Great Article: The Death of 'The Sleeper'

http://kotaku.com/the-surprising-and-allegedly-impossible-death-of-everqu-1785741600

Check the above out, it is a great article about the old Everquest game, and what happens when you pull the rug out from under your players - and then put it back, saying 'sorry.' Or not saying sorry, but blaming it on a software bug. Maybe there was a bug.

We will never know, but the story is a gaming legend.

Savage Worlds: World of Warcraft, part 2

Let's get back to our Savage Worlds: World of Warcraft conversion, shall we? We last left off with out core source-book, here:

It is a good start, and a dangerous book since it is going to set you up focusing on the MMO as the world. You need to think bigger than that, since the MMO's land mass only covers a 9 mile by 9 mile area - less than a city - so a "real" world of World of Warcraft would cover an Earth-sized planet (or a good part of it), check here for a map and scale comparison. You could easily multiply the entire MMO world map by 100 times in each direction and still have a small area in relation to a full-sized planet. Which is why last time we suggested:

The lore book as a good reference guide as well, because it is less MMO based and more lore-based. We want to expand the land mass and fill it in with hundreds of miles of smaller kingdoms, unexplored areas, and interesting locations - while still keeping the familiar, in-game areas as tent-pole locations that tie your new material back into the world.

That scale problem will be your largest problem in this game. Granted, you could avoid creating anything new and just fill in everything with "unexplored wilderness" and leave the game locations as-is, but you will be missing out on a huge opportunity to make the world your own. Ideally, this will be a world much like a early settlement USA, with huge tracts of unexplored wilderness, cities being built, trade happening, wilderness expeditions being launched, places of mystery being avoided, and all sorts of "kingdom activity" happening in the established cities and smaller places you will fill in. Conquoring that "sense of scale" and making the world larger than the game will ultimately make your game stronger, and keep players from going back to the MMO because there isn't much different between what you are doing and what the game is doing.

The next huge problem you will need to deal with is the power level of the MMO, and frankly, the game world itself. As a veteran MMO and WoW player, I am going to expect a full upgrade path for gear, and be able to deliver a 90,000 damage crit from my high-level mage. This game is not going to be like that at all. This will be a flatter progression, and all the magic items in the game will stay within the Fantasy Companion's suggested guidelines.

This is critical, since you will be doing a lot of "coloring" items presented in the Fantasy Companion as the items, creatures, and spells familiar to the World of Warcraft universe. You could go all-out and write a conversion guide, and I am sure there are some who are trying, but the goal here is to get a simple, WoW-like experience up and running without having to write a conversion guide or spend a lot of time translating everything over, item by item, class by class, and power by power. 90% of what is in the base Savage Worlds game and the Fantasy Companion will cover what you need for this type of a game.

Simply recolor items, apply a trapping to a spell, create classes by picking powers that class would have in the game, and don't try to replicate the videogame perfectly. A paladin can heal, so let them heal with a healing power with a "holy" trapping. Done. Create a druid out of a moonfire like attack spell, a root, some heals, a thorns spell, and some shapeshifting. Done. Maybe you pick powers as you go, and every class isn't so tied to a strict progression chart that says "this power must come at this level, before this one, and after that one." A paladin is a collection of fighting ability and holy powers, and maybe every paladin in the world isn't trained the same way.

Think of the World of Warcraft game as the "videogame adaptation" of a real world. It's obvious the game's creators had to cut a lot of the "real world" out, simplify all of the classes and professions the "real world" actually has, and create an artificially high "power curve" for the magic items in the game. The "real world" that you are playing in is much larger, much more complex, the professions much less clearly defined, and the magic of this world is much more evenly powered and within a normal range of power and capability. Epic items can still feel epic with the best levels of power found in the Fantasy Companion, but not to the point where they are doing an unrealistic ten-thousand times damage of a normal weapon.

There is actually precedent for this in the videogames, if you pull in the original Warcraft RTS games. Those were much flatter power levels, where the "epic heroes" and items of the world could still take damage and be defeated by normal monsters and units in the game. The power level of the Warcraft universe has been blown out of proportion because of the MMO, and in the "real world" it is probably closer to the power level - start to end - of a traditional RPG, such as Savage Worlds.

