Battlemat - DnD PvP

I have been thinking that I should restart an old tradition - the battlemat.  Years ago we played a lot of games of DnD 3.0 where we all built characters and then landed on a complicated bit of terrain to fight to the death.  Because DnD 3.0 is incredibly lethal we often spent eight hours building a character only to die in the first round to a 'save or die' attack or in the second round to an incredibly deadly full attack from a martial character.  There were definitely some interesting battles where things went back and forth but by and large death was swift.  The funny thing is that I had more fun by far building the characters than playing.  I would tweak and tweak and rewrite over and over trying to find the perfect mix of items and feats to be INVINCIBLE and there was a real sense that I could perfect a build but when the actual battle started it became very random.  If two people gank you, you lose.  Even if you have completely monstrous saving throws you still die when you roll a one on your save.

Of course we didn't play unmodified 3.0.  Doing so would have led everybody to be flying, invisible spellcasters and nobody being able to actually do anything useful.  We had to ban all kinds of magic items like Daern's Instant Fortress so that characters didn't simply hide in an impenetrable vault waiting for everybody outside to die.  The list of banned spells and abilities was really quite extensive and pretty much all based around the idea that 'Fighter With a GreatSword' must be able to find and defeat you.  If you do anything that means that FWGS cannot win then it is banned.

DnD 3.0 really isn't meant to be a PvP game.  At low level FWGS just one shots anybody and casters generally have spells that guarantee death that work 2/3 of the time.  At high level things are a little different of course since wizards presumably retreat to their custom demi plane and scry on their opponents to ascertain their weaknesses before plane shifting back with an army of arch demons at their command.  Of course if the fighter with a bow goes first he kills the wizard before the wizard can take an action so it is relatively fair.  Basically doing PvP in DnD 3.0 involves huge amounts of creation and calculation and then rolling initiative to see who wins because everybody dies in one attack.  This leaves little room for tactics and decision making once the game starts so I don't think it is a particularly good format for PvP.

I think 4th edition is actually a pretty good PvP format though.  Character stats are drastically more controlled so nobody is going to get their defenses so high that they are unhittable nor so low that they are unmissable.  Permanent invisibility or flying isn't available because the designers really seemed to want a random ogre with a club to be a viable opponent so they designed the character abilities around that.  This works well for PvP because it means that FWGS can fight anybody.  There are some problems still but they are generally really easy to work around.  Daily attack powers are totally absurd in a format where you only expect to do one fight so they probably should be banned.  Whether or not daily utilities and item powers are okay is unclear to me.  Action points are nutty too since all they do is ensure that the first round is an utter bloodbath.  You probably need some kind of rule to prevent people just sitting in a corner using Stealth waiting for everybody else to die too I expect.  That is all that should be necessary to keep the game interesting I would think.  The game still works with action points and daily powers allowed but it would be ridiculously fast and deadly and it seems quite possible that the person with the lowest initiative simply doesn't get to take a turn at all - hardly the ideal result.  The end result is still going to be fairly random I would think since attacks will miss half the time and people will gang up but overall it should be a fun time.

What I wonder is what sort of character people would bring.  Leaders seem exceptionally powerful because they get to heal themselves so much - that might end up being a real balance problem.  If other classes were allowed to multiclass into leader types and use their daily heal ability it would be okay though as the advantage would be mitigated.  It is possible I suppose that leaders are so bad at killing that they *need* that massive hp advantage to be playable at all.  Hard to say.  Defenders look to be fairly strong in many cases since they have massive hp and defenses so they are a pretty hard target.  Their defender type abilities are generally going to be bad but just being super tough is a big plus.

The last thing I would think about is the victory condition.  It could be a simple last man standing resolution or I could go with a points system.  I was thinking about rating people on three scales - damage/healing done, death order and total kills.  Rate the players in reverse order and assign them points equal to their ranking - highest total points wins.  This rewards a combination of survival, sniping people off and just doing a lot of damage which hopefully gives a good spectrum of rewards.

