...versus World of Warcraft

5E turning into the 'pen and paper MMO' is doomed to fail. I logged into World of Warcraft recently to check the upcoming expansion, and while this MMO is highly flawed, it is still a better experience than an online 5E game. The metrics we all use as excuses to 'play 5E' get blown out of the water by a halfway decent MMO.

No, World of Warcraft isn't D&D.

But it is an 'activity' like D&D that shares a lot in common:

• Fantasy
• Consumes Time
• Play with Friends
• Adventure and Story
• Character Progression

Finding a game? I have a button to instantly get into a group whenever I want. I am put in the queue, and off I go! Granted, these are not the best games, but unlike 5E, I am not forced to waste weeks figuring that out - and have to give these people personal information and find a shared play space. And in an MMO, I never have to let them into my house. That may sound massively unsocial, but this is the world we live in post-2020.

Chances are I will land in an active and friendly guild on a server if I show interest and the willingness to learn and follow orders. I will always have content and groups. I will never need a dungeon master. I do not need 3d assets or a VTT to run a game. No game prep. No 80-dollar books to buy. There is a monthly fee, but it is cheaper than keeping up on 5E books and Kickstarters.

Granted, this is all an 'I know this' comparison - and a pretty lame article. There is no 'dungeon master' in World of Warcraft - but with AI advancing as quickly as it is, and Microsoft buying Blizzard, this likely is only a matter of time.

MMOs are not roleplaying. Not yet.

But a strange convergence of AI and online adventure is where we are heading.

But I ask myself, what is the Wizards VTT building? A static, non-animated, unmoving version of World of Warcraft with a few limited terrains and towns that we will all get sick of after one or two sessions? Part of the fun of a pen-and-paper game is going to places we have never been to and seeing people and cultures far removed from our experience. How fun will it be to go back to the same damn tavern map and town a few hundred times because the selection in the store isn't that great, and we don't have the money to keep buying 3d maps?

I have been in the 3d industry, especially the 3d asset creation field - building 3d sets and terrains is not cheap, and it can take weeks or months for a dedicated artist to pull off. To make that 3d set work within a VTT engine? That is further work 'editing the map' by a level-design editor, like creating the walkable surfaces the ruler will work on - more time and money spent. Testing? QA? Packaging? Store cloud space? More money is added with each step. Especially if the 3d assets you use are essentially asset flips from game stores, you get into relicensing fees and contracts (and having to pull an asset because the license expired).

Pretty soon, what you thought would take a 3d artist to 'hack out' is taking months to build a dungeon for the next major module release; the testers are complaining a few hundred issues are broken. What you thought you could flip on the VTT store for a few hundred dollars to build, and ship is turning into expensive videogame development in the hundreds of thousands of dollars in sunk development costs - that may release with a thud. You want the VTT Tomb of Horrors to be an 'experience' - of course, we need to sink more money into this!

How much can you charge for this?

The Wizards VTT feels like it is showing more for investors than for gamers. If you wanted gamers, the sets would be modular and snap together easily. You could buy pieces. This feels like a tech demo meant to grab investor attention.

Meanwhile, MMOs are sitting over there with infrastructure, cost data, scale, staff artists, animators, and the customer base to pull it off and make money doing it since they have been down that road for decades. They know how much money they can sink into a 'dungeon' for it to make money, and they have millions of customers ready to pay and allow for a profit margin.

AI plus D&D has a long way to go and is a niche experience.

AI plus an MMO is 99% of the way there and mainstream.

Wizards is trying to build a backdoor MMO with the VTT, which is doomed. Not just from a 'being negative' standpoint, but from an observational one - the level of adoption and success they would need to create the economy of scale to pull this off would be unprecedented.

And sooner or later, they start bumping heads with MMOs.

No, you can't 'roleplay' that well in MMOs. And you can't tell your 'own stories' - but the value and delivery of services are more accessible than a VTT. The costs are far less, especially when it comes to asset creation. Online roleplaying is a niche product, and VTTs are in the novelty market where more effort is needed to make the whole thing work than most people are willing to put in.

What happens when an MMO creates an AI 'dungeon master' that crafts stories around your favorite MMO character, and the game suddenly never plays the same way twice? What happens when the MMO AI DMs dynamically create adventure zones, NPCs, and 3d maps? What happens when your character's story is this complex, amazingly written creation that you have narrative control over, given your actions? What happens when your character has romance options with dynamically generated NPCs and can raise an in-game family and kingdom?

Will you even need a VTT?

An AI-driven VTT is a product designed to play the game we were interested in 10 years ago in the best way possible. It isn't forward-looking. And it will be quickly replaced by AI-driven mainstream options.

Rotations

I see a lot of talk on Youtube about Pathfinder 2 having "rotations" for maximum character damage output, where characters repeat the same sequence of powers over and over again.

Wait, is D&D 4 still a thing in 2020?

I kid, and I do not play Pathfinder 2, but I have some experiences to share on the subject. We had that same "power rotation" issue in D&D 4 but at least in that game, positioning and the map mattered a huge deal in damage output. There was also a "passive healing" in the careful use of controllers to stop or hinder enemy attacks - reducing the damage output of the other side.

Without a map and just powers? We played D&D 4 like that too, and it got tiring for some players to be shouting the same power names over and over again like they were some Pokemon where the only word they knew was their own name. Green flame blade! Green flame blade!

People would walk by our game room and stare at us like we were all insane.

D&D 4, of course, broke apart terribly as the levels went higher and the expansions ruined the game, with Wizards even revising the entire game and Monster Manual in the Essentials line - and still requiring the original books. Such is the legacy of MMO-like designs, they are easily calculated, exploited, fragile, and get boring and repetitive as time goes on. This is why MMOs completely change classes on a rotation, nerfing and buffing to drive interest, and repeating an "evergreen" cycle of changes as the game goes on.

You can't do that with a book. And if you do, you are doomed to follow the D&D 4 route of continually releasing expansion books to keep the game changing and interesting. And doing what they do these days with "temporary power" systems that are only good for one campaign book, such as a Desert Adventures book introducing campaign-only tweaks and powers for all the classes that change the balance and feel - for that campaign only. They do this in MMOs all the time with "potency" or "azurite energy" or some other silly grindable number like some sort of Zynga-Facebook daily stamina game of the 2010 era.

Yes, mechanical interest is a part of game design. It breaks apart some when Internet forum figures out your best-path map and everyone is expected to play one way. And then the job of the referee goes from managing the world to "tricks to stop power rotations to keep things interesting." This is what happened in D&D 4 for us as well, I started to develop encounters with the sole purpose of breaking up power rotations - and they do this in MMOs too. Nope, you are all on a raft of flaming barrels going down the rapids! Dodge the logs!

We went from playing the game to fighting it.

It was worse on the referee's side, because after a while players figured out I was trying to screw with them by breaking up their best rotations, and then they started to find ways not to get into these encounters and fight enemies on neutral ground where the rotations could come into play.

We went from fighting the game to trying to outwit each other's encounter setups.

All in service of some fake concept like game mechanics. It got tiring, like some Cold War game of cat and mouse between submarine commanders, with the rules being the battleground. Our campaign ended up with us trying to develop a simpler set of rules that did the same thing, but that never worked out. We bought into the power-rotation and battle-chess system, and it burned us out.

Mind you, this is D&D 4 and not Pathfinder 2, but the story feels similar enough for the thoughts to come up again. Maybe they can manage the beast this time, and I need to read in further - but my Pathfinder 1 books prevent me from buying into another edition. Also D&D 5 is good enough for many, and I have that.

Also, if I am doing fantasy, I have a wonderful choice of B/X systems where I can sidestep the entire power rotation concept and focus on the story, characters, and action. I am a bit skeptical these days of MMO-style RPG designs that are too tightly designed and easily min-maxed, and prefer the simple - and me and my players will fill in the rest.

