everybody wins!

But people get really upset.  When they see my advertisements I get lots of hateful whispers with people yelling at me to get out of Looking For Group chat, or making unwarranted assumptions about my hygiene, age, marital status, and general attractiveness.

When I advertise in Torghast chat I get people yelling about how anyone who can't do the content themselves is garbage, and how they should never ever pay for a carry.  One conversation went something like this:

Me:  Selling Torghast carries for 50k gold.

Random person:  Anyone who can't do this themselves is awful.  They should quit WOW.  How can they be this bad?  If they need a carry, they should join my group, I will do it for free.  It is trivial!

I found it kind of funny.  Even if a weak player heard it, would they really want to join a group with an entitled asshat who is busy telling them how wretched they are?  Much better to pay 50,000 gold to run with someone who is helpful and non judgemental, I think.

I don't understand that desperate desire to trash talk people who play differently.  Their progress isn't affecting your progress, and if they can't do Torghast themselves they aren't going to be a high ranked player in any format.  All they are is just one more random person trying to make numbers go up and hopefully enjoying the process.  Just accept that one person's fun is not another person's fun and move on.

There is nothing to be gained by trying to push other people down to make yourself feel higher.  If you want to feel good, find a serious challenge, work hard, and overcome it.  Other people not required.

Except when those people are carrying you through dungeons for large sums of cash, I guess.  Those people you do need.

Making the money

The economy of WOW in Shadowlands has not been good to me.  When SL launched a lot of people talked about how Blizzard was making crafting powerful and important again because legendary items were going to require crafters in order to be made.  If you want a legendary ring you need a jewelcrafter, a legendary plate helm requires a blacksmith, etc.  These legendary pieces have 4 levels, and in order to learn to craft a level 2 you need to make 15 level 1s.  Then 15 level 2 pieces to learn 3, and 15 3s to learn 4.  These recipes cost a *lot* of gold to make.  For example, to get to max level making rings I will have to spend 1 million gold on materials.

This certainly makes crafting important, but it doesn't end up being good for crafters most of the time.  The trouble is that the endgame of this system is always degenerate.  Either you end up with only a tiny number of crafters who make the huge investment to get to max level and they get to gouge the server savagely, or you end up with a ton of people going broke trying to get there and then none of them can make back their investment at all and they all lose a truckload of money.

Fundamentally the issue is that one crafter can handily supply the entire server with gear.  The *only* incentive to being the second crafter in the market is to undercut other people.  You cannot increase supply or produce alternatives, you can only provide competition.  Unfortunately for every crafter who actually reaches level 4 there are 45 low level items to sell off, and there are not nearly enough buyers for that.  Most people only need one or two legendaries, and they can buy rings, necklaces, cloaks, and eight different armor slots.  All those crafters have way too much stock and not nearly enough customers.

A far better model for a crafting skill is alchemy.  You can make potions and such, like everyone can, but if you level up a particular reputation you get a daily cooldown to make a valuable resource.  Because it is only once a day you can't supply the whole server, so new people entering that market still have something to contribute.

All the legendary crafting doesn't work at all like that.  You have an enormous up front cost you may never be able to recover and what you get at the end is the privilege of fighting to undercut your rivals.  The people who camp the auction house win, and everyone else sells nothing.

Crafting systems that require camping the auction house *suck*.

WOW already rewards the auction house campers plenty, we didn't need more of that.

I got wrecked by this system.  I realized that there would be competition, but I figured I should level my ring and necklace production up to max so I could provide stuff for my guild.  I thought the auction house would be full of overpriced stuff and this would help people out.  That didn't happen though - the auction house is full of rings and necklaces priced at a fraction of the cost of materials.  I had guildies ask me to craft things for them and I told them they shouldn't get me to do it.  Buying materials for me to craft would cost them far more than simply buying the finished products.

Right now I am about halfway through level 3 on both rings and necklaces.  I have lost a good 300,000 gold so far trying to level my crafting and I have helped nobody in my guild in the process.  At this point I will probably finish up and get to level 4 in the hopes that at some point I will be able to make money from it.  I can't recover all of my losses so far, and I might as well slowly finish up my leel 3s any time the price of goods rises above the cost of materials.

It gets worse though.  I am on an extremely high population server with a massive economy.  On a small server the legendary recipes are going to be a disaster because nobody can afford to get all the way up.  The lack of customers will be crushing, and so lots of people will be locked into only getting level 1 legendary items.  There are so few buyers that crafters cannot afford to craft their way up, so everybody gets locked out of the market completely.

There are two fixes I can think of right away, but both would have needed to be in the game at launch - now is too late.  The first is to simply change that 15 to a 5.  Producing one third of the items to level up would make it an investment, but the markets would not be flooded.  Crafters who put in the time would be able to sell their goods, and competition would naturally control the prices to keep them a bit above material cost.  The other angle would be to change the system much more substantially and remove the learning system entirely.  Have a daily cooldown to product one resource, and have crafters have to use 1 of those resources for a rank 1 item, 2 for a 2, etc.  This would encourage crafters to do their cooldown and would work fine in markets of any size.  Want a plate hat?  Get a blacksmith to make their Special Bar of Ore for four days in a row and make it.  Profit for crafters, accessibility for buyers.  Best of all worlds.

Instead we are stuck with a mess of a system where a few people who gambled big get to gouge customers and the others lose their shirts, and people in small economies get screwed.  Not ideal.

The best thing

In my last post I talked about how the WOW expansion Shadowlands is good, and worth buying.  What I failed to mention was the best thing about the expansion so far - Torghast.  This is a zone you can run with between 1-5 players, and like many other roguelikes and dungeon crawlers of recent years, you do it by accumulating tons of interesting powers and upgrades and using them to defeat extremely powerful enemies.

Torghast has a bunch of different tilesets and the settings look fantastic.  There are dungeons full of furnaces and lava, gigantic towers rising from the mist, and twisted, metallic halls.  Torghast has different layouts and designs each time you zone in, enough of them that even if they aren't random they manage to keep on being fresh.  Each wing has different enemies and themes and they all come in a variety of difficulty levels.  Blizzard aimed for dark and scary and they hit the mark.

I LOVE running Torghast.  I would be doing it even if wasn't fun because it drops important stuff, but I just like doing it.  Many of the buffs you get are simple like +3% crit chance, but there are also lots of powerful and interesting things like "At the start and end of Avenging Wrath, cast Divine Toll."  I know most people won't have any idea what that means, but trust me, it is bonkers.  The best part though is the combos.  Casting Divine Toll for free regularly is great, but if you also get the power "Divine Toll stuns all nearby enemies for 3 seconds." it gets hilarious.

I think the way they have done the design of the powers is great.  Common powers are always useful but weak, rare ones are more powerful, but more narrow, and then there are ultra rare ones.  There are specific mobs that have unique abilities and they give you new powers that are linked to their abilities in theme.  You can even collect powers that let you blow up enemies and turn them into more powers, and this lets you get even more interesting and unique abilities.

There are definitely some dud powers.  A part of those are not great but they are thematically cool so I am on board with them, like "Maw Rats explode on death for 2000 damage."  Others are just totally worthless and have no interesting combo potential, so they are always a pass.  I don't mind some powers being worse, and I don't mind powers that are tricky to combo, but I want everything to be useful at some point.  There are a few things that are truly junk though, and I would fix that, if I were in charge.

However, the best thing about Torghast is the vast sums of money you get from running it.

Most people don't many vast sums.  In fact they lose money.  However, there are a lot of players who aren't that great but who still want the rewards.  Also it is undeniable that some classes and specs are better than others.  I play one of the best specs, Protection Paladin, so I can smash it easily.  In fact I can smash it while towing another person along with me.  A person who is paying for the privilege.  Paying an awful lot.

Previous to this I was running dungeons to earn cash, making about 5k/hour.

Now I am getting customers to pay me to run them through Torghast and I am making 50k/hour instead.  That is an incredible rate!  The real struggle isn't the dungeon - it is the logistics.  You can't trade money across servers, but you can group up across servers.  Finding people on my server who want to pay is tough, so I have been making alts on other servers, accepting payment there, and then doing the runs.  Now I just have to figure out ways to get that money to the server I am actually on!

I say 50k/hour is an incredible rate, but in terms of real dollars it is only 5$/hour.  That doesn't sound ideal, but it turns out to be an enormous amount of ingame currency to buy all the fun things I want.  And honestly... 5$/hour to run a fun dungeon with crazy powers and unexpected challenges?  Sounds pretty good!