A world that makes sense

In fantasy worlds there is a always a strange mishmash of feudal culture and feats of magic and heroism.  Sometimes it works and makes sense and other times ... not so much.  There are plenty of troubles with the classic DnD world organization but most of them tend to revolve around just how big a shift high level adventurers must cause in culture, warfare and politics.

It is generally relatively easy for a high level party to meet up with a 10,000 person army and utterly demolish it.  The wizard ends up flying above the massed enemy while invisible and massacres them by throwing enormous fireballs around willy nilly.  We should keep in mind that historically very few armies actually fought until they were destroyed; by and large a small percentage of the people involved would die and one side would break and run.  I can't help but think that it would take only a few random explosions in the ranks to completely break an army, especially when they have no idea of the source.  Not only that, but how would you protect a ruler?  The king or queen is likely to be a normal person with 10 HP (or less!) so at any time a group could teleport in, massacre the ruler and teleport or fly back out at will.  That of course assumes that they *need* to leave and don't just kill everyone in the castle and raze it to the ground, which they usually could.

So how can we construct a society that has incredibly powerful people (I will call them Heroes) in it that makes sense?  One way is to simply restrict the number of Heroes around.  Building a world where only the PCs are Heroes is possible but it does mean that the PCs can overthrow nations at will and cannot face any Hero opponents which I am not sure is a good idea.  This strategy also entails that the PCs be unique and epic which does fit a lot of storylines but certainly not all.  It also means that once the main storyline is complete your world is probably unusable since the PCs presumably can rearrange the entire world to suit their liking.  I like a world that is a little more durable than that and which doesn't rely on the PCs being so very unique.

Regularly the way DnD worlds are constructed to avoid this is assigning hereditary monarchs tons of bonus HP or character levels for no reason or simply layering magical protection over the ruling family and/or class.  This doesn't solve the problem of army combat not making any sense though and it requires all kinds of additional spells and effects to achieve that aren't in the books since the baseline rules don't allow for protecting people sufficiently to avoid teleport bombs.

The idea I am leaning towards for my next world is one that rewrites military conflict very substantially, making it much more like modern conflict than medieval battles.  In modern society you have security guards, police and other enforcers who keep people in line in times of peace but when a tank or bomber shows up the security guards don't get together in a big group to fight them, rather they wait for the army to do something about it.  I imagine a fantasy world the same way where regular guards and soldiers who are not Heroes are fine and well for guarding shops, fighting bandits and other such tasks but when real war comes the kingdom calls on its Heroes to do the actual battle since they are the tanks and bombers of their world.  These Heroes would also end up being the rulers of their world since hereditary monarchies of normal people would be so fragile.  I see groups of Heroes ruling nations with structures varying from benevolent ruling councils to iron fisted dictatorships where the most powerful and ruthless Hero is a terrible despot.  This might even have a strong mitigating effect on warfare since if you have to go out and actually fight the enemies yourself and risk being fireballed to death there is a real incentive to not declare war on another nation.

4th edition DnD actually has many less problems this way than 3rd edition.  Wizards can't just fly around invisible blasting people because everyone's combat abilities are strongly restricted and things like teleportation are much less convenient.  A 4th edition DnD party can beat up a lot of bad guys but they simply can't fight 10,000 guys with bows; they get turned into very dead pincushions on round 1.  For this I have to give 4th a lot of credit, you don't need to make up your own political structures and military designs from scratch and can just modify historical ones slightly to fit.  There are really powerful and dangerous people around but normal people can be leaders and survive and armies make sense.  Somehow though I desperately want to play in a 3rd edition / Pathfinder world; perhaps it is only nostalgia but it is there nonetheless.