MMO Games versus Social Games

I tell you, our discussions about game design as super interesting. I ran yesterday's article about "escalating hit points" by DarkgarX the other day, and he predictably had the same reaction, "Escalating hit point systems suck!"

So we talked about it for a while, and we managed to come to an interesting conclusion:

• Some pen-and-paper games are more MMO Roleplaying games
• Some pen-and-paper games are more Social Roleplaying games

Eureka! I thought, and we had this interesting discussion on what makes something more an MMO game than a Social Roleplaying game. I suppose we need some definitions first:

Social RPG: A roleplaying game where social interactions are the primary determining factor in determining success. Combat is a social interaction or the end thereof, and conflict is balanced on one-to-one fights.

MMO RPG (or Party-Based RPG): A roleplaying game where combat is the primary determining factor in determining success. Combat is balanced on many-to-one fights, where a party works together to defeat a foe or group of foes. Combat is a group-based gameplay function and less of a social interaction.

It is an interesting definition, because a lot of things start to make sense. In a game where a PC plays "Dirty Harry", the character's weapon needs to be powerful and a tool of social interaction. Combat needs to be quick and deadly, because how is a single character supposed to make a threat and hold someone off? This is a Social RPG, and weapons and combat in these sorts of games tend to be quick and deadly, and one character can defeat a foe in one blow because that threat needs to exist when violence is used as a tool of interaction between characters and bad guys.

In a MMO RPG, weapons need to be balanced for the party's contributions. Your longsword does 1d8+2, or an average of 7 points of damage. The big boss monster has 60 hit points. Is the boss monster afraid of one sword blow? Probably not. But your 5 person party is doing 7 points each per turn, so that's 35 points of damage potentially in the first volley. That is a threat. The party is the social threat, not one person. Your character is weaker socially with a singular one-on-one threat of violence, but your party is the social group making the interaction with violence here.

In a MMO, that one-on-one social contract many players assume is there with a Dirty Harry "make my day" threat does not exist. That is for the party to say, "make our day." It is a strange way to view things, but it works. Some games cater to the one-on-one interactions, and make violence and combat powerful enough for those one-on-one threats to hold water. These are Social RPGs, where they can be played between two people, a single character feels like they have the power to make threats and changes because a single character matters.

In MMO games, the group matters more than one-on-one interactions. This is why MMOs in general are more popular for groups of people, since it takes a party to get a goal done. You can do one-on-one roleplaying with an MMO RPG, but that social contract of the thief holding a dagger on someone needs to be specially considered with a coup de grace rule because the game is by default setup for a party to be contributing towards a goal, not a single person. One-on-one roleplaying exists in these games, but the social power comes from the "all for one" party and not the individual.

In a MMO RPG, you need escalating hit points. You need to balance things so the party as a contributing whole is the determining factor, instead of the one-on-one fights. The play of a battle matters, and things like boss monsters can exist. Because you don't want every fight at the table to end on turn one, things need to have some play to them and be tough. You can have a 40 hit point giant. You are a part of a team, and that team works together to solve threats and take action.

In a Social RPG, you can get away with using a flat system where weapon damages and hit points do not scale with character power. That 0.38 pistol will always be powerful and a threat. It needs to be because in a more social one-on-one interaction, you need those threats to hold water so you can roleplay them without your mind saying "OMG, that does a d6 damage! He has at least 50 hit points. Not a threat!" You can scale skill and the ability to defend or to-hit, but weapons powers should be high and fights should be deadly because that weapon represents the end-all of a threat made in a social context. That social interaction needs to have weight behind it. Combat needs to be balanced for the one-on-one and deadly.

It is an interesting difference between the style and play of these types of games, and these definitions clean up a lot of how we talk about games. Is this more of a social game? Is this mechanic more party-based and MMO-ish? Is this game's combat system more social-based, or does it assume the party is the driving force?

And a lot of our arguments about which game is better for what have cleared up between us because we can now say "this type of rule is better for social games," or, "this game is better for MMO or party-based play."

Sometimes a disagreement happens is because there is no common definition between the two sides.

Your 15 Minutes of Adventure Are Up

D&D 3E introduced us to this wonderful concept of the 15-minute adventuring day. It goes something like this:

"Hey guys, I used all my spells in that last encounter. Let's go back to town and rest."

Now, this existed before 3E to be fair, and this issue has really been seen more with D&D than other role playing games. Part of the problem is D&D itself, adventures are designed around a series of encounters with CRs that are supposed to balance play and use up resources at a predictable rate. This does not always work, and I feel CR misleads us in a number of ways:

• Randomness leads to greater or lesser resource usage
• The CR system is too simplistic to deal with the complexity of the game's classes and powers
• Players don't care about balanced fights and "burn down" every encounter

The first one is interesting, and yes, a series of bad rolls will double or use up your entire excursion's resources (spells, potions, powers) and you are stuck. Since the rest of the encounters in the dungeon were carefully balanced around you having some resources to deal with it, it's game over man, time to bug out. One encounter drops your party resources to zero, and if this is a "one time only" dungeon with an objective (like most should be), you have lost. That's it. Bad dice have let the bad guy get away with the princess, and that's the knocks of a story-based game.

Yes, the d20 with its wide variance is partially to blame here, it isn't the best die to use if you want a strong average, but with D&D it's what we got.

Another side note. D&D 4E tried to solve this problem with at-wills and encounter powers. the designers of D&D 4 were trying to solve a lot of problems, and this one they did a pretty good job at (tactical miniatures wise, not role playing wise). They introduced the concept of regenerating powers and healing surges, and that kept the party going into the next part of the story. For story-gaming, D&D 4 had a lot of nice improvements over D&D 1-3 and D&D 5. Mind you, the design of D&D 4 did not lend itself to roleplaying all that well, but as a tactical miniatures game where you played stories, it was interesting (counting the first 3 books or so before everything started going to the lower planes).

The second point is also interesting. In some ways I feel the CR system is overly simplistic and it does not take a lot of factors into account. One the other side, if it did the CR calculation system would be something as complex as calculus to figure out encounter balance. With Pathfinder, I have seen reports that modules designed against earlier versions of the game are now too easy with the power creep introduced in later books, and that encounters need to be toughened up to be a challenge again. Old CR does not equal the new CR, and the rating slips as time goes on.

Burn downs. This I have been waiting to talk about, because every player coming from an MMO knows about this one, and this is how most videogames train players nowadays. When you are in a MMO, in each encounter you 100% burn down all your powers and abilities in order to beat it. It does not matter if it is a hall fight or a boss fight, you keep pressing every button, keep hitting every power as its timer comes up, and maximize your damage output to 100% in every fight. In the old Everquest, this wasn't the case and you had to practice careful resource management through a zone. Past that, most modern MMOs make you burn down as fast as possible in order to get through a fight.

The reason? It's flashy! It's more exciting! It solves players from complaining the dungeon is too hard and filling up your customer service system with too many tickets.

So many videogame and MMO players are trained to burn down.

Now, many players get it when they begin playing pen-and-paper. They get the careful resource management game. The games fight this though, and try to make things easier on players by giving them infinite-use attack cantrips (D&D 5), or multi-shot built-in class attack powers (Pathfinder). D&D 4 had infinite-use at-will powers and auto-recharging encounter powers. Even 3E had a plethora of multi-use wands, scrolls, and other items that let you blast away with rechargable wands of magic missiles and fireball staffs. You see the burn-down starting to creep back in.

Player power has increased dramatically over the last 15 years of D&D to keep up with the MMO arms and expectation race.