One of the best things about Torghast is the way you can just run it over and over.  The previous expansion had something similar called Horrific Visions, and while that was fun, it had a cost to enter.  That meant a lot of mind numbing grinding in order to get to play, and that meant that people were reluctant to help others because helping meant grinding for your entry fee.  Torghast has no fee.  You just go, and you are either good enough, or you are not.  Also you aren't on a timer so if you need to afk to pee or answer the door you can do that.

I hope that they continue to support this new game mode.  Regular updates and changes to powers, new tilesets, and added difficulty will make this continual fun and I expect they can do that fairly easily.  Right now the balance isn't perfect, as tanks are particularly powerful, but since you can get a group together and do it and you aren't competing directly against other players I don't mind that so much.  There won't be a competitive Torghast scene, it is just a fun thing to do.

I like that.  I like it a lot.

It is good

 I have been playing the new Shadowlands expansion for WOW for the past week.  The xpac was delayed a lot at the last minute which led many people to worry that the game was going to be a mess.  A big company announcing a delay a month before launch is worrying, no doubt.  The answer is in though, and Shadowlands is good.

Good doesn't mean perfect.  There are bugs here and there, and the heavy population servers are groaning under the load, but by and large things work and are a lot of fun.

The levelling experience is quite narrow and on rails.  You have to play through the campaign in order, visiting one zone at a time.  There are lots of side quests and such to do, and the campaign story is polished and interesting, so I was happy with it all told.  I don't think I would want to play through such a thing twice, but thankfully Blizzard set it up so alts don't have to do so.  The zones are widely varied in terms of aesthetic and style, and I enjoyed the variety of experience.  The visuals are great, and the marriage of appearance and mechanics is consistently good.

In short, if you like WOW, you will like Shadowlands.  It is a strong mix of choice and direction, and could quite reasonably be described as peak WOW from a casual play perspective.

The dungeons are well executed too.  There are tons of unique mechanics and themes, and the dungeons reflect the zones they are situated in extremely well.  They act as the culmination to storylines, and they do this in a way that is satisfying and fun.  The encounters are enjoyable, the difficulty is reasonable, and even though I just spent the week spamming dungeons all day long I am looking forward to playing more.

So how about the numbers?

The numbers are good!  Blizzard had big problems trying to balance things a few months ago.  They wanted legendaries and covenant abilities to be huge and mighty, but they discovered that balancing them across all the classes and specs was impossible.  They resorted to making things much weaker, and I think their final pass got it pretty tight.  I have gone over my legendary abilities many times and they all seem to clock in between 4 and 6 % more damage.  Some favour one style over another, but nothing stands out as being overpowered.  I want to build a whole bunch of them for various specs and situations, which strikes me as a good thing.

I liked the Kyrian aesthetic and abilities, and they suited my paladin class, so I chose them.  It seems both thematically appropriate and powerful.  Still, I can see reasonable arguments for every covenant choice if you aren't trying to min/max those last few %, which is close enough.

As to whether or not classes are balanced I can't say for sure.  I do more damage than everybody else so far, but it is had to know how much of that is gear, how much of that is me, and how much is class balance.  However, I am confident that Blizzard is keeping a close eye on things, and they seem willing to make adjustments to get things in line as necessary.

When the raid opens in a week and a bit we will start getting real data on class balance.  There will always be winners and losers, but based on my experiences in quests, pvp, and dungeons things are in quite reasonable shape, certainly good enough to get a thumbs up for a launch incorporating so many new mechanics all at once.

There are bugs.  Especially the Kyrian flying world quests have some issues, and I am avoiding some of them.  However, if a major launch like this only has 'some optional quests don't work sometimes' as the big criticism, you have to consider that a win.  There needs to be some work done to improve world quest text, direction, and bug fixes but most of them work flawlessly so it isn't a thing to fuss over too much.

Plus I got a new frog mount!  Bugs aside, you gotta respect the frog mount.

Interface advice

One of the most valuable things a WOW raider can do is to have a good interface.  A great player will cap out at mediocre output with the default interface, and no matter your skill level a properly built interface will make a huge difference in how you play.  This is a basic bit of information about how I did my interface for those who I am going to be raiding with in the upcoming expansion.

The way I did it is not the only way.  Lots of these decisions take into account things like my hand size, alternate specs, and how I have been playing for many years.  I have had my stun on Q for 15 years and it isn't going to change now, no matter what else happens.  Still, the principles are useful to anyone, and in any case seeing how other people build an interface can give you good ideas.

This is my party setup.  The basic principle is that every piece of important information has to be available without looking all over the screen.  If your character bar is in the top left, you won't notice when you take a lot of damage.  If you do, you won't be looking at your feet to see if you are standing in fire.  You also want your important cooldowns visible without having to look at the bottom of your screen.  Here is my setup:

My character health bar is in a prominent spot.  Above my health bar at 1.  I have all of my defensive cooldowns.  If I see my health bar is low, I don't have to look all over the screen - I have my defensives right there.  I have my debuffs shown below it at 2., so it is super obvious to me if I get a particular boss debuff, and it is right beside my health bar so I can check my full status all at once.  The big icon near the 1.  is the remaining duration on Divine Shield.

At 3. are my reminder icons.  These tell me if I am lacking an aura or my rune buff.  As soon as I put those buffs on, the reminder icon vanishes.  This way I am always reminded before a pull to get those buffs up, and I don't have to put that on my memory.

4.  is my target.  It it set up to have a *huge* cast bar so if my target is casting the entire bar is taken up with the cast.  I want to be completely sure that I don't miss casts.  Also I put wings, my interrupt, and my stun right beside the enemy frame here.  If a cast is happening, I can see, without moving my eyes at all, exactly which options I have to stop it.

5.  is my rotation helper.  I use Hekili because it is excellent for ret and prot paladins.  This lets me focus on dodging goo without staring much at my abilities and cooldowns.  Right below it is my holy power display.  I recommend everyone get some kind of rotation display, but each class needs to hunt down the best solution for them.  Just make sure you aren't staring at the bottom left of the screen and standing in fire because you can't see your character while figuring out your rotation.

6. and 7. are my focus and target of target displays.  I want to have those just in case, though honestly I don't look at them much.

8. is the most important part of the interface, so pay close attention here - the damage meter.  Notice on the bottom how Redcape has done all the damage and other people haven't.  This is just how it is.

Okay, so now we have what the bits are.  Now how do we make them this way?

The health bar for me, my target, target of target, and focus are all created via Shadowed Unit Frames.  I use the default raid and party frames though, as I find they do what I want.  SUF lets you easily set up different arrangements for each frame, which is great.  For example, I think it is crucial to have the cast bar for your target be extremely obvious.

The extra icons at 1. and 3. are made via Weakauras.  You can find tons of weakauras at https://wago.io/weakauras so if you have a specific thing you want a icon for, hunt there.  I have weakauras to show me the duration of all of my defensives, important buffs, and cooldowns right next to where the button is.  Weakauras also provides the holy power display below my Hekili bar at 5.

The buttons surrounding my character frame and target frame are made via Bartender.  This gives you extra bars you can rearrange, so I put bars on the screen near the frames and made the bars click through.  This way they don't interfere with anything, but I can easily put buttons right next to the raid frames that they are associated with.

In raids my group frames shifts.  This can be done in Interface - Raid Profiles in the default interface.  In 5 person content I want all party members right beside me, in raids I need it set further away.

Now that we have the appearance out of the way, I should talk a bit about buttons.  Personally I like using my mouse for all movement and my left hand for all spellcasts.  This works great for prot and ret, but wouldn't work for healing.  (This is part of the reason I don't heal...)

My setup is that I have my basic 12 buttons mapped to 123456qwerty.  The bar above it is mapped to shift-123456qwerty.  The bar above that is mapped to ctrl-123456, and then to custom buttons.  This allows me to easily use 24 keybinds, and have another 12 awkward ones.  I don't want to ever mouse click an ability in a fight, because that leads to death.

My mouse has 7 buttons on it.  I have them mapped to back up, strafe left, strafe right, move forward, autorun, mark target as skull, and mount up.  This way I never have to slowly keyboard turn, I can just mouse turn and strafe.  There isn't much reason to ever use the turn buttons, as mouse turning plus strafing is all you ever really want to do.  I want to be able to move and turn at full speed with the mouse while hitting abilities at maximum speed.

If you have any other questions or comments (feel free to criticize my interface if you think there are things I could improve) please comment away.