For our game, this is a good thing, because we don't need to break our role playing game and simulate a 90,000 damage crit with the rules and scale our items all the way up to impossible levels. We are playing on the pen-and-paper "real world" power level, and that is how this world works. Although it looks and acts like the World of Warcraft world in every other way. We are keeping the number ranges down for play-ability, yet still allowing for powerful magic items in the game to capture that "epic feel."

So what do you do about "epic level" items that are better than your last "epic level" item? say you get your hands on a legendary sword, like Thunderfury, Blessed Blade of the Windseeker, and you stat that out to the maximum level of power a magic item can have in the Fantasy Companion. Then, you find a new sword that blows that out (like most any green item from an expansion past Cata, or even some gray vendor swords in high-level areas). How do you make something "more epic" without blowing out your rules?

First, those "high level gray items" in the game world do not exist, a shortsword sold in Northrend is the same as a shortsword sold in Elwynn. The power level of all basic items is the same, and there is no "videogame" progression to normal gear - normal gear is normal gear. All "epic items" max out at a certain level, and that Thunderfury is just as epic as a Maul of Tyranny. Seriously, Excalibur is Excalibur, in real-world power level, and those high-level purple items should be just as epic as each other. That makes Thunfderfury desirable again, and flattens out the power curve of all of these expansion items (and any others that may come and destroy your game).

Also, items do not have "levels" or "requirements" - they are all just green, blue, purple and so on (in relative levels of power), and can be used by everyone. There is no such thing in this world as a "level 60 green item blowing out a level 10 green item." Green items are all "low magic" items but still magical, and they are all around the same power level ( a +1 here or there).

I would never in-game refer to an item as a "green Item" so I use this only for rating the items found out here in "real" World of Warcraft - before the videogame designers messed everything up and built this insane power curve for the game.

There is a point where you can go overboard, and too much is too much. You want to limit "real world" item power to the best the pen-and-paper game has, and leave it there. A "green item" at any level may just be a +1 to hit or a +1 to damage, and leave it there. It is good, worthwhile, and is an advantage to have. Scale up the higher-level greens and blues, and all the way to purples and oranges along the power curve you see in the Fantasy Companion and you will save yourself a lot of conversion, power-level headaches, and a lot of wasted time building a World of Warcraft simulator in another game.

Next time I want to focus more on classes and powers, so stay tuned for that.

Great Article: Why it took me eight years...

The goal of this new mindset was accessibility, but the result was apathy and entitlement. If the early days in WoW are best summarized as "only the elite deserve medals" then the golden age was most certainly "everyone deserves a chance to earn a medal" — a design edict I will go to my grave vehemently defending. 

But that isn't how things ended. 

By my guild's final days, the message had morphed once more: "everyone deserves a medal." I like to think I did everything I could to keep the guild from hemorrhaging players, but the thrill of competition was gone. My own ideals now worked against me. I'd cultivated a mindset of skill mastery in a game that no longer valued elbow grease. It was no surprise, then, when players simply stopped showing up for medals.

http://www.polygon.com/2016/7/1/12078500/world-of-warcraft-eight-years-blizzard-raids

A great article on what happens when you take challenge out of a game. Apathy. Entitlement. Infighting. Looking down on skill and achievement.

Your best players leaving.

Great gamer players like challenge, and I feel a lot of people like to call themselves "great players" when all they want to do is spend time with something with no real challenge.

A great player loses more often than he or she wins. There is no "everybody wins" with a Michael Jordan, he had to rise above dozens of other teams, injuries, schedules, and life itself to become a "great player." Nowadays, everybody is told they are a "great player" with little more skill than "show up."

And oh yeah, pay the subscription fee every month. Trust me, you are a great player!

Just keep that credit card info current, your greatness.

The first players of World of Warcraft had that, The best drops were incredibly hard to get. Whole raids sometimes produced nothing. But yet, they tried, and they built great raiding teams, piece by piece, and skill by skill, until they earned the right to say they were the best.

A worthy read, and one worthy of reflecting upon the current state of pen-and-paper games, for sure.

Are 'easy' games, intended to attract casual players, really causing players to leave?

Savage Worlds: World of Warcraft, part 1

So, let's convert World of Warcraft to a Savage Worlds game. This is a tough challenge, because the players that would be interested in this type of a game will be conditioned by the rules, builds, classes, DPS rankings, gear, treasure, drops, and mechanics of the MMO. We will get to that later, but let's start this by gathering up our source material first. Our go-to book will be this:

As a background resource, this one looks like it will do the job. Of course, you are going to have a lot of players more familiar with the world and lore in various places, but this book will serve as your "tentpole" reference book for the world and its places. You can go two ways from here, what's in the game is lore, or what's in the book is lore. If you go with the game, you will be tying yourself to the MMO very tightly, and your game may suffer as a result with constant comparisons of "that is not in the game" or "the game does it differently."