Personally? I find burn downs boring and resource management more compelling. I like story-based play (a separate topic entirely), but I appreciate games that force you to make hard choices.

In old-school gaming like Basic Fantasy or Labyrinth Lord, giving a magic user infinite ranged attack cantrips would be unthinkable. Today, shooty and flashy are the new thing and the new norms. In the past, you didn't doll up with magic items and carry around enough rechargable magic items to blow through days of content. If your DM was stingy, you pulled the "go back to town" thing. If he wasn't, you loaded up for bear with enough magic to blow a hole in the side of White Plume Mountain.

In older editions of D&D and today's OGR games, the magic item economy is sparse, and you don't get into it as much. A wand of magic missiles is rare and special. A +1 sword is Excalibur. You survive on your wits and a player's ability to coax room descriptions out of the DM's head to avoid the trap of doom in the next room. Then again, the story in old-school games was a lot like today's 'sandbox" games. Do you survive? What do you do? Old-school games focused on the stories of the characters in that personal survival story, and not the DM's or module writer's story.

I blame Vampire: The Masquerade back in AD&D 2E days for this "module as story" stuff really. Vampire showed us a wonderful roleplaying game focused on personal stories, and AD&D had to follow suite and try to make dungeoning "story gaming" as well. Vampire did story gaming elegantly. AD&D had a lot more trouble making that leap because of the abstraction and resource management, and that theme of "story dungeoning" has stayed with us ever since, even across 3E's magic-card-if-i-cation of the rules.

So this pesky resource management game is getting in the way of completing tonight's story dungeon! Let's punt, take a mulligan, and head back to town to ignore this archaic D&D resource management system and continue on, shall we? If you are going to be in any way realistic about this dungeon master and reset the encounters, make us roll for wilderness encounters, or make us 'lose' the story for taking a break in the middle, then I guess you are a horrible dungeon master who hates well-told stories and famous module designers, right?

I am being sarcastic, but I have had those feelings come up at my table before so they are there.

There is an internal struggle here that I feel D&D has never gotten over. There is a simulation side to old-school D&D with the resource game, and if you have never played an old-school game, I recommend you do to see what I am talking about. It is a different game. Health does not auto-recharge. What you take in is it for possibly 100 rooms. The game is simple and deadly. Characters die frequently. You struggle. There is a mental game going on where you pry descriptions out of the DM, be clever, avoid fights, and survive.

3E and Pathfinder? Stuck in the middle of storytelling and resource management. Deck-building RPGs at heart.

4E and D&D 5E? Storytelling games at their heart and trying hard to shed old-school D&D's resource management game. Heavily MMO-influenced with recharging and infinite-use powers, with D&D 4 being the more MMO game, but D&D 5 shooting for the feel of 2E's story-dungeoning feel.

None of them are bad, and players love each for different reasons. This is not an argument one is better than another. You play what you love. But, you need to understand what each one brings, and where the conflicts are. If I ran D&D 5, I would go for more story than resource management, because that's what that game does best. I would adjust the story if players felt their party needed to take five, and advance the story in a logical way that reflects them having to take a breather. The show would go on. There wouldn't be a 15-minute adventuring day because the story reacts.

In old-school games? Yes, you can bet I would come down like a ton of bricks on a party that wasted its resources in wasteful burn-downs and had to retreat to town. Old school games are the Old Testament of resource management sims. Roll for wilderness encounters to and from the dungeon. Roll for wandering monsters all the way down to the point you left off. The dungeon's residents react and adapt to the last incursion, setting up traps, moving to rooms deeper (or to ones you thought you cleared), clearing out, or calling for reinforcements. You take a 15-minute day, and I will make you regret it for the next 15 days, but that is the old-school dungeon master's job.

The trouble comes when the game's designers try to please everybody, and tell you that the game is good for all types of play. It's cool marketing speak, but it isn't true. Some games do things better than others, and that's okay. Another problem arises when the game's designers put in systems geared to resource management when the game shines in story-based play. I can't blame them, the marketers said 'make it appeal to everybody' so sometimes you get systems in games better ignored than used. It happens, and game design isn't a perfect science.

Know what you like. Know what your players like. Most importantly, know what you expect from a game, and how a game shapes that experience.

Free-to-Play: Wildstar

DarkgarX and I tried the Wildstar free-to-play game recently, and yes, the servers were jammed nearly impossible to log into. A couple thoughts:

The graphics and factions are fun, and impossible not to like if you are a fan of Guardians of the Galaxy, and other similar out-there space opera style depictions of the universe. It is a wacky, pun-filled, silly, serious, and crazy place with a charm all its own. It is a fun place, full of in-jokes and whimsy, and I wish I could buy a pen-and-paper game based on this universe.

Seriously yes, I could play this on the tabletop if the humor was kept intact, kind of like the old Paranoia game with its frequent fits of black humor and outright and random fits of uncontrollable laughter. I wouldn't want black humor for this one, just that free-wheeling space exploration and danger with humorous and uncontrollably silly moments. They did a great job with the world, and it is worthy of a pen-and-paper game that captures the irreverent and silly high drama of this universe.

I liked the classes, and I felt they were imaginative and they broke the boring tab-target standard of the last generation of MMOs. Every ability is AoE or self, and you don't need to fiddle with a target indicator and end up healing the thing your fighting by accident. You just play, things move quickly, and it feels like an action game. They did a nice job here, the combat is fluid and dynamic, and the powers are cool and different.

What were they thinking following the old bang-to-bang quest model? Seriously, it feels like MMOs have got stuck in this Facebook game model where you just search a 3d world for exclamation marks, skip the quest text, and run off blindly chasing the next quest objective. I feel it hurts an otherwise fun and interesting game, and it doesn't really play to the game's strengths. In a game about freewheeling space adventure, putting the chains and cage of a traditional questing system on everybody locks down the fun, tells players "only quest content is important" and sucks the life out of the natural conflict the wonderful world has between these two factions.

It feels like MOBAs are so popular because they took the funnest part of MMOs (PvP) and just made a game around that. Everything else that MMOs traditionally do, from the slow grind to the endless questing, is unfun, and MMO designers feel they need to keep shipping this rote, uninteresting, copy-and-paste between games, honestly lazy content and they keep trying to improve it and wonder why a square wheel doesn't roll.

Wildstar is fun and cool-looking, and I love the world. I do not like the locked-into-it questing content. I hope this is just the introduction, but honestly, I wish it wasn't there and we were free to pursue player-created goals and user-created content. Yes, kind of like EVE, but with people instead of 3d starships. I want to fly a grav-ship around the planet as an explorer and discover new lands, to ply traderoutes with my atmospheric cargo ship, to participate in PvP wars as a soldier, or craft my butt off and discover and build things as a scientist to support the war effort.

I want to be forced to be a part of something bigger driven by the community, not be a mouse in a maze driven by developers. Yes, I know, EVE again, but I love that personal connection and 3d avatar-ness of Wildstar, especially in a sci-fi setting.

We shall see how this breaks out, and I am hoping it does, and my character can be a part of this larger struggle for freedom and independence of this far off world.

ArcheAge and Theme Parks

DarkgarX and I have been playing around in the Archage MMO lately and I walked away a little disappointed.

It is a game that promised unlimited freedom trading, building, and PvP - with a huge sandbox world. Our experience has been a typical level-based grind through a series of camp-to-camp quests that seemingly have no end. The PvP is endgame content at 50, and most all of the run up to that feels like a traditional MMO quest-based themepark grind.

It is important to understand the difference between a sandbox and a themepark setup for a game world. Themeparks are tightly controlled settings with clear quest lines, progression, and typically feature strong player protection versus any interference to leveling. The fact that our pair of characters is near level 30 out of 50 and we have not seen or had one PvP battle is depressing.