Multi pronged attack

Back in the day when I was running DnD campaigns I would try to have monsters make multi pronged attacks.  I found that if all the monsters were just beating on the characters trying to reduce their HP to zero, the fight wasn't that interesting.  You can have multipronged attacks by simply having archers shooting at the party while melee beaters run in from another angle, but that still lets the party respond in fairly simple ways.

I much preferred making the extra attacks entirely different from the main one.  For example, on monster could be grappling characters trying to swallow them, while the other is reducing their Charisma score.  Is it more of a problem that someone gets chewed on, or that their essence is drained away?  Not an easy thing to figure out!  You can also have enemies trying to execute prisoners, set fire to houses, or any number of other things.  Forcing the party to balance threats that are orthogonal to one another makes for exciting gameplay.

We had an entertaining example of a multipronged attack in my DnD game with Naked Man last week.  We hopped through a portal and were immediately attacked by a group of Shadows, a Ghost, and Wraith.  The Shadows drain Strength, the Ghost possesses people, and the Wraith bashes down.  The Wraith was fairly predictable in that it was attacking our HP, which scales with level.  The Shadows attack our Strength though, and that is a stat that doesn't improve as we level up.  Our defenses against Shadows stay basically the same from level 1 to 20, but since we are higher level encounters contain ever greater numbers of them.

This situation leads to some silly circumstances.  If we encounter the Shadows in a big room, I Fireball their end of the room and they all die instantly.  Trivial encounter.  This time though we were in a tiny space, surrounded on all sides.  The Shadows started draining our Strength and AOE effects were not usable.  We could have easily had someone die on round 1 with nothing they could do about it, against monsters that are rated to be utterly trivial to us at this point.

It ended up that we used a lot of resources fighting off all the undead, but we did win.  The issue is that the battle was so binary.  Both sides can wipe the other out nearly instantly without any recourse.  This just isn't true for other weak monsters like orcs, which have the same difficulty assigned to them as a Shadow, but who are no threat whatsoever to a high level party like ours.

The Ghost gave us real trouble too.  Being able to possess one of our people and fight against us is a devastating blow, especially when we have no idea at all how to stop it.

I love the idea of one monster bashing, one monster messing with brains, and a third group of monsters attacking in another totally different way.  However, I don't know that it worked out as well as we could have hoped.  Being possessed doesn't give you a lot of fun choices.  In a computer game it would be fun, as the player still would control 3 characters.  However, being taken out of the battle with a single roll before you get a turn isn't great.  Nobody wants to sit out a long, intricate encounter entirely.

The glass cannon Shadows didn't work out that well either.  We summoned some critters to distract them, and Naked Man was left with a choice.  He could have the Shadows ignore our summons and beat on us, in which case he probably wipes out a character, or maybe all of us.  Alternatively he could have the Shadows attack the summoned monsters, which pretty much removes the Shadows from the fight entirely.  Neither answer is particularly satisfying, and it comes from Shadows being set up in a binary all or nothing sort of way.  He chose to have the Shadows bash on our summoned critters and we beat the fight.  I think that is the better choice, but he obviously didn't like it.

It is a tricky thing to evaluate.  I love the idea of multipronged attacks, but without customizing monsters to the party it seems quite difficult to make the reality match the fantasy.  DnD has this thing where characterse get better at resisting HP reduction with level, but most other sorts of attacks are just as good at high level as at low level, and that puts encounter designers in a weird place.  If you don't attack HP, your critters are locked into being trivial or deadly, with almost no room for challenging in the middle.

I am worried about Bron

I have been looking at some of the new stuff arriving for WOW in the Shadowlands expansion.  I am going to be joining the Kyrian covenant so I wanted to see what their soulbinds look like.  Soulbinds are essentially a new talent tree only available to members of a given covenant.

It is neat to see how they have changed things from WOW's inception to now.  In old WOW they would have had an ability like "Do 2% more damage."  A modern version of that is the following:

Each time you use an ability that is different from the previous ability you gain 1% versatility for 6 seconds.  This stacks up to 3 times.

This is an awful lot like 2% more damage.  It can change your rotational choices in edge cases, but mostly you just ignore it completely and get your ~2% more damage.  You can't get that excited about this ability, and it will never become a balance issue.  This next one though is *quite* a different story.

After 90 ability uses, summon Bron.  Bron attacks and heals your targets for 30 seconds.

What the heck is this?!?  Does Bron do 10% of your overall damage?  1%?  Does it deliver a truckload of healing?  I sure don't know!

From a casual player perspective this is a fantastic ability.  Every couple of minutes without warning a big friend parachutes in and fights for you.  I love that.  You don't have to worry about it, it does useful things, and I bet the visual is entertaining.

From a game design perspective this worries me.  It is exactly the sort of ability that ruins the player experience because players will always optimize the fun out of everything if you let them.  If Bron is nearly useless we can avoid this issue, but that is kind of sad for Bron.  If Bron is good though, then players will want to have all of the burst from Bron occur in a specific window, usually the first 30 seconds of a fight.  Players will build addons to track how many ability uses are left, and set themselves to 85/90 so Bron will spawn 7 seconds into the fight once they are in position and their setup abilities have all been cast.

It could be that instead they want Bron to do healing 30 seconds into the fight, so they set themselves to 68/90 instead.  You will have raid teams setting up target dummies so people can get their Bron to the correct number, and raiders who accidentally went over their 90 asking for the team to wait another 2 minutes so they can get Bron primed again.  Arena players will do the same in their prep phases, desperately spamming abilities to get Bron to the exact right point.

All of that is contingent on Bron being good.  You can't let such a fun, flavourful ability be powerful, or everyone will optimize it until they hate themselves.  Boring abilities can be good, but interesting ones, not so much.  A lot of Shadowlands stuff has gone this way as Blizzard realized that covenant powers that were excellent presented huge balance issues and made people feel trapped in a particular covenant whether they liked it thematically or not.  They nerfed the covenant powers dramatically because at least that way the casual people wouldn't feel too badly about taking a suboptimal covenant.  I expect Bron will be looked at the same way, and Blizzard will make sure Bron does 2% of a player's overall damage so it probably won't be worth it to obsessively optimize it.

Babysitting players so that they won't ruin their own fun in an attempt to generate bigger numbers is one of the unfortunate parts of a game designer's job.  It is one of the things modern WOW does well, especially if you consider Classic WOW as a comparison, where players spend all their time farming up buffs and consumables to defeat utterly trivial content in slightly fewer seconds.  

Silly secrets

Secret doors are silly.

This isn't a universal truth, but it is where we have arrived due to extreme overuse of the trope.  When playing DnD or other similar games I can absolutely imagine secret doors being used in ways that are fun and immersive.  In the creepy old manor occupied by a vampire there could be a secret prison located in the basement, but the only easy way to get there is a secret door located behind a bookcase that leads to a tiny stairway.  That scenario works.

The problem is that somebody saw a secret door in a movie or something and decided that they had to put a couple of those in their DnD module.  Then somebody else saw that, and decided to put six secret doors in *their* module.  After years of this we are stuck with games that assume that there will be secret doors scattered everywhere, and no adventure is complete without them.

This progression takes the secret door from a memorable event to an annoyance.  Searching every room for secret doors is drudgery, and leaves the game feeling stale.  A secret door should be a singularly exciting event, not 

"Okay, we search the room for secret doors.  Not because we have *any* reason to think there is one, but becasue they are absolutely everywhere so we search everything for secret doors."

"You find a secret door."

"Fine, mark it on the map, moving along."

What great adventure, such excitement!

A good rule of thumb is that if the characters will never remember finding the secret door, nor care about where it leads, it shouldn't exist.  Solving the puzzle to figure out which piece of the intricate fireplace to push on to get to the secret laboratory is a fine thing to do.  Finding a generic secret door in a featureless wall that goes straight to the next room and which has absolutely no reason to exist is boring and pointless.

This is largely true of all kinds of things in gaming.  If the players have an optimal choice that they should always take you should automate it away.  This is especially true if making that choice takes time at the table to resolve and isn't exciting or fun.  Figuring out a puzzle to open a secret door embedded into a fireplace - fun!  Rolling to see if you find a secret door in every featureless chunk of wall - awful.