Blizzard is ruining my fun

A month ago or so I went to the Diablo 3 site to look at the material there.  I found all kinds of stuff that looked bad and worried that Blizzard wasn't going to get the game into decent shape.   Abilities that increase your damage dealt by 160% are not reasonable (Zombie Dog + Zombie Dog passive + Zombie Dog Explosion!) and they had a bunch of abilities that did fixed damage totals rather than scaling with gear.  I had hopes that Blizzard would rectify these errors before launch and avoid shipping a game with awful scaling issues like Diablo 2 and WOW had.  Despite that I had great fun using the character builder to create a hideously overpowered Witch Doctor and figured that this is what I would use as my starting character.  After all, who doesn't want to summon a horde of hideous mutant dogs that explode on command?  (Mostly I wanted the 160% damage increase; I am a numbers junkie)

I went back to the site today and was both saddened and gladdened by what I saw.  Gone are the fixed damage abilities, huzzah!  My faith in Blizzard not being a pile of idiots is vindicated.  Much to my dismay though my ridiculous Witch Doctor combo is deader than the hideous abominations he was intended to summon; the Zombie Dog combination is now granting 32% more damage rather than 160%.  I can't help but feel that although 32% more is better than 0% more it isn't going to let me crush my enemies like ants in the way I had hoped.  In the early version of the game it was easy to figure out what ability combinations to use because there were obvious loopholes and balance issues despite the vagueness of "Hits an area for X damage" ability descriptions.  I could tell what the best builds were without even knowing how big an area that was!  Now all the numbers seem to be massaged into place and I can no longer determine the optimal way to play the game without having played the game.

Sadly(?) I will have to actually play the game to master the game.

The acid test

Last night I went out to Snakes and Lattes to show off FMB at the board game designers night.  I really had no idea if there would be any other designers there initially.   I don't know anybody else who actually tries to build real prototypes though I have collaborated on making tons of games with people.  It turns out there are a lot of people that build these things and there were all kinds of new games to play.  FMB got a real test run because I got four volunteers to play the game straight from the rules without me telling them anything.

That was HARD!

I had to sit there desperately fighting the urge to correct things, step in and clarify rules and generally be a busybody.  I know that I can teach them more quickly than they can learn by just reading but finding out whether or not they could play the game just from the rules I outlined is critical.  Thankfully I passed the test; there were a few things that really need to be written better but they played through just fine.  I got really good reactions and people seemed to enjoy the design and the gameplay a lot, though there were the usual complaints.  The first time people play through the game they complain that either the team that goes first or the team that goes second can't win (both the complaints and the winners seem unrelated to who went first) or they complain that they can't win because their opponent's Artifact is unbalanced (and then proceed to play their own Artifact and watch their opponents make the same claim).

It feels good to know that at least the complaints always follow the same pattern and that it doesn't matter who goes first or what Artifact people choose - everything is always unfair.  That is in fact the goal!  Things need to be awesome and powerful so that they change the nature of the game and make people feel like they are being effective but of course the numbers need to be balanced behind the scenes.  I want everyone to feel like the things they can do are awesome but have it be tricky to figure out exactly which awesome they want to do.

I was also intrigued by the difference in process for other game designers.  I played Stormlands which is a game that has better production quality and polish than FMB but yet doesn't have the victory conditions finalized.  The game creator built the game and is still sorting out the broad strokes of how it is played while doing some cool stuff to make it look great.  This is essentially the opposite of what I did.  I refused to do anything resembling production until I had played immense amounts of games and got the gameplay polished to my liking.  After I did make something of production quality I have continued to innovate but the ordering in my mind was completely clear:  Make the rules and numbers work, then make the physical game.  This is probably why I have more than a half dozen fantasy tabletop RPGs in some degree built and none ever really put together and why FMB idled for 8 years until it was ripe.  The numbers, they must be perfect.

FMB game night

I am heading out to Snakes and Lattes in Toronto tonight to go to their game developer night.  If you want to come by and play some FMB on the newest set I just finished, we are there from 7-10.  There might even be some other game designers there with new stuff, who knows!

Danger Sense

In DnD 4th edition there are several feats that increase your initiative.  The way it works is everyone rolls a d20 and adds their initiative bonus and then takes their turns in order, highest going first.  In the case of a tie the person with the highest initiative bonus wins the tie.  The two feats in we care about are:

Improved Initiative:  +4 to initiative.
Danger Sense:  When you roll initiative you can roll twice and take the best roll.