In old World of Warcraft, the PvP fun started at 20. In the old Warhammer MMO, it started at level 10. Both were a blast to play, and you learned your PvP role quickly. Both of those were still themeparks, but at least they made a conscious effort to start you with PvP early.

In Archage, I feel like PvP is held away, your character is auto-protected, and there is no war of big conflict I have any connection to. The game is beautiful and has wonderful technology with placable houses, farms, mounts, vehicles, ships, and all sorts of other really cool stuff, but I am not feeling the conflict or fight affect my character in much of a way.

Most of the house and farm building is locked up behind quests, and you can live and farm in a protected zone, so there is nothing much at risk for your placable structures.

In a sandbox world, everything is on the table. You can be ganked by level 50's in the starting zone, and even by people supposedly on your same side. There is no sides, it's everyone for themselves. If you want to team up for mutual protection, you are free to do so. If you want to form a guild that protects your new players, go ahead. It's up to the community to create groups and environments based on their desires, play styles, and wants. Yes of course there are problem players, but in these games community and social order usually creates safe havens to get started in.

EVE Online is a great example of minimal protection to start, and then letting people fly free and do whatever they want ion 0.0 space. It has a tiny themepark to get people started, and then cuts you loose in a universe-sized sandbox. It's a great experience.

Sidebar note here, on themeparks in MMOs and roleplaying games. I am becoming tired of them. They feel like engineered experiences that are boring and predictable. They are filled with the by-the-numbers lands and content. I don't need a Disneyland-style  "Egypt Land", "Future World", "Ravenloft Land", or a "Norse Land" in my games, nor does it make sense to me in these worlds. How would you feel if Lord of the Rings had these places added in by Hollywood types?  

For some people, okay, fine; but really, every world I play in doesn't need token tip-of-the-hats to every Earth culture to fill up some development and marketing bucket list. It's just, no, I feel it's just lazy and unimaginative. Plus, everyone's doing it.

If I want an Ancient Egypt fantasy game, I will set it in the original Ancient Egypt and paint D&D rules and monsters all over it. It's fine, you don't need to create a pseudo-Eygpt for me and fit it in some other world somewhere. Maybe now that you don't need to create this place, you can build something original and put it where you were going to put this.

To it's credit, Archage doesn't have these silly places, but it does have the same themepark structure as many other MMOs. The camp-to-camp grind is hard to want to play through, the "chosen one" plot line is the same for thousands of players, and it just feels like it tried to go in a bold new direction, but it fell back on the traditional MMO themepark-isms. We will likely play through our time and see what happens, but I am feeling a little down about the game.

What do I want? I want that free and open game where the actions of the community and players matters. It's tough, you get a lot of hype and pre-release journalism from everywhere, and your expectations are probably way off base than what the game finally ends up being.

EQNext: The End of Opposing MMOs?

One fascinating part about Everquest Next is its abandonment of the two-sided MMO model. It seems as if everyone starts out on the same side. The lore is such that one group of survivors of the dragon wars returns to their homeland, and they begin the long, arduous process of reclaiming their lands. Even the Dar kElves have been recreated as a somewhat-friendly faction of elite warriors, so there isn't two sides returning home - there is one.

From the panels we attended, it seems the EQ Next team wants to start everyone out as equals, and let your actions decide your fate. If you want to walk an evil path, you will choose to do that through your actions. You will find the evil factions, ally with them, perform quests for them, attack the good guy factions, and your choices will lead you down that path. It is a fascinating setup, and one eerily similar to SBRPG's sandbox mode of play, although we do assume there are factions in the game world that are both good and bad, we don't say you have to ally with them.

Note up until this point in MMO-land, most games have been bi-factional, when you create a character, they force you to pick a side. World of Warcraft's Horde vs. Alliance, Warhammer Online's Order vs. Chaos, SWKOTOR's Imperials and Rebels, and a bunch of other games where the sides really feel sort of arbitrary and forced upon the story (Rift, Guild Wars, etc). Here, you pick the side your character ends up on based on their actions - it is up to you.

It is an interesting setup, one I wish was used in World of Warcraft and other games, since there are some factions in each of those games that sit between the sides (Goblins, Pandaren, etc). A problem with WoW is that part of the design was to keep the two sides unique, if you saw a Tauren of any type, you could be sure it was Horde. With the new expansion and the Pandaren, that is not true anymore, and by the original design goals, this is a mistake. Wouldn't it be more interesting to let players form up battle lines along ideals they believe in, instead of artificial allegiances to some faction picked for them during character creation? If I want to be a warlike Human-hating Orc, let me join that faction; or if I support Thrall and his Alliance-supporting faction of peace, let me join them. It seems disingenuous to force all Horde down a narrow path just because the (non-existent) world PvP requires forced factioning. It's why the game seems so limiting and cold nowadays as well, there's simply no freedom.

I hope EQ Next forces game designers to think hard about factioning and forcing players into roles. Let me pick a race, and let me decide. If one race trends towards one way of thinking, make that an easier path (Orcs and war), but never limit me from choosing my path, or choosing it for me. This is one of those key design goals we had for SBRPG1, and it is reinforced for SBRPG2. You deserve to pick your character's fate, who they ally with, and what factions they support.

In a way, even games like Pathfinder and D&D4 force you into a role. With Pathfinder, there's an assumed Pathfinder Society membership implied; and with D&D4, the game puts everyone on the side of the good guys. These games were built with the MMO mold in mind, and it's an interesting choice. As a result, the factions trend towards the good guys, and the evil factions are relegated to monster status. You could never join them, nor expect these factions to have anything more than a simple, "bad guys of the next adventure" motivation.

Freedom, it's what makes games epic. Supporting it in the game's design matters a whole lot too.

"Change comes when you want it."

A very wise friend of mine said that to me, and it is one to think about. For many people, this should be followed up by, "Why change?" If you are happy with what you have, fine, don't rock the boat, change would be bad for you. If you are unhappy, then the question of "why change?" is already answered, and you must.

The entire EQNext experience changed me. Sometimes, when you see something new and different, you want that instead of what you have. For MMOs, the same-old static worlds and terrain of EQ2 and World of Warcraft have gotten stale, and yes, I would like to see something new and different for a change. It does not mean EQNext is going to be better, and I think that is where people get defensive and confused. EQNext has to prove itself, and it deserves a fair chance. If you are happy in your current MMO, fine, don't rock the boat, and change would be bad for you. Others may be unhappy with what you are happy with, and that is fine too, I accept that, and you know, it is life. Who knows, the old games may be more comfortable for some, and even me, I don't know, but I am excited by the future and all its possibilities.

Same thing with Pathfinder, D&D4, D&D3.5, and to some extent D&D Next. All of these celebrate the past, and it is a fun, wonderful past, mind you - I enjoy all of these games. Something on the edge of my conscious says, there is something better out there, something wonderful and fantastic with new worlds never seen before. There comes a time when I don't want to live in the past, I want to explore the possibilities of new games, so I head out and try new things. I design too, game design is my hobby, and I enjoy it to no end. However, the twentieth time through Keep on the Borderlands and the Tomb of Horrors gets the same after a while, and yes, there are the Pathfinder adventure paths, but those are still in the same D&D Normal worlds where you know what to expect.

Part of me wants to head out into the unknown, and experience worlds never seen before. It's part of the original spirit behind SBRPG1.0, to cut players and groups loose with a full set of world creation tools, and let them come up with the world. This spirit is back in EQNext, where players shape the world, players create it, and the shared "live" experience is more important than the written module. It's part of why the game calls to me, and why we are recreating SBRPG in a new and exciting form. To adventure in games where magic does not work the way you are used to, you can never expect what's down that deep hole, and the dangers lurking out there you have no idea what they are capable of - that is a truly dangerous and exciting world, and ones people love playing in.