The solution is one that scenario designers and GMs have to implement.  No secret doors unless they are rare, unique, and engaging.  If you aren't describing something that catches player interest, and if they aren't legitimately surprised to find it, cancel that secret door and just put a regular door.  I know that every scenario designer wants to surprise players with new and unexpected things.  Unfortunately secret doors have been so overused that they don't fill that function anymore; we need something different and fresh to entertain our jaded, cynical brains.

An ordered list

When I first saw 5th edition DnD I thought its handling of magic items was excellent.  In older editions magic items got complicated and felt a lot more like an optimization problem than like a fantasy adventure.  Characters had to be decked out in magic top to bottom, and had a variety of slots that needed to be filled.  You needed magic boots, magic belt, 2 magic rings, magic hat, etc.  Fantasy stories don't have these absurd numbers of magic items, and this felt to me like it could be better.  5th edition simply has 3 slots for magic items, which reduces the total number of items you need.  I liked that plan.  

I don't like the plan much anymore.  At low levels those 3 slots aren't relevant because you don't have enough magic items.  At medium levels you swap magic items around the party until everyone has their 3 slots full.  At high levels new magic items either are better than your current ones and bump an old one off, or they are useless.  In my campaign with Naked Man we regularly find new items that he is excited to tell us about, consider them, and then try to figure out how much money we can sell them for.  Everyone already has their 3 items, so a new item with niche use or which simply isn't that powerful is worthless.

I can't even save up for later.  I know that I will have 3 attunement slots now and will never get more, so if an item is bad, no point in keeping it.  I do want characters to have different values for items, but a system where most new acquisitions are met with 'meh, I guess we can sell it' isn't working well.

Characters pretty much have an ordered list of magic items, and everything below 3rd place is junk.  That doesn't have to be the case.  Right now the system is bad - it doesn't matter at low level, is okay at medium level, and is bad again at high level.  We should start with 1 slot and go up to 5 or so over time.

A conversation with Naked Man left me thinking about how to implement this.  One thing he pointed out, which is entirely true, is that many characters make their last meaningful advancement choice at level 3.  After that they just use feats to buff stats and continue to get the abilities that are listed.  No other choices are made.

We can potentially solve both of these problems simultaneously.  Feats have the trouble that there are a few great ones and a ton of rubbish ones.  Improving all the terrible feats so that characters consistently take them would be useful - raw stats should be a default just in case you happen to hate all the listed stuff, not the standard thing everyone does.  Right now though I don't want to rewrite all the feats.  

Instead I think I should simply add a new feat to the game:  Mighty Spirit.  Add 1 to your total number of magic item slots.  In addition to this I would also start slots at 1 instead of 3.  Of course this needs to be counterbalanced by giving characters more feats.  My initial thought is to add new feats at level 6, 10, 14, and 18.  This would mean that a player who wanted to take tons of weird feats is welcome to, people who just want more stats can do that, and somebody who wants to have a huge number of magic items can make that happen.

While taking another copy of Mighty Spirit doesn't sound exciting in itself, it opens up some really cool options.  When you take it you aren't just increasing a number, you are adding some powerful new abilities to your character.  By the time peopel are high level they likely all can use a bunch of magic items, but the degree to which this happens is player controlled, giving them more impactful choices.

I want magic items to feel impactful.  I want people to have real choices later in character life that matter, and aren't just +2 to a stat.  I think we can do these things at the same time.

Adventures in Terraforming

 The Flautist and I have been trying more Terraforming Mars experiments in our 2p games.  First we tried a powered up version of the game where every turn we got two prelude cards each and picked one to keep.  This would clearly generate a ridiculous game, so we started at only ten Terraform Rating each to keep our incomes more in line with the base game.  A new prelude each turn is a lot more powerful than ten money, and the game ended early at turn nine.  I got lucky and hit 30 bucks and 21 bucks as my last two preludes, which was certainly a lot better than random income on the final turns.

The Flautist isn't one for half measures though, so she wanted to try that again but with full income.  Naturally getting a free prelude every turn made the game silly fast, and we ended on turn 7.  The board was mostly empty as we had just taken as much pure terraform as possible, due to the rapid game end.  It was an amusing experiment, but didn't really make for a great game.  Much like playing with five players, playing with that much extra stuff ends the game so fast that much of the game no longer matters.  Income cards and things that generate points over turns don't work, and that cuts out too much of the play for my tastes.

Our next experiment was aimed at finding out how it would feel if there were no randomness in card draws.  I usually win the games, in part because I memorize the whole deck and she doesn't.  If we drew exactly the same cards would I find it an advantage because I can predict her plays, or a disadvantage because she doesn't have to worry about what I might have because she has it too?

We decided to do this by taking two separate TM sets and building two decks ordered identically.  Every time she would draw she would do so from her deck and me from mine.  With identical resources, would our games play out nearly the same?

Our games sure didn't play out the same.  We each got the same corporations and preludes, and I selected Inventrix over Helion.  I don't like Helion at the best of times, though admittedly it has some sweet endgame angles when the Thermalist award is in play, but the extra three cards granted by Inventrix seemed crucial so I wouldn't fall behind in information.  Between preludes and ocean cards in our opening hands we got to four oceans on turn 1, and I used Inventrix's special power to drop Kelp Farming.

Kelp Farming turn 1 is a hilarious smashing, and could easily have gotten me the game by itself.  However, I leveraged Inventrix into AI Central to draw tons of cards, and Earth Catapult, Anti Gravity, and Research Outpost to give me -5 cost on all those cards I was drawing.  Six cards a round at -5 cost is preposterous, and we ended the game on turn 11 with me 50 points ahead.

The Flautist likes Helion, and didn't quite realize how powerful the extra three starting cards from Inventrix would be.  She chose Helion, which meant that the entire game I knew exactly what cards she would draw each turn, and knew what to play around and what to ignore.  Not having the extra science symbol from Inventrix also meant that she couldn't get a science set up going, and while she did play Earth Catapult she couldn't abuse it nearly as badly as I abused my discount / card draw engine.

Inventrix kind of broke our format.  We were supposed to be drawing the same cards each turn and then planning around that, but instead I got new stuff each turn and knew what she was getting before she did.

The Flautist wanted to change the format for another go at this, but this time remove all card draw from the deck to ensure that we would get the same cards every turn.  That is one way to go about it, but I came up with another idea I like:  Build 4 decks.  2 of the decks, using half of each of our sets, would be our decks to draw our standard 4 cards a turn from.  They would be ordered identically, of course.  This way no matter what happens we get the same cards on each turn.  Then build 2 more decks with the rest of the cards, also ordered identically, and use those decks for all other card draw.  This way card draw remains in the game and works fine, and there is an advantage to drawing more as you know what your opponent has access to, but you cannot completely predict their draws because each turn they get 4 cards that you don't know about until you get the same ones.

I like this theory a lot.  I don't think it would make a good long term format but it should give an interesting experience and let us actually do the thing we intended to do in the first place - each draw the same cards every turn and try to outfox each other given that information.

Cooling down

 WOW is getting a big patch today.  Blizzard is updating the game in preparation for the new expansion, and retribution paladins are getting a variety of changes.  One of the trends in the changes is to ramp up the cooldown based nature of the spec.  For a couple expansions now ret paladins have been in a frustrating place because everything about their play is based around a single cooldown - Avenging Wrath.

AW is a cool looking, iconic ability.  You grow glowy wings and get a huge damage bonus.  Angel dwarf smash!  Unfortunately for four years now the way you build your character is to stack everything that makes AW better.  You take all the abilities that make it last longer, and all the abilities that make you more powerful during it, and it adds up to doing four times as much damage during AW as outside of it.  This means that ret paladin play is largely about being a golden god for 30 seconds, and then being dumpster tier until AW is back up again.

I don't like that playstyle much.  For one, it makes selecting talents and traits boring.  You can't switch things around at all without becoming terrible.  Everything multiplies together, so the more AW stuff you stack, the more critical the next AW pick becomes.  I can't tinker with individual choices the way I want to - not without being terrible, that is.  It also doesn't leave much decision making in combat.  I hit AW as soon as it is up, and that is all there is to it.

I was hoping that with a new expansion coming and much of the AW boosting stuff rotating out that I would get to change this situation.  Unfortunately the new talents Blizzard has just rolled out are going to put me back in exactly the same spot I have been in for years now - take everything that boosts AW.

One new talent called Seraphim gives a 33% damage bonus for 15 seconds.  Of course you want to take this, and use it during AW because they multiply together.  Even though Seraphim has a 45s cooldown and AW has a 2 min cooldown, you will just use Seraphim every 1 minute so they sync up.  Another talent called Execution Sentence gives 20% bonus damage for 8 seconds and has a 1 minute cooldown, so obviously you take it and use it every 1 minute so it syncs up with both Seraphim *and* AW.

