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.