There will come a time when the pen-and-paper world wants change, something new, something cool. It's a natural cycle and renewal and rebirth. It only comes, however, to those who want it.

Wise words indeed.

SOE Live: Final Day

Wow. What an incredible trip. Our final day of coverage begins as I think back at everything we have done and saw here at SOE Live.

We have breakfast with the director of the SOE game Dragon's Prophet, and got to give him feedback on the game. It is a fun game, worthy of holding us over until EQNext comes out, and looks to be a fun experience. He has been with SOE for about 12 years, and worked on everything from Clone Wars to Everquest Online Adventures, so he had a great pedigree of titles. It was fun just being able to sit down with him, share ideas, talk about games, and different ideas we had about MMOs and gameplay. I will keep what we talked about with him a secret, since it is a very cool thing, and we would love for him to run with the ball and get it implemented. Regardless to say, the gameplay idea we shared with him would change the game with MMOs forever, and truly bring these games to the next level.

We share because we're cool guys, and who knows, maybe SOE wants to work with cool guys like us someday. Yeah, we're like that.

EQNext is just 50 Shades of Awesome. It won't be out for another year or two, but the creator toolset portion will be out this winter. This is a smart strategy, the days of building gigabytes of pre-chewed content and stories and delivering them at launch died with the Star Wars Old Republic MMO, and Sony recognizes that. You can never build enough story and one-shot content to satisfy your players, they will burn through it in a couple months, and leave. That model does not work anymore. Instead, they are going the route of player-generated content, both before the game launches (with the toolset), and after launch with a changing, dynamic world.

It's a sound strategy, and exciting to support. There will always be games now to play and experience, plenty of stuff to do in Planetside 2, Dragon's Prophet, and the Everquest franchise. I support this because the focus here is clearly on the players, and not the company's story lines and canned experiences. The players here will be the ones creating the cool places in the world, creating the history together, and changing the game to be what they want it to be. George and I have always been about 'rolling your own experiences' in pen-and-paper games, and really, it is a great-great thing to see a company embrace player-created content, and be open to totally changing the history of the world based on what happens on the game's servers (yesterday, discussion panel). For this openness and welcoming of player-content, EQNext is our game.

There's a ton of other things happening here as well, and games from Everquest, EQ2, Planetside 2, and DC Heroes Online are getting small ways to incorporate player content. It's a sea change over here, and a welcome one to see. There's tons of expansion packs, new stuff to do, and cool little changes they are making in each game to improve things. Keep in mind, making changes in these games is a big project, and the company does the best with what it has to keep stuff cool and fun, even in games coming on 15 years old. We appreciate the support, and it is a great thing to support a company that doesn't abandon its games. Yeah, I know, SOE had some it shut down too, but for the ones still played by many people, it is a cool thing.

Nothing changes on the pen-and-paper front, and in fact, as we see more and more games move towards virtual dungeon masters and player-created content, PnP games are going to increasingly become obsolete. Think of the benefits of pen-and-paper games as being a series of goals that MMOs need to reach, and there still are a number of them out there that have not been reached yet, such as a referee, user-created adventures, user-created worlds, referee-controlled NPCs, referee-spawned monsters, adventures that can change mid-stream based on party actions, and a bunch of others. EQNext is knocking some of these milestones down, and I expect MMOs in general to start seeing these technical challenges as features to implement.

Think of that. We are now moving in a direction with MMOs that is towards replacing the human-referee entirely. I know there will still be things a human referee can do, but with advancement after advancement, the human referee will become obsolete, and in fact indistinguishable from a computer AI. This isn't far-fetched, it is just a normal progression of artificial intelligence, and in fact, expected. EQNext's user-generated content may start with structures, terrains, and props - but what's next? Monsters? World factions? Adventures? AI referees? There will be a time when the computer does a better job than a human referee, and that day is coming quicker than we think.

There are cool opportunities in here as well for the human referees, and SOE sees that too. We are getting tools for human referees to generate adventures in these games, and that is only the beginning. Someday, it may be possible for a player to 'jump out of body' and become a temporary referee in the game world for a group of players, spawning monsters, creating goals, and speaking as the NPCs We are heading towards that world too, with even more chances for creative people that want to tell stories to be able to do so through the game's tools. The combination of AI referees and human-created and managed MMO content is coming, and again, probably faster than we think.

Exciting stuff, and I do feel SOE Live this year was a glimpse into the future of gaming, both pen-and-paper and MMO. It was a special honor to attend, and also give the developers and execs here a taste of the SBRPG magic. What a fun, cool couple days this has been; I hope we could share with you a little look into this, and give you a glimpse into the crystal ball as well.

SOE Live: Day 3, part 2

...and then everything changes. Oh yes, another post today since so much is going on here.

Levels and the holy trinity are gone. EQNext is moving towards a more Minecraft or Terraria system of character power. Your crafted gear determines your stats and character power, levels are gone. Also, you collect and possibly tier-up your classes to increase and accumulate powers. It looks like character level in EQNext is gone. Spec-ing a character to be a tank or healer is gone. Everyone is DPS. What determines victory is likely gear power, the tier of your class powers, and a majority of it is player skill.

You will be able to re-spec your classes, and change yourself up. It is a dynamic system, and yes, while radically different, I suppose their answer to people that miss the old class-level combo is go play the infinite number of games that use that system. It is a radical, incredible departure from the norm, and they even brought the old AD&D Player's Handbook up on the screen to illustrate 'these are the old ways.'

Your character power is determined by what you collect, what you craft, and the time you put into yourself. They mentioned that a new player could tag along on a high-level raid on day 1 and still contribute. It is a flatter system for participation, but I suspect an incredibly deep one for the amount of time you can put into it and what you get out of it. I do suspect, like in Terraria, that an un-geared character will absolutely get one-shotted in the high-level areas. But like in Terraria, a twinked character with good gear, low ability power, and no player skill will suck just as hard.

Wow. Again, this is a team trying for a moon-shot of gaming. Minecraft and Terraria and their linear systems are the clear model here, along with the unique lore and faction systems that Everquest brings to the table. The emphasis on crafting for power is very cool, starting everyone off similar and keeping them there is also very cool - it is a radial departure from over 35+ years of level-based fantasy gaming.

How it works is you will have 4 primary abilities from your primary class, and then any 4 from your collected classes. There was some mention of tier-ing a class up, so I guess that is how the power of an ability works. How hit points are gained wasn't also revealed, but I suppose it could be almost entirely gear-based, since there are no character levels. I wouldn't mind playing a game like this, since it puts starting people on the sam ground, and makes crafting and collecting good gear a premium goal.

There clearly is a heavy emphasis of pen-and-paper games in the room. They want to create a MMO equivalent of the essential D&D experience, without the limitations of the D&D rules. Artificial numeric character qualities, such as level, seem to be purposefully being gotten rid of; in favor of the real, experience and collection based qualities. How this all works out remains to be seen, but it is an incredible goal if they can pull it off.

More coverage? Coming up:

http://www.destructoid.com/soe-live-everquest-next-shocker-two-eq-games-cometh-259254.phtml

Another fun note from today, the topic of roleplaying came up, and a player asked if their character could follow a deity. The designers said, 'that is up to you.' In essence, you, as a player make choices in the world, to steal or be honest; be trusting or untrustworthy, or any other number of hidden virtues the game tracks for your character. If your character's values align with the deity's values, or any other number of NPC groups - that group will be act favorable to you. In essence, you have to play the game according to the values your character holds dear. You can't brazenly steal from the villagers in game for loot and giggles, and then go 'roleplay' a kind and gentle follower of the love goddess. The love goddess' NPC will hate you, and you won't be welcome in the village. It's put up or shut up time for roleplayers, and that is a very cool thing.