Having talents be cooldowns isn't a problem inherently.  The trouble is the kind of cooldown they are using.  Talents that read like "Do 4 damage to a target" and "Do 2 damage to all nearby targets" and "Deal 8 damage to a target over 10 seconds" are all fine.  You can use them on cooldown if you want, or save them for the right spot.  If you take one, you might take the others, or not.  Depends what you want to do.

However, talents that all act as multipliers to one another are an issue.  You end up doing monstrous damage for a tiny window and otherwise being bad.  Even if it is overall balanced in terms of damage output it sucks as a playstyle because you are locked in.  Everything has to be used in a specific optimal order as soon as it is available.  You can't effectively tinker with the build because it all multiplies together.

You get locked in to a specific play pattern, and that is boring.

It would be fine if other talent choices were reasonable, but right now nothing even looks close.  Having one loadout that was built for massive burst damage is okay; the problem is when other builds simply cannot compete.  The class and spec will be balanced around the best talent setup, which means you either play the cooldown stacking setup or you are going to be numerically inferior.

I like playing my paladin.  I don't want to play another class.  Unfortunately it looks like Blizzard has goofed on the numbers and ret paladins are again going to be locked into builds where they are ridiculous during AW, and pathetic otherwise, and that is not a great place to be.

What kind of game are we making, anyway?

 The WOW expansion Shadowlands has been officially delayed.  It was only about 4 weeks away when the announcement came, which is a huge disaster for Blizzard.  The state of the game on the beta has me convinced that Blizzard did the right thing in delaying and most everyone seems to agree with me.  People are pissed that it is happening, but given where they were they were either going to ship a shoddy product or delay.  No third option presented itself.

Much of the delay has to be chalked up to polish and bugs and such, but I won't talk about that here.  They need to do the work, they will, no big deal.

However, a significant part of the issue is that endgame balance is a total shitshow and they have no good way out of the mess they have created.  The core of the struggle is this:  They created an expansion that works great for an MMO game, but is a problem for an action RPG.  When WOW launched it was way more of an MMO, and it has slowly evolved away from those roots.

In an MMO things are unbalanced.  Some classes are just good and others aren't.  There are plenty of suboptimal choices, and many decisions that are made for flavour torpedo your character's power.  In an MMO you can fuck up big time, and it takes forever to do things.  The world feels big.  Content is extremely easy, built for lore and effect, though often crushingly time consuming.

WOW has shifted away from these things.  You can switch specs easily.  You can find groups through a special group finder window, and usually this will simply teleport you to wherever you need to be.  Decisions are easily reversible.  The world is small and simple to traverse.  Content is hard, tightly balanced, and designed for challenge.  This is more of an Action RPG feel.

In Shadowlands there are four major groups called covenants.  You have to pick one to ally with.  This choice gives you several powerful spells, one of which is common to all people who ally with that covenant, one of which is different for each class.  Then these covenants give you several trees of bonuses you can work on which have variable rewards based on class and spec.

In an MMO this is great.  The covenants have differnent visual themes, distinct philosophies and goals, and they each offer a different home zone.  This choice fits in, and getting a bunch of your abilities from this choice makes sense in this particular world.  You make a choice, it matters a lot, and you live with it.  In an action RPG this is a disaster.  For each spec there is going to be an optimal choice of covenant for each content type.  Kyrian looks superb for paladin tanking, but garbage for paladin dps.  I can't have two covenants, so if I want to maximize my power in high end content I literally need two characters.  

Balancing in WOW has always been a challenge, but this is a whole new level.  In the past if a spec was overperforming you could just nerf an ability or two.  But if a covenant power is too good for a particular spec, what do you do?  If you nerf it, all the other specs that use it get hit for collateral damage.  Then people want to swap covenants, but they are already invested in their current one.  Any tweak you make to the system affects a whole variety of specs in ways you can't easily predict, so balancing them becomes a terifying prospect.  Each change causes a cascade of other problems that all have to be corrected for in some other way.  We may well see logic like "Well, Divine Toll is too powerful for prot paladins.  However, we can't nerf it because it would hurt ret paladins, so because Divine Toll is too good, we will instead nerf some other ability instead."  This of course means that anyone *not* using Divine Toll gets hit even harder, just because Divine Toll was too good!

In addition to cross spec issues, you have cross activity issues.  There is no way you can make cool new spells and abilities and have them work for raiding, dungeons, and pvp.  You can have them all be bad and not worth using, or be extremely bland and similar, but those solutions both totally fail on the lore and feel fronts.  If you want those abilities to be powerful and unique you are going to face down people who pick a covenant that is excellent for raiding and then realize they are 20% worse than other people at pvp, which basically removes them from contention for any serious team.  Plus even if they get on a team, they will always know they are vastly inferior and that sucks as a play experience.  Blizzard has made it clear that swapping covenants and abilities is going to be extremely slow, suitable for someone making a long term choice, and not at all useful for someone wanting to do two different activities in the same week.

Previous versions of WOW had challenges with balance, but they were fairly careful to keep all power concentrated in spec specific buckets.  If ret paladins were too good, you could easily fix it without breaking everything else.  Even then, it was a thorny problem.  With the Shadowlands system it will be vastly more difficult.

All this matters because Blizzard declared that they are going to get balance within a few %.  They won't.  They never have, and this system is so much harder than any before it there is no way they will achieve their goal.  It is a fine goal and all, but the system is so interconnected now that balance changes will be extremely difficult to fully plan, and when you do people will be forced to abandon flavour choices to account for the new numbers, and people *hate* that.  It is the Action RPG problem of wanting extremely tight balance for challenging content but located in a game that is ostensibly an MMO.

Some games just have crap balance and content is trivial.  Look at Classic WOW - people clear new raid tiers within a couple of hours of the content going live, and then wait half a year for new content.  Some classes are obscenely overpowered and make others look like jokes *cough* warrior and mage *cough*.  That is an MMO.  Roll a good class if you want to perform... but you don't have to, because everything is easy.  You spend your time farming or cybering, not practicing.

In modern WOW though people expect tight balance, they expect challenge, and Blizzard has committed themselves to delivering it.  They are going to fail.

I am not saying that tilting more towards MMO type design is bad.  It sounds like a cool set of choices they are setting up, and a world that has important lore.  But if you want to have big decisions like this that have big consequences, and you want people to have to stick to their decisions to make those decisions feel impactful, then you aren't going to have tight balance.  Period.  I think the key in these situations is to admit what your priorities are and go with them.  Pretending that you can just do it all is simply setting yourself up for failure and disappointment.

You can ship a game where everyone just tools around and beats the stuff they want to.  In that game you can have choices like covenants and it works just fine.  You can have a game of high challenge and finely tuned balance.  In that game this version of covenants is a disaster.

Have your cake, or eat it.  But not both.

Greed is good

 The Flautist and I did another Terraforming Mars alternate rules test.  As I said last time, we decided to see what would happen if we dealt ourselves a bunch of the best trading themed cards from the Colonies expansion.  We took the best 10, dealt out 5 to each of us, and then 5 random cards.  We played the basic corporation so we would have to keep the cards and then played.

Our 5 colonies were cash, titanium, steel, heat, and oceans.  On turn 1 we had 5 colonies out, 3 on cash, 2 on titanium.  Turn 2 saw another colony on titanium, and turn 3 saw 2 more colonies, both on steel.  I played a trading enhancer and a couple ways to make trading cheaper, and The Flautist played 2 additional trade fleets and a way to make trading cheaper.  It was silly.  We had 19 cash, 6 titanium, and 10 steel coming in every turn between us, to say nothing of the extra income from the colonies themselves.  It wasn't just that though - I drew huge income cards and ended the game with 58 raw income and 49 terraform rating, for 107 cash incoming on turn 11... and that didn't even take into account my 5 titanium and 6 steel income.

We filled the entire board on turn 11 and then ended the game with both of us having exactly 38 dollars in front of us that we could not spend on anything.

This isn't a surprise of course.  The trading cards all multiply together, each one making the others more potent.  More than that though, the fact that one of us was in trading meant it was more profitable for the other one to dip into trading too.  I find the opposite usually occurs in large games, as much of the time nobody builds a trading empire at all.  It just isn't worth it unless you get a good combo of cards, and if nobody else joins you in building colonies the return on investment is paltry.