So which is better?  Initially I figured out that Danger Sense increases the average of your final initiative value by ~3.5 and so I used that value but it turns out the formula is actually much more complicated.  The reason this is so is that if one character has a drastically different value than the other then rolling several times is often irrelevant while adding +4 can make victory guaranteed (or make success possible).  The other thing that is interesting is that tiebreakers are huge.  If the +4 gets you above the other guy's bonus rather than below you effectively gain +5 instead so the breakpoints for how good Danger Sense is become pretty interesting.

You can see the little chart below which tells you how much + to initiative Danger Sense is worth depending how much you are ahead or behind your opponent in current bonus to initiative.  The bottom axis is borked though because it should read from -10 to +10.  The dip in the middle is because Danger Sense doesn't get you over the tiebreaker hump like actual bonuses to initiative do.  Essentially this tells us that if your initiative bonus is low you want Improve Initiative but if you initiative bonus is high (higher than the enemies the majority of the time) you want Danger Sense.

I like math and I just can't lie.

When it sucks to be a fighter

My Pathfinder game has unfortunately run into the problem of distinct power level differences between classes. This is a long running issue with DnD where you come upon a complex problem and the fighter comes up with a tricky, risky plan using the party's skills, fighting prowess and moxie and proposes it to the group... and the wizard says "Sure, yeah, or I could just use Rock to Mud to demolish the castle walls, Fireball all the guards to death and Teleport the princess to safety."  The fighter says "Sure, yeah... that sounds good.  How can I help?"  Inevitably the wizard replies "Well, um, I guess you can guard the rear in case we get ambushed?  Thanks for being on the team!"  This does not so much create party unity or make anyone but the wizard feel good.



In our last session our characters were fighting a shambling horde of zombies.  They were not difficult at all to fight except that when they died they exploded, delivering a massive amount of damage to all enemies adjacent to them.  This meant of course that our melee characters got butchered and eventually we had to run.  That is, the other characters had to run.  As is traditional in DnD my cleric has absurd undead killing powers but since I have the travel domain I am also able to cast Fly.  I held off the horde of zombies and yelled at the rest of the party to flee and when they finally did I simply flew up in the air over the zombies and annihilated them while they sat there staring helplessly at the flying cleric.

This was tremendous fun for me but not much fun at all for the rest of the characters.  The trouble with this whole situation is that everybody else wonders why they don't just have the flying cleric demolish all the encounters with undead while the rest of the group hangs out in town.  The problem is always the spells that don't have direct combat applications.  If I couldn't fly I would still be strong against undead but at least we would all be playing the same game.  As I level up I am going to be able to Teleport to anywhere in the world as well as having tremendous healing and great combat options.  If this is a problem now, how are the rest of the characters going to feel when I get really powerful and get access to all my high level spells?  If we compare attack routines and "who can do the most damage to the fire giant" contests I won't be anything special but when it comes to using spells to completely ignore campaign challenges I will be exceedingly overpowered.

Castle walls?  Knock em down.  Long distances to travel?  Just Teleport there.  Terrible curses on the party?  Cure them.  At higher levels it becomes harder and harder to deal with these things when you have one of the top tier characters around.  I found a good link talking about this subject, though the class lists there are Pathfinder specific.  I can avoid this by just not using my abilities but I honestly don't like playing the game when I have a list of things I can creatively use to solve problems and I am arbitrarily not using half of them for some reason.  If I were playing a fighter I would use all my cunning and resources to solve problems like a fighter can - scale the wall, ride a horse fast, find a powerful NPC to cure my curse.  It is unfortunate that classes are so badly balanced when it comes to out of combat capabilities but there is no easy way around that in Pathfinder or any DnD version before 4.0 aside from simply not playing the powerful classes.  Maybe I should do just that... I have a great idea for a paladin and there is nobody accusing them of being too good!