This is getting closer and closer to the goal of having an invisible dungeon master working behind the scenes of the game to make it different, interactive, and a unique experience for every player - given the individual player's actions. They keep talking about some sort of AI story engine working behind the scenes that alters play depending on what is going on in the world, based on the actions of the population. Also, your individual reputation is tracked, and your actions have consequences - you can become the enemy to groups in the world, and your character can become kill-on-sight to any of the factions in the game. This is really, really close to a DM - and I suspect the designers are programming the game with this invisible DM in mind and working behind the scenes.

If the players do not help a village, and let it fall to the Orcs - a bunch of cool stuff happens. Villagers stop tending fields, and stop going out onto the streets. The level of fear increases, and shops could close. The village could become an abandoned ruins. All this can happen anywhere in the world, and the outcome is unique to every server. A truely dynamic game world run by an electronic DM? I think this team is very, very close. This game just may well be the first serious AI DM the world sees.

We had some great technical sessions today about the voxel engine, being able to flood caves by tunneling under a lake, the destructibility and physics of the world, how the voxels smooth out, particle effects, constructing walls and buildings realistically (dirt inside of a stone wall), and a heck of a lot of other stuff. The world is more real than any other MMO world I have seen, it's not just a shell of textured static polygons.

Again, so much comes to mind when you think about pen-and-paper games, it's going to take me a few days to sort my thoughts out. Level-less fantasy gaming? Gear-based power? Freely-respec-able characters? Collect-a-classes? Powering-up-classes? Just wow, this SOELive is a game designer's tour-De-force, just so many ideas coming out of this team it is just insane. For the EQNext team to put all of them in one game is remarkable, and I hope they are able to deliver.

If they can, it is not only a game-changer, but a world-changer for fantasy gamers.

SOE Live: Day 3, part 1

Wow, more incredible stuff today, discussions about the world, classes, lore, fiction, and the world reboot. Yes, Everquest is getting a lore-reboot. It is sort of a reboot-plus, where the designers can use the now-invalid future history to pull the storyline of the world from. They are not beholden to it, but it is there to serve as the backdrop, characters, factions, and content from which the future history will be written.

Of course, the history of each server will depend on what happens within the community, but major world events injected into the world will come from the new line of lore. I like this style of reboot, it doesn't throw too much away, while keeping things open enough that anything could happen. We still have the familiar, but what happens with this material could remain the same, change dramatically, or new stuff could be added to the world and things become fresh again.

We went to a writer's panel today featuring Maxwell Alexander Drake, a writer SOE contracted with to help write the lore and fiction for this new world. What's cool is that he is working directly with this developers and creating the written record of the game as development continues. Very cool stuff, and there will be a new line of novels and fiction to go along with the reboot. Yeah, this is a reboot done right.

This reminds me of the D&D4 '100 years later' relaunch of the Forgotten Realms, and how many gamers just hated it. I have always thought a reboot+ is what the world needed, not an advancement into the bolted-on D&D4 timeline and content. Really, the world of Faerun is defined by its cosmology, to wrench-in Eladrin and Dragonborn as party-crashers, and then rip out the planar cosmology and say "Faewild and Shadowfell are here!" just seems incredibly sloppy to me, and shows a lack of care for the creation. It hurts, since now Faerun seems like the old world with a coat of D&D4 on it, and I feel something needs to be done to fix this, honestly.

There is also more on the feedback SOE is getting from gamers, and a lot of MMO-players used to the old ways of doing things are coming out and saying negative things about the fragments of EQNext that they see. The freedom the game gives you, if they deliver on what they are promising, is immense - I mean really immense. Groups of players can change the world, and also work against each other. Every world, and its history, is different, since this is all a constructable/deconstructable sandbox. A lot of what's being said negatively seems like players wanting to go back to the safety and familiarity of the old ways, or back into the cave, as they say.

I have nothing wrong with the traditional MMO or pen-and-paper game, they are great, there are some that are well-designed and cool, but there seems to be a real desire to walk out of the light and back to the way things were done. I mean, EQNext's classes were talked about today, and they are a combination of class abilities, equipment abilities, and weapon abilties. You can multiclass two out of 40 collectible classes, and furthermore, the weapon you use and the gear you equip gives you further special abilities. You can be a paladin-mage type class, have air waking boots, and a sweep-attack halberd. You pick the abilities you want, get some through gear, and others through weapons. It is an innovative system, very cool, and something I wish we could see more of in pen-and-paper games.

SOE Live: Day 2

Emergent game play is the big buzzword this year. SOE is taking the position that content created by the company is not going to sustain player interest. What SOE hopes takes its place is player-generated content, which are experiences players create inside the world, between each other.

A good example of this is PvP, player-built houses and castles, player run events, and a world system that encourages players to compete and cooperate socially on various goals and quests. Another part of this is player submitted adventures and modules, and even 3d models and other assets.

...and then, everything changes in a moment. Check:

http://www.ign.com/articles/2013/08/02/everquest-next-is-real-and-its-amazing

http://kotaku.com/everquest-next-could-fix-everything-wrong-with-mmorpgs-1003801733

Yeah, we were there at the reveal. Let me get the negative side out of the way first, they are promising a heck of a lot. We all know how well that went for D&D4, but something gives me a little more faith in SoE this time.

They are leveraging the power of their fans, the die-hards, the players. The players are going to do a huge amount of work on this coming this winter, actually using the same tools the developers use, ones that will ship with the game, to create the world. The best-of-the-best will be vetted, voted, and added to the world - and I expect this to continue post-launch. There are content creation tools shipping with the game, that creators can use to build content, get it approved, and creators actually get income from sales. There is even a method if someone uses something you created to build something else, you get a royalty based on the percentage of what's yours.

Wow, this game is a mix of Minecraft, Everquest, Second Life, and something else that hasn't been invented yet. The world is never the same, it changes, cities rise and fall, the Orcs shift attention to different places, what was once a settled area is now a ruins - it kills every other static MMO in one fell swoop. The scope of what they are talking about has never been done before, but being here, up close to them, asking questions to them in panels, it seems like they know exactly what they are doing, and exactly what they can deliver. The game was running on PCs at the show, by the Devs, behind the curtains. It is live and it is real.

Okay, I am sure if you want to know more, hit the links and use the Google. Pen-and-paper wise, here was a fun swipe at D&D (and I suppose knocking the crown off D&D Next's similarly named head) of "we have all been playing something like Dungeons & Dragons for the past 35 years" - and then proceeded to cast D&D in that typical MMO light of static adventures, class-based-play, and so on. To an extent, it is true, D&D has become static and stale. The premier version of the game, Pathfinder, is based off a game system that's 13 years old. Yes, I know, tried and true; but been there, played that applies as well.

Things need to be shaken up, as game designers, watching the EQNext creative team play with their giant box of cool paints is mind-blowing, and makes you think of the possibilities you could build if you just broke yourself free from the tried-and-true D&D tropes. To an extent, D&D4 did not go far enough, and the motivation and execution lacked severely. It fell under a shelf of expansions and errata that made the game a mess. What this creative team did today was 'change the game' and yes, it applies and hits pen-and-paper games squarely in the jaw. I can't think of a reason why I would consider investing in a new pen-and-paper game compared to playing this. This isn't a game, it's participating in a shared history with thousands of players in a world that will never stay the same.

Yes, agreed, it sounds like a dream, and concerns duly noted. Half the criticisms I have read online are flat-out wrong, and we talked about these on the panels today. You will see them in the comments of the above stories, and yeah, many of those are misunderstandings due to a lack of knowledge. This is a skilled team and something cool, don't worry, they have thought of that too. The players in the panel have too.