But when every player builds colonies as fast as they can, whoo baby the game goes crazy.

It was a fun experiment but clearly it warps the game completely.  If we hadn't gotten quite as strong a set of colonies the story might have gone differently but even if I was just producing a glorious stack of heat and power it still ends the game quickly.  I suppose it might have been a more normal looking game if a bunch of the colonies that don't enter play right away had been randomly chosen, but that wouldn't even have been much fun, or fit with the theme.

Much like Jovian cards, the trading cards need a critical mass to be good.  Below that point they aren't worth much, but above it they become the entire game.  That does give the game a lot of variety but it does mean that dealing them all out like this feels kind of silly.

I have another idea for our next rules experiment - reject draft.  Any time a player decides not to buy a card or discards a card for money the other player may choose to buy it for 3 bucks if they want to.  I hope this makes card choices much more interesting and lets us assemble cool combos.  I considered making it so that any card you discard can be bought by the other player at a discount - after all, it is a patent that seemingly has little value.  Market value depends on demand!  It would be tricky to figure out if you should buy a mediocre card for 3 if it would cost your opponent only 2 to purchase it.

Naturally this just increases the power level of the game, giving players more choices.  It isn't nearly as big a power level jump as the 'all the trading cards' game we just played though, so I expect the final board state to look a lot more normal.

Flappy flap

Lately I have been playing some DnD with a couple of people using an alternate race that grants flight.  They are a type of Tiefling, decended from both human and infernal creatures, and their bat-like wings allow them to fly around.  They do lose out on standard Tiefling abilities to get flight, but as anyone who has ever tried to GM a game with a flying character in it can tell you, flight is busted and is vastly superior to other racial abilities.

The counter argument is usually that at level 5 a Wizard can cast Fly.  That holds no water though because this costs a memorization slot, one of your few high level spells for the day, only lasts a short time, and can cause you to fall to your death if you fail a Concentration roll.  It also doesn't address the issue that flying destroys a huge percentage of encounters and challenges that characters deal with from levels 1-4.

We definitely found flying to be a serious balance issue in our games so far.  I certainly think it needs adjustment but which adjustment exactly is tricky.  A lot of GMs just flat out ban flying races, and I think that is a fine solution.  You could build a race that flew but was packaged with hideous restrictions to go along with it, but honestly I don't think that would be much fun.  The problem is that flying destroys so many basic assumptions about the challenges in the game that you can't just fix it by making the character otherwise useless.  It would still end up that the flying character automatically defeats whole swaths of the game by themselves, and then does nothing otherwise.  Hardly interesting.

Our flying characters were able to avoid traps effortlessly, hover in the air using ranged attacks to trivialize enemies, and evade spell effects.  This sort of thing can be solved by making a set of rules about how flying works that are restrictive in reasonable ways.  For example, characters with flying want to be able to hover in place, fly straight up, swap direction instantly, and perform tasks without any hindrance.  None of that needs to be true, and in fact it seems kind of absurd when you consider what flight looks like on a large bird.

A hummingbird can do all that stuff, but hummingbirds are tiny and eat stupendous amounts of food to accomplish their feats of aerial magic.  A flying character is going to look a lot more like an oversized pelican weighed down by a ton of gear.  No hovering for them!

I imagine the following rules for flying characters.

1.  You can only ascend at 1/3 of your flying speed.  

2.  While aloft, you must take a move each round for your full flying speed or fall.  

3.  You need at least a 20 foot wide space to turn in.

4.  All attacks made while flying are at disadvantage, and all spell casts require a Concentration check or the action is wasted and the spell is lost.

5.  You can carry at most 5*Str pounds of gear while flying.

This makes you feel not like an attack helicopter or a hummingbird, but rather a big clunky flappy bird that can get aloft if you need to.  You can still get up to the tower to grab the thingie when your companions would have to climb.  You can scout effectively and avoid many outdoor hazards.  You can even engage melee opponents from on high, though the penalty to attacks and spells makes this much less effective.  These are significant advantages.

What you can't do is constantly be out of reach so your friends have to soak all the attacks.  You can't just zoom around ignoring all area control type spells.  You can't launch yourself through tiny dungeon corridors, attacking enemies at will then dodging out of reach again.  

This ruleset means that outdoors, outside of combat, flying has huge advantages.  This feels right!  It should be great in that situation.  In a fight though being a bipedal creature with big clunky wings just isn't an advantage unless your opponents are totally unable to attack someone in the air.  In the tight corridors of a dungeon wings aren't much use at all, except perhaps for gliding over a pit of spikes.

That feels, to me at least, like a good spot.  I would still love to have flying, and I think it would still be the absolute best racial ability, but it won't break most combat encounters and it will be situational.

When I built Heroes By Trade I included a race with wings, but their wings weren't strong enough for flight.  They could slow their fall easily and thus jump down from any height, and even run on water for short distances using their wings to help out.  Players found this useful and thematic, but it never broke anything.  That might be my best answer yet if someone really wants wings, though I suspect that most people that want wings really do want to take off into the wild blue yonder.

Alternate formats being just the same

 The Flautist and I have been playing lots of 1v1 Terraforming Mars over the last half year and we have taken to performing experiments with the game.  The first experiment was to end the game only once the deck of cards ran out, and this resulted in a fun but silly game that we don't intend on repeating.

Our second attempt at new rulesets was born because we wanted to try a game where we both got *tons* of card draw.  We figured the game would go really long because our early money would be invested in cards rather than heat / plants / ocean production, but it didn't quite work out that way.  We set it up by choosing 10 great card draw cards, shuffling them, and dealing 5 of them to each of us.  Then we dealt 5 other random cards to each of us and we played the basic corporation.  This way we were both guaranteed to get an engine.  We had 8 basic science symbols and 2 cards that required 3 science symbols to play.

The Flautist drew 6 science symbols.  I drew 2 science symbols, and both of the cards that require 3 science.  Unlikely, and quite a mess for me.  She slammed down her engine and it was a tremendous success, though not because of all the card draw.  She played the science payoff card that gives 4 energy on turn 2, the one that gives 6 energy on turn 3, and the other one that gives 4 energy on turn 4.  By turn 5 she had 17 energy production, a steelworks to turn it into oxygen, and then dropped the top science payoff card Anti Gravity to top it all off, making all of her cards cheaper.

With her taking an oxygen and a heat every turn and me using a bunch of steel production to place an ocean every turn using Aquifer Pumping we ripped through the game and ended on turn 11.

My game went reasonably well too, with my turn 4 Advanced Alloys boosting 3 steel and 4 titanium per turn.  I built a ton of cities and greeneries, notching 37 points just from greenery/city board points (pretty good for turn 11) and almost stole the terraforming lead on the last turn by grabbing 10 terraform.  It wasn't enough, and 14 points of Jovian payoffs still left me behind, losing the game by a single point.

Our attempt to have a long game with lots of cards drawn didn't work.  All it did was give one of us a ludicrous early science engine.  We drew cards, sure, but I didn't get into card draw until halfway through the game, and The Flautist ended up tossing away a dozen cards at the end.

We had fun with it, but given how the card draw cards work it isn't that easy to have lots of cards without also making the science portion of the game kinda broken.  Card draw without science symbols is kinda limited.  If we had randomly not drawn the science payoffs for awhile I think it would have gone a lot more like we envisioned.

The next experiment we are going to do is one based on the colonies expansion.  When we play a few colonies usually get put down, but they usually don't play a crucial part in the game.  We plan on doing something similar to this last experiment where we take 10 trading / colony cards, deal 5 to each of us along with 5 random cards, and see where we end up.  There will be a ton of extra resources in the game because of all the trading, but our other production will surely be miserable given that set up.

We shall see if she can notch another win against me with this weird setup.  I suspect there will be some serious randomness in the cards - if one of us gets cheaper trading and better trading along with 4 energy production they are going to have an absurd early engine, particularly since there *will* be lots of colonies further boosting trades.

I will report back with the results.  If you have any other odd rulesets that you would like to see me try out and report on, speak up. 

Chug, chug, chug

In the early days of WOW potions were crazily powerful.  You could drink huge numbers of them to give you a wide range of buffs, and you could chug them like crazy in combat to get health, mana, and other benefits.  Realistically the cap on power was a financial one - people simply weren't willing to farm enough to drink all the potions they could potentially use.  If you ever couldn't beat something, then just have everyone in the raid farm for dozens of hours ahead of time and crush the encounter with pure potion power.