If you start at the book, you may be a little better off, because you can start here and make up the rest. I am not a big fan of tying things too closely to the game, because the MMO is still just a videogame, and the scale of the in-game map is all off compared to a real world. If you stuck to the game, most of the continents would measure eighty square miles, or an area of land about nine miles by nine miles - something that could fit into an average town or city on real-world Earth easily. A real World of Warcraft is going to be much larger, the map will "fractal out" and have many more interesting locations, and you will have many more places to explore and adventure.

The cities will become larger, easily filling the same size as the entire MMO world - just for one city. Think of that. Stormwind will be a massive city, surrounding area with smaller holds and fiefdoms, and garrisons and holds far beyond that. You will need to think big for each of the faction's capitals, and expand the land considerably. You can still keep the same "directionality" to your maps, Stormwind would spill out southwards from the mountains, and touch the coast to the north, but things will get much larger, and much more spread out.

In addition to bigger, you are going to go much smaller. There will be thousands of square miles of new places to explore, along with many new areas of unexplored wilderness and savage, wild lands stuck in supposedly "settled" lands. You can invent towns, villages, and forts as you wish, keeping the in-game places as the tentpoles, but having the freedom to fill in thousands of miles of new places, both big and small, to fill out your world. Unexplored areas will be your biggest addition, even in a seemingly "simple" place like Elwynn Forest you are going to have thousands of square miles of unexplored wilderness, places to go, and lost ruins to explore.

What will make your game different is the scale and unexplored places angle to your creation. You will literally be trying to create a world from this material, and fill in the blanks that a videogame adaptation of a "real" place cannot cover. Be prepared to make a lot of maps as your world grows and fills in places from the imagination of you and your players. Use the game locations as tentpoles, and you are free to fill in the rest - as long as it doesn't overshadow what players are used to, it won't matter. You don't want to create a kingdom larger and more powerful than Stormwind, but there is more than enough room for imagined places less important and smaller that could be just as interesting and memorable.

Could there be two smaller kingdoms within Stormwind's sphere of influence that constantly compete and fight? I am sure there could be room for that, and you could base an entire area around that mini-story within the Warcraft world, and inside of Stormwind's lands. If you side one with the Defias Bandits, and the other with a dark warlock faction, you could tie these new places back to existing factions and make them seem more "at home" in the world. Now you have a story framework, some new locations and characters, and a place other than Stormwind to adventure in.

It's like if a game maker crated a "Colonial USA" MMO, and put "Colonial Boston" right down the road and coast from "Colonial New York" - and skipped everything in-between because "it wasn't important" or "it would make the world too big." There's no Connecticut, Rhode Island, Hudson River, or southern Massachusetts - just a road with maybe a couple farms and hills, and a river or two. Out at sea, even more is removed, with no Long Island, Nantucket, Boston Harbor, or Cape Cod. While all the architecture and trappings of the land look great and feel like the time, a lot is missing from the real world that should be there for an authentic experience.

Your job will be creating that "authentic experience" for this world.

Remind your players "the real world is much larger" and your game will focus will be exploring these places - old and new. You will likely be putting down new towns and adventure locations everywhere in the world, like new swamp towns and ruins in the Wetlands, and you will use that similar "world building" process everywhere you go. It will be hard to NOT fall back on the MMO, so when you travel to a new area, you may want to pause and fill in a couple new places and get your scale right. You don't want to create a wonderful new and massive Stormwind area, travel to Darnassus, and have that new location be the same, small, MMO scale because you didn't have the time to think about this new part of the world.

You can base these places on lore, which the above book provides generously should you decide to go there. I personally would save this sort of lore for later, but the Dark Horse book is good because it gives your game a sense of history and background drama. It also prepares you for the "current" lore a bit better than an MMO resource, and sets your mind up better with a sense of place and history.

Again, you are not playing a "World of Warcraft MMO simulator" you are playing a Savage Worlds game based upon this as source material. We will get to items, gear, classes, and suggestions on how to run all this within the rules framework next time, because I wanted to focus on how I would setup the world and the sense of scale this time.