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.

To Infinity and Beyond!

The Flautist and I decided to alter the rules of Terraforming Mars a couple of weeks ago.  We wanted to try the game with an alternate end condition to see how it made things feel.  Instead of ending the game when all the terraforming tracks ran out, we decided to end it the turn the last card was drawn from the deck.  We played with basic set and preludes.

We knew that this change would lead to higher scores and different card evaluations, but we didn't anticipate quite how out of control it would get.

The early game was fairly normal, though we did play more card draw than usual.  How much card draw I play depends a lot on what I draw, my income, etc. and at times I don't play any because I already have places to spend all the money I have.  I knew the game would be a long one though, so I played every card draw effect available.

The heat ran out on turn 9, and the other tracks maxed out on 12.  We then spent a couple turns filling up the remaining board with cities, then greeneries.  By 14 the board was completely full except for a few spots allocated to specific cards, and at this point the great majority of cards were dead draws.  Thermalist was in play, but I was ahead by 100 heat, so heat and energy production were completely dead.  Our incomes were 135 and 136 counting steel and titanium, so there was no way we could possibly find ways to spend all of our money.  Miner was in play too, but since I had 10 titanium / turn and 9 steel / turn, there was no way for me to lose it.  Greeneries were also impossible, so plant production was also moot.  We looked at our boards for a minute, declared me the winner of Miner and Thermalist, and set aside our boards entirely, declaring all resources infinite.

For the last 3 turns of the game we sat there drawing as many cards as possible, putting the cards we drew straight onto the table, and waiting to see who would get Noctis / Mohole / Phobos to be able to claim Landlord.  I got lucky and collected 2 of the 3 and walked away with all three awards.

The final score was 192 to 170 in my favour.  Key to my victory was scooping all three awards but only having paid for two of them.  I got 23 points from animals, and roughly 60 raw terraform rating, as well as 16 points from Physics Complex.  Honestly the game was a ton of fun, though it did take a long damn time to finish. 

My long term takeaways are that the game as we played it is kind of stupid.  Infinite money makes much of the game feel ridiculous, and it was too long.  However, I actually quite liked knowing that I would get to play all the things, and I enjoyed knowing that we would see all the cards.  I think that the game would be a lot of fun if it was slightly shorter, and I have a couple ideas on how to do that.  First off you could just have players draw five cards a turn each round, which would shorten the game by about two rounds, shaving off the ridiculous infinite resources time.  Also you could simply declare that just like the solo game, the two player game lasts exactly 14 generations.  That is still a long game with lots of opportunity to do fun things but you would never get to infinity, and filling the board would be possible but by no means guaranteed. 

Doing a 14 turn game seems like a cool variant, but I really like seeing all the cards.  Maybe we could just flip over 3 cards every turn and trash them out of the game, so at least we know that all the cards in the deck will be seen by game end.  Not too sure on the best way to achieve that goal, but this kludge kind of gets there.

Not so old after all

I have been playing a lot of WOW these past weeks.  What often happens to Wendy and I when we resub is that we play together doing story and levelling stuff for quite a while, and then eventually I decide to start doing hard stuff and she keeps on doing story stuff.  She loves to see things from both factions sides, do all the side quests, and see all the cinematics.

I love to find something hard and beat it into submission.

The trouble in the early going was that my performance was just not up to snuff.  I was standing in bad, failing to interrupt, generally just being mediocre.  I knew my mouse was being an issue because sometimes I hammered on the keys and just got no response, and had to sit there and watch myself die.  I am getting old though, and it has been years since I played seriously.  In that sort of situation you have to ask yourself if maybe you just don't have it anymore.  It is a poor craftsman who blames his tools, after all.

Turns out it was the tools, not me.

I got a new mouse and it was like I could fly.  I circle strafed around monsters, slid out of fire, and bashed all kinds of faces.  I have to remember this - I can't keep up the kind of performance I could deliver 15 years ago, but I am not a chump.  I just need the right tools!

It does bother me to buy new stuff when I have old stuff on hand that still kind of works though.  My mouse, while it was a disaster for gaming, still mostly functioned.  Plus it wasn't a cheap thing when I got it many years ago.  It makes me twitch to see it just sitting on my desk, never to be used again.  I paid over 100 dollars for a new mouse just to play WOW!  My money demon is losing his mind.

Nonetheless, the feeling I get from playing with proper equipment makes it all worthwhile.

I am certainly finding it odd to plop down into an expansion so late.  After a couple weeks of levelling I joined a guild and ended up beating heroic N'Zoth, the final boss of the expansion, on my first raid.  It was fun, don't get me wrong, but there isn't anything new to fight, there aren't any fights to learn.  That is the end.  I can still gear up (and I am!) but it is extremely strange to not have that big end boss waiting for me as the final goal.

There is a long way to go in gearing up, inching ever closer to that perfect gearset.  I wonder if I will end up playing right to the end of an expansion and starting the next one right away.  It will have been a long, long time since the last time I did that, if indeed it does happen.