This is not a good system for any game that wants to have a competitive scene.  All it means is that the top tier of players have to play 16 hours a day farming up materials and they are miserable, and the players below that tier feel obligated to farm less, but still too much to be fun.  It is fine and well to let people grind up power increases, but there needs to be a low cap on that so that the competitive players can actually enjoy their time.

Blizzard agreed with me, and they tightened things up a lot many years back.  They made it so that you can only have 1-2 potion buffs at any given time, which prevented massive stacking of buffs.  You have to pick the buff you want and go with it.  This was a good change, and I won't criticize it.

In the old system healing / mana / temporary potions had a 2 minute cooldown, so in a 10 minute fight you would get to drink 5 of them.  Blizzard felt this was too much, so they made potions not cool down if used during combat, so that players could only use one per combat.  This new one potion per fight plan was better than the old system of chugging potions like crazy, but it really missed the point, and like most kludgy fixes it created new problems.

The first problem is that led to pre potting.  These days everyone drinks a potion one second before the fight starts, which allows the potion to cool down, and means you can still drink your one potion per fight later.  If somebody pulls a couple seconds early by accident, you all just drank your one potion per fight right at the start, which is often not what you would want at all.  Having countdowns so that everyone can drink right before the pull feels immersion breaking and silly.  It also means that everyone is still drinking two damn potions per fight.

Secondly this feels bizarre.  Why does my potion cool down during combat, but only if I drank it before combat?  Why do potions have this cooldown if their actual cooldown is realistically restricted by getting out of combat?  What is the point of layering these cooldown restrictions on top of one another? 

In the new expansion they are finally ditching this dumb ass kludge that has been dogging us all for a decade.  They are simply making potion cooldowns 5 minutes, and there is no restriction on that cooldown based on being in combat or not.  It is simple to understand, intuitive from a UI standpoint, and makes sure that people are still using roughly the amount of potions that Blizzard has decided is reasonable.

This is the solution that should have been implemented in the first place.  Naturally I have seen people calling this a nerf because they can break combat more often than once every five minutes in a dungeon and they want to drink potions faster than one every five mintues!

What fools.

Everyone will be under the same restrictions, so it isn't a nerf, just a change.  One which will reduce their overall consumption of resources, leaving them more time to play.

This change is a good lesson for anyone aspiring to be a game designer.  Don't try to get too complex and clever with your designs.  The players will always hunt for ways to gain power, and if your system lets them ruin their lives to win, they will do it.  (And then they will curse you for 'making' them do it.)  Build systems that are intutive and simple, but which end up with challenging optimization choices.  Players should always look at their options and understand what each of their choices will do, and then find that making the *correct* choice is challenging, even if the result is easy to calculate. 

Any time you have to write tons of extra text on tooltips, have hidden effects that casual players are affected by but don't understand, or need complicated math to understand, you must be extremely cautious.  Is this thing so great that it is worth the cost?

It usually isn't worth the cost, and simplicity is generally the best way.  Is isn't always easy, but it is absolutely worth it.

How not to be stunned forever

My group has completed the Tomb of Horrors.  The second half of the dungeon was even more absurd than the first half, if that is possible.  We crushed our way through it avoiding nearly all of the traps by holding our breath, touching things with magical forces instead of our bodies, and having trap and magic scanning going at all times.  We came extremely close to losing someone to a ridiculous crushing room trap, but thankfully the monk's reflexes were enough to save us.

Finally we came up against the lich at the bottom of the dungeon.  Time for an epic battle!  It was a battle we certainly should lose, by the numbers.  The lich in its lair is a CR 23 encounter, and our group is only level 12.  However, we have a few things going for us that aren't at all normal.  Our rogue had a sword that does extra damage to undead and converts all the damage dealt to radiant damage.  This blade is ridiculous because it bypasses all weapon damage reduction and just ruins undead, like a lich.  We also had multiple characters with the lucky feat because we knew that nasty saving throws were going to happen and we wanted rerolls on those.

The lich led off by instantly killing one character and fearing the rest.  Our rogue chopped in, hitting for half of the lich's hit points in a single attack, so the lich fired a DC 19 Charisma save at the rogue, and the resulting failure meant the rogue was disintegrated.  On round 2 we had half the party dead!  

As I was playing a cleric I decided to just pour on the radiant damage attacks, but this was a foolish endeavour.  The lich, like many legendary opponents, has the ability to ignore three failed saving throws and choose to make them instead.  It also has the ability that if it makes a saving throw, it won't take any damage from the attack that hit it.  Unfortunately we had nobody else forcing saving throws, so the lich was effectively immune to my character.  I could eventually cast enough times at it to get through its three free saves, but it would definitely have killed me by that point.

Thankfully I wasn't actually needed in this fight.  Our melee warlock ran in and bashed the lich to death with a hammer and we won.  One character I managed to bring back from death, the other was gone.  This is an excellent result for a CR 23 at 12th level, but the fight felt extremely frustrating to me.

Here is the thing:  Legendary monsters need some way to avoid being destroyed by save or die attacks.  If they just have normal saving throw numbers, parties will toss endless saves at them and the monster will fail some and be incapacitated for the entire fight.  Slowly beating a monster to death while it is Held / Stunned / Tripped / whatever does not make for a climatic battle scene.  You need to avoid this.  One way would be to simply give legendary monsters outrageous save numbers so they can't fail.  That has the problem that all spells with saves are literally useless, and honestly feels pretty silly.  Players would absolutely have to metagame and refuse to use anything that has a save.  You could also give the monsters incredible hit point totals so they live 20 rounds and the players run out of saves to toss at them, but that makes the fight interminable and wretched.

The solution of 3 free saves though is a pretty crappy one.  If you have a party full of people who toss out saves the opponent will quickly run through their free saves and then get wrecked.  If you have only one person who tosses out save effects though, that person is completely unable to do anything.  The brawlers can do their normal bashing routine, and the people who use attack rolls for spells are fine, but all spells with saves are right out.  That is not a great mechanic at all.

One solution is building a game where groups don't regularly have access to huge numbers of save or be incapacitated effects.  Monks are the worse offenders I have seen, as they can force enemies to save 4 times in a single round.  This usually results in a trivial fight where the big scary boss stands there stunned until it dies.  That just isn't fun.  Sure, the character gets to feel powerful, but 'We wrecked it, super easy' is not the epic story we want to tell.

Another way to do it would be to give legendary monsters advantage on all saves so they get to roll twice.  That is still a huge benefit, and makes saving throw based attacks fairly weak, but it feels so much better to have a chance of doing something instead of no chance at all.  Full immunities suck.  This style would mean that at least you would know that firing off save effects at bosses is unlikely to work, but if it happens to get through it is devastating.  That seems much better to me.

A third approach could be to simply make legendary enemies immune to stun / paralyze and other similarly crushing effects.  Those monsters don't need to be massively resistant to fireball, or being tripped by a fighter, or other similar things.  The real problem is just them being taken out of the fight, and dealing with that directly would be a far better solution than the 3 free saves mechanic.

This whole problem set is just an extension of DnD 5th edition's insistence on going back to nostalgia instead of building something new.  4th edition didn't have this same problem because we didn't have lots of abilities that took people out like we do in 5th.  Monsters got to take actions even if the players really unloaded on them.  I want to fuss at the 5th edition designers about this, because it shows up all over the place.  Unfortunately I have missed the boat on that particular change by a bunch of years now, and I don't see them changing it to suit me.

A pit of lava

 Today myself, Naked Man, and some friends set out to conquer the Tomb of Horrors.  The Tomb is an old DnD adventure written before I was born.  I have never looked at it, but I have heard many a tale about its outstanding implausibility and lethality.  The stories did not lead me astray.  We only got about 2/3 though the thing, but it is definitely the pinnacle of absurd funhouse dungeons that try to kill characters in the most over the top ways possible.

I had a fun time playing.  The group is great.  However, the dungeon is a silly mess that I couldn't take seriously.  

I actually went into the session figuring it would be brief.  Everyone else seemed to be sold on the idea that if their characters died to something they would just bring in a new one and keep going.  I wasn't into that idea at all.  If we aren't going to die to the dungeon, why bother playing in the deadliest dungeon?  If we are going to go for nonsense deathtraps, then let us actually respect them and let the heroes die.  If I die, I am out, and I go home.

But we didn't die.  None of us even came all that close, really.  We are all in good shape and have lots of resources left at this point, most of the way through the dungeon.  I am sure it gets even more dangerous near the end, so I expect us to have a TPK next session, but we could live, you never know.