But seriously wow. Yeah, this is the type of thinking pen-and-paper designers need to think of, getting on that whole next level of fun. Otherwise, we will be sitting here talking about the minor changes to D&D 3.752 or D&D 4.65. Worlds need to be shaken up over this, designers need to be pulled in and asked 'how do we compete?' Seriously. A shot has been fired across the bow of both MMOs and pen-and-paper games today. Nothing out there or in development in the PnP world answers this.

Pen-and-paper - step up. Otherwise, it's horse meet the automobile. Given the last 10 years of MMOs and how they have decimated PnP player bases, that statement is not far from the truth already.

Oh yeah, we got to meet Larry Elmore today too. Damn it, what an awesome day.

SOE Live: Day 1

Planetside 2 sure is the 800 lb. gorilla in the room, this convention is about 50% Planetside interest, with players from all over the world attending. By the time the keynote had rolled around to EQ1 and EQ2, we lost a good portion to the room to the PS2 tournaments and lack of interest. It is a strange shift I bet for those used to coming to the SOE conventions and having the MMO crowds be the focus of attention. Clearly, this year seems to be about Sony's mega-hit sci-fi shooter, and it feels like it is dominating the show.

EQ1 and EQ2 seem to be on longer-term support, with the focus being on recycling older content for the current high-level player base. We had a shocking moment where the air went out of the room when the EQ2 director said basically 'every player will be able to have a fully-geared level 85 character in the next expansion' - for free. No applause, and more of a stunned reaction it felt like. MMO players love their characters and cherish the investment of time put into them, so giving everybody a pocket high-level twink does a couple things: it introduces a population of low-skill players to high-level content, it devalues leveling a character the old fashioned way (since traditional character will not be raid equipped when they hit 85), and it puts a focus on new content only. Of all of those, people seem concerned about traditional leveling, and the mid-level zones may become wastelands without people to level through them.

Regarding EQ1, they introduced a dynamic mission-builder that auto-tunes a special zone to your party size and character level. This is only for the new expansion zones, and how much it auto-tunes is still undetermined. I doubt you could level from 1 to MAXLEVEL on auto-tuned content, this is still unclear. A lot of stuff comes into consideration, the needed level and gear to play these, level and challenge appropriate rewards, solo-ing, and a bunch of other stuff. It does seem, like EQ2, that most of the new content seems to be focused around maintaining the current high-level crowd than encouraging new and mid-level players to get up there and enjoy it. I wonder why a pocket-85 wasn't introduced in EQ1 when it was in EQ2.

Okay, let's consider pen-and-paper games. One thing Sony gets right is developing a game and supporting it. EQ1 is going on 15 years old, which in pen-and-paper years, comes out to a RPG like 45 years old. D&D has had this annoying history of throwing everything away, especially true in 3rd Ed, and EQ1 proves you can support a game as long as there is interest in it. Monopoly has been around a lot longer, and D&D culd be the same 'evergreen' game. If you have new ideas, build a new world with a new game.

Building a glorious persistent with lore and history is something Pathfinder gets right, and D&D fails at. D&D's rebooted 4th Ed. worlds were bitter pills to swallow and not well received (maybe Dark Sun was best out of all of them), and the 'roll your own' was a welcome change, but it seems we left Grayhawk and Faerun behind, or wallowing in unpopular changes. SOE and Everquest get this right, with a lore, current story lines, and history stretching as far back as the game itself. With pen-and-paper games, it's typical we reboot the worlds every time we get a new version, or alter them so badly they are unrecognizable or too heavy.

A fun thing said by the EQ2 director was 'we polled players and asked them, what parts of the game are annoying or not fun?' Man, I wish more pen-and-paper game designers asked that question. D&D Next has a great opportunity here to make things better, though I fear the gut reaction away from 4E may force the game back into the 2E/3E cave. Pathfinder fares even worse, because to hold the mantle of the spiritual successor to 3.5E, they have to adopt some of its worst rules, such as the skill system and complicated character stats. Innovation? Most pen-and-paper games fall way short here, and the things we saw today with some of the next-gen MMO games should put them to shame.

Really. MMOs are the enemy pen-and-paper game designers, since they play for the same crowd and attention. You tried to ape them with 4E with mixed results, and now the safe course is to hold onto 3E or go back to the tried-and-true class roles and rules (which I fear with D&DN). Where is our innovation? Where is the pen-and-paper game community's answer to Planetside 2? (Don't say Magic: The Gathering, although you could make a case there - more on this later.) Where is the long-term support for older games? Why do we need to throw so much away? Where are the new rules systems with exciting features, or will we be stuck with 3E derivatives for the next 10 years? Where is our long-term world support, with continuing stories?

Pen-and-paper companies throw to much away, and it's sad to say that MMO companies actually have better plans for support and retention. Product development too, you'd think with all that MMO companies have working against them, because PnP companies don't have to code game engines, make 3d models, build tons of content - that innovation would actually be on the PnP game side. It's not. We are stuck trying to repeat the success D&D had during it's golden years, and I am not sure if that can ever be replicated again. Computer game companies actually seem to be more innovative and willing to take risks, which is shocking, to say the least.

Maybe we are stuck to selling to the same crowd of D&D fans, it is shocking to see a ton of Planetside 2 fans here at SOE Live - but these fans are the new blood, important people to get into your world if you want your fantasy titles to thrive and survive. SOE has another game called Dragon's Prophet that looks geared towards new players as well, new rules, new goals, action-oriented combat - just cool new stuff. D&D doesn't have those new fans, it seems we are just selling the same thing to a dwindling group of players. Where are the PnP games that pull people in? Again, computer game companies are the ones attracting new players. PnP game companies need to figure out how to do that before they shrink to niche markets of older-and-older players.

Of course, you need to update your premiere franchise every-so-often, and tomorrow we get to see EQ Next. Will they innovate? Can they pull back the dwindling fantasy MMO interest with something exciting and fun? Can EQNext compete with Planetside 2? From the hardcore innovation and support I saw here, I am wondering if the pen-and-paper vs. MMO fight isn't just a one-sided affair. The most troubling part about all this is most of PnP's wounds are self-inflicted, and could be at least stemmed with proper support of existing editions and worlds, creating new games for new worlds, and marketing everything better.

There is a lot to think about, not all of it good news for PnP games; but really, I believe we need to change the PnP game for PnP RPGs to not only survive, but thrive.

SOE Live: Day 0

Oh yeah, George and myself are down here at SoELive 2013, where we are having a blast, and tired from the trip. Getting together with gamers, either pen-and-paper or MMO is always a cool thing, and sharing ideas and creativity is always cool. You can feel the excitement rising here, with Friday's EQNext premiere and a whole host of seminars coming up that will take us through the weekend. There is a ton the experience and learn, everything from how to manage an MMO to setting up a successful Youtube channel, creating MMO quests, and a bunch of other very cool stuff that has lots of applications to the pen-and-paper world.

Come back for daily reports on what we did and saw, and we may fill you in on some very cool stuff. Tonight, it was all about chasing SoE peeps on Facebook around Planet Hollywood, getting a bite to eat, and getting some rest for the big days coming up. Oh, and yeah, getting the luggage into the room. I swear this hotel has the longest walk from your car to your room, and carrying 50 pounds of luggage is not fun at all. Especially when you are walking through a mall, and you don't want to drag your suitcase through a crowd, or clock some guy with a Samsonite when you turn a corner. The things we do for you guys I swear....

The Hidden Costs of Computers and Pen-and-Paper Games

The best way I can describe this is buying a new computer. When you buy a computer, you aren't done paying for it. No, I am not talking financing it, but there are costs that continue to get charged to you in one way or the other. Even if you have a computer, you are still getting charged these costs. Now, I am defining 'cost' here broadly, it is not only money, but it is time. Now intrinsically, both are the same, as all money is is a way 'labor' can be stored and monetized but that is beside the point.