In the first hallway we found a Sphere of Annihilation sitting in a carving, 5 gigantic poisoned pit traps, a dart trap, a switch trap, and a teleporter that sent us to all kinds of different places.  In the first hallway!  You might imagine that a dungeon designer who had access to 'teleport anywhere' as well as 'anti magic zone' and 'undetectable trap' could easily dispose of any interlopers, but this dungeon was clearly built by an idiot who merely wanted to inconvenience invaders, not actually stop them.

For example, one trap is a hallway with an illusion of weak enemies fleeing in fear.  If you enter the hallway, the entire 13 meter length of hallway turns into a slide, sending everyone on it into a pit of lava.  We know that the lich could simply have teleported us all into the lava.  But they didn't.  They could have put the lava under or above the hallway, killing us all easily.  But no.  They made sure to make a trap that is both preposterous and also not necessarily lethal.  They also made sure to make the mechanics of it completely ridiculous.  How exactly does a chunk of rock that big shift like that?   How is everything nearby not destroyed by the lava?  "Magic", obviously.

From a game standpoint, instantly lethal traps that you can't avoid aren't much fun.  From an immersion standpoint, an opponent with godlike power, unmatched intelligence, immense time to prepare, and home ground advantage should be unbeatable.  The sensible way that this situation plays out is that the lich inhabiting the Tomb simply murders us without any effort at all.  Instead the lich is a bumbling fool, wasting their power and resources on fruitless endeavours, because that way our party has a chance.

One issue with a place this full of secret doors and traps is that it encourages wretched, boring play.  We have a rogue with incredible Perception and Investigation skills, so he automatically finds everything.  We have a warlock who casts Detect Magic at will, so every single magical effect is found immediately.  In each corridor and each room we promptly find all the magic and all the traps, but everything takes a long time to do because we have to keep talking about searching with our powers on every single thing.  We can't just move down a corridor - we have to slowly walk, talking about investigating each thing we find.  Tedium, not fun.

If, for example, you have the Find Traps spell but can only cast it a few times a day, that is interesting.  You have to pick the right spot to use it, and conserve resources.  But constant, always on detection simply means that there is temporal overhead, and every single thing we do has to be framed in "I stare around the room Perceptively!"  Detect Magic is the worst offender here.  I would personally remove it from the game completely because I think it torpedoes fun, but at least it should always cost something.  I understand the appeal of making players think about the things they find, and consider how to handle them, but you don't encourage this by just filling every corridor with pits of spikes that the players defeat with tedium - you include evocative descriptions that they can interact with in normal, sensible ways.  Avoid things that require the GM to say "Well, it works because Magic."

I am glad I got to try out this thing.  I like playing with these people.  But geez, what a badly designed mess this thing is.

I did not cast Fireball

Dungeons and Dragons is back on!  DnD is not the easiest activity to do while a pandemic is in place, but we have managed to make it work by sitting outdoors at a substantial distance from one another.  It seemed like it might be a total mess, but it actually has worked out just fine so far.

As usual though, I am causing Naked Man, my GM, no end of headaches.

Our first session back we were slogging our way through a funhouse dungeon in search of a MacGuffin.  After many traps and terrible monsters we found ourselves decending down a series of underground waterfalls to the bottom of the complex.  It was an arduous and dangerous journey down, and at the bottom we encountered a pack of undead ghouls.

Usually this would be where I would say "I cast Fireball" and we would roll initiative.  Before I could get to that though one of the ghouls and our party Bard started chatting one another up.  It seemed there might be some useful information to be gathered, so I played along, trying to get the ghoul to tell us useful things.

Talking worked!  The ghoul revealed the MacGuffin, and we managed to convince it that we were perfectly fine with it going to the world above to murder and destroy.  It planned to visit the surface and after inflicting terrible mayham and destruction it wanted to go back and bring the entire ghoul race up to continue the slaughter.  Somehow we convinced it that we weren't bothered by this, and we agreed as a group to use the MacGuffin.

Naked Man was perplexed.  He had expected us to murder the ghoul and take the MacGuffin, and began planning the inevitable sneak attack the ghoul would inflict on us at the worst possible time.

I knew that a backstab was going to happen.  No doubt at all.  But one thing I know for sure is that if there is going to be backstabbing, I am going to backstab first!

I told the ghoul that I wanted to cast a spell on the MacGuffin so we could figure out how to use it.  It said to me "You aren't going to cast a spell to engulf us in fire, are you?"  Naturally I answered "Well, that is exactly the sort of thing I could do, but I won't!"  This answer seemed to satisfy it, and Naked Man leaned forward eagerly, wondering what sort of divination I would cast.  I certainly wasn't going to Fireball them.  We were roleplaying, figuring things out with guile and trickery, not just blasting our way through!

I cast Wall of Force instead, and encased the ghoul in a bubble.  That way we could murder all of its friends while it stood there helpless.  A thinking man's gambit, not some clumsy Fireball!

We blew up the rest of the ghouls, and then let the named ghoul out of the bubble and killed it too.

Naked Man was flabbergasted, as apparently I had totally sold him on my willingness to be chummy with an undead monster planning a full scale undead invasion from the cold dark.  No way was I *ever* going to go back up that waterfall with a pile of undead in tow, just hoping they don't start chewing on me halfway up!

I totally respect the choice to turn an obvious fight into a roleplaying encounter.  That is fantastic.  But you gotta remember that players are rarely going to negotiate with the vanguard of an invading army in good faith, especially when that vanguard is undead.

Also having thought more about it I shouldn't have cast Wall of Force.  Fireball would have been far better.

Finally I should note that the ghoul told us nothing of use.  If I had just Fireballed it at the outset we would know just as much useful information.  So much for clever play.  It amazes me how often I think "I should just Fireball, screw this roleplaying" and it turns out after much roleplaying that I really should just have Fireballed from the outset.  

Dim the lights

Normally I rant here about numbers.  Sometimes I fuss about progressive politics and how it relates to games.

Today I am here to be grumpy about mood lighting.

In Battle For Azeroth there are a real variety of dungeons with a wild expanse of aesthetics and styles.  I like that!  There is a silly pirate town with a pirate boss riding a parrot, a dank prison on a remote island, and a goblin factory / research lab full of robots and mad scientists.

When I think about which dungeons I want to visit again and again though, there is an obvious pattern.  The dungeons I want to visit most are the ones where I can see what is going on.

Waycrest Manor is the best example of this.  The aesthetic of the place is a old manor house infested with witches, ensorcelled servants, magically animated constructs, and horrors.  It is dark, gloomy, and hits the look perfectly.  Heck, it even has an endless lightning storm going on so that when you are outside in the courtyard fires start from lightning strikes.  Great!

But you spend most of your time in this dungeon in a narrow corridor with dark brown walls, dark brown floor, dark brown ceiling, and dark monsters.  Sometimes you have to go into an alternate realm that changes the colouration of the place, and that places a dark purple tint on everything.  It is maddening!  It is so hard to see what is going on, and when mechanics require you to dodge stuff on the ground that makes it even worse.

With perfect room lighting it is workable, but my computer is in a room with windows, and under those conditions Waycrest Manor is just unplayable.  I can't see anything that is going on, because the entire screen is just a mess of darkness.

There are two ways that restricting vision usually happens - either lighting, as described above, or by restricting space.  Narrow hallways and low ceilings can be a struggle, but they are workable.  Low light conditions are, by themselves, a thing I am okay with.  But bother together is just misery and I hate it.

It is no coincidence that I want to run Freehold over and over.  It is outdoors with lots of room to move, has good lighting so I can see what is happening, and even includes a variety of routes to choose from in an open format. 

I get that people want a variety of aesthetics.  I can see the appeal to an old manor house, or a dank dungeon.  But Blizzard needs to resist the urge to make restricted areas also dark areas, even though that totally makes sense.  It just causes me to rage at the computer, desperately playing Battle With The Interface trying to figure out what the heck is going on.  I don't mind challenging mechanics and tricky choices - in fact, I quite like it!  But squinting at my computer, being unable to know what is even happening, doesn't feel like challenging or interesting - just frustrating.

Even if I get less variety in style and look, I want open format dungeons where I can choose my route, see what I am doing, and feel like I have choices.  Narrow dungeon corridors are a staple of old school fantasy gaming, but they mostly function to limit player choice, and that just isn't a compelling reason to continue to include them in the future.