Your new computer has the following costs in real money:

• The cost of the computer itself
• The cost of keeping it 'fed' in software, paid-updates, and games (Steam)
• Ongoing access fees for Internet and digital media (Netflix, iTunes)
• The cost of keeping it upgraded in hardware with monitors, mice, and accessories
• The cost of storage media, cloud storage, or backups
• The cost (in space) of system setup
• Repair costs to replace or fix hardware

Okay, a pretty agreeable list for everyone. These are pretty basic tasks that you agree to pay out of your pocket, so they are up-front and most are optional. Let's look at the hidden costs of computers, and I will measure these in time:

• The time needed to learn the system (for new OS's and programs)
• The time needed to update the OS
• The time needed to keep on top of system security and antivirus updates
• The time needed to research and work around program incompatibilities and limitations
• The time needed to keep up and maintain the file formats you use
• The time needed to update ALL programs on the machine
• The time needed to update ALL hardware drivers on the machine
• The time spent in researching and finding software packages for your operating system
• The time spent in inefficient basic tasks (file and disk management, backups, writing media)
• The time spent in configuration (hardware, icons, desktops, tiles, wallpapers, screensavers)

Let me start off by saying your time is usually more valuable than your money. Let me say then that nobody is paying you for the time spent in the above list. You can have the best computer in the world, but if you are spending more time fiddling with it, learning it, and updating it - it is eating more of your time than it is worth. The only time spent on a computer that is earning you value is when you are either being productive or playing a game - the things you bought the machine for in the first place. Everything else is a cost to you.

Now where are we going with this, and why is it important for a gaming blog? Let's shift gears, and figure out the costs a pen-and-paper game have in real money:

• The cost of the game books needed to play
• The cost of expansion books and the time needed to learn them
• The costs of keeping it 'fed' in modules and gaming materials
• The ongoing access fees of costs of character creation software (Hero Lab, D&D Insider)
• The costs of dice, pens, paper, and other table materials
• The costs of figures, battle maps, and tabletop terrain
• The costs to replace damaged or lost books

Again, a pretty standard list, some are needed and most are optional. Now the real point of this article comes up, and this is a pretty sorry metric for most every pen-and-paper game, becuase most of them do horribly in this regard. What are the costs in time for pen-and-paper games. Note that I am purposefully excluding play time - that is the 'value earn' time that you bought the game for. This list is strictly the 'junk time' wasted in supporting a roleplaying game system:

• The time to learn the game and read the books
• The time to teach it to every new player
• The time needed to explain and introduce game worlds and back story
• The time to adjudicate and decide unclear rules and situations during play
• The time needed to keep up with official rules errata for the game
• The time needed to teach errata to every player in the game
• The time spent in non-play tasks like character creation
• The time spent maintaining characters in level ups, power choice, gear choice, and character improvement
• The time spent getting play groups together and finding new players

I know some people enjoy some of these parts, but we are using the measure of 'play time is gold.' Now many games purposefully increase these time costs as a part of a system lock-in strategy. With computers, you normally want to reduce the time costs - increasing them is a hassle and makes the computer not worth owning. For pen-and-paper games, if a rules system is ultra-complex and all-encompassing, you literally don't have the time or the energy to learn or play anything else. You always can, of course, but some systems enshrine complexity to the degree where you have to make a mental commitment to play only that, and nothing else - especially if your friends have invested as much time as you have, or even more. Pathfinder and D&D 3E and 4E follow this model, and do quite well at it.

Part of the problem is that it is easy to walk away from a simple game - you have little invested in it. This time and money investment is a huge part of marketing games such as Warhammer and 40K, the buy-in costs to buy, assemble, paint, and create armies is very high - and thus the lock in for players is as well. Same thing with pen-and-paper games. If you own a shelf full of gaming books of a system, you are locked in, both with a money cost and a time cost.

Is the time-wasting tactic used for system lock-in bad? Well, for computers, it is. Part of what makes Windows such a giant is that you have to spend so much time with it to keep it running. Owning that computer takes so much mental effort worrying about it, it almost creates a parental dependency between user and machine. The computer is helpless without your attention, and this creates a sort of system lock-in as well between you and your computer. You want to play the latest games and get work done, so you accept the time costs involved with that. If there were computers out there where you could do the same things, but for less time and hassle - would you walk away?

People are walking away from this model today, and thus Windows as well. Tablets and iPads are replacing the web browsing and email needs for many desktop owners that don't need all that power. Android is a more open ecosystem with greater freedom and less hardware support time requirements. Chromebooks are 'zero time cost' computers that just open up and work, without worrying about driver updates, system security, file formats, or software functionality. Of course, in a Chromebook, your files are locked-in to Google's ecosystem, but they allow you to use other storage providers (Dropbox, etc) as well, so there is still freedom to store files where you wish, provided you want to spend the time doing so.

Are people walking away from complicated pen-and-paper games? Well, World of Warcraft decimated D&D like Magic the Gathering decimated, well, D&D (a long time ago when Magic first came out, and it was easy and fast to get into and play). MMOs give players a higher 'value add' time than a pen-and-paper game, you can log in and immediately start having fun. You don't have to spend hours maintaining your characters in separate computer programs, learning volumes of rulebooks, or finding other players to play with you. All of that is just there. In fact, MMOs that purposefully reduce costs in the time needed to learn, and also the costs needed to play (free to play) often do better than ones requiring a huge time or money investment up front.

What does that say for complicated pen-and-paper games that are getting more expensive in both the cost of books needed to play, and the time needed to support them? Is the pen-and-paper gaming industry going in the wrong direction with more expensive games, especially in this free-to-play world? Just because dinosaurs leave large tracks doesn't mean you should follow them.

The next big thing in pen-and-paper games will follow the free-to-play model. Simple rules, optional upgrades, minimal upkeep time, and zero-entry cost. None of what I see in D&D Next, Pathfinder, Star Wars, or any other upcoming release fits that model. In fact, the system lock-in of the older games, Pathfinder, D&D4, D&D3, actually keep people from wanting to learn the next big complicated thing that comes out. The giant dinosaurs fell to the smaller and faster ones that could adapt and move quicker, they weren't replaced by even larger dinosaurs that ate more resources.

It is one of those game-design issues I ponder about on a lazy day, looking at shelves of games beckoning to be played, but taking so much time the activity seems like a waste...of time. Are we going in the wrong direction? Where is the next big thing? Will it even look like those games on the shelf next to me?

"If I do poorly, it's the game's fault..."

The above quote is probably the faulty ideal of modern game design, from pen-and-paper games to MMOs. Today's players are being trained to blame the game first for a lousy experience, and designers are encouraging that with 'no-lose' gameplay. Let's rewind a little bit, and see how this came about.

George wanted to boot up his old Everquest account, and see how the game has changed. Thankfully, it hasn't changed terribly much over the years, and that is its appeal. At high levels, the game is hard and unforgiving. If you don't spent XPs to develop your character at high levels, you will suck, and the monsters will use you as a dishrag to wipe the zone with. The game doesn't stop you from leveling past certain points, but if you don't put in the required time to fully develop your "alternate abilities" at certain level break points (55, 60, 63, 65, etc), take it from me, you character will suck. Monsters will out-dps you, you won't be able to enjoy the high stats of good gear, and you will be hindered as you level further with none of the cool high-level powers and abilities.

In Everquest, if you do poorly, it is your fault. The game doesn't hand-hold, you have to ask questions of the community, you have to research character builds and zones, and you need to do your homework in order to do well. It has gotten a little easier over the years, but the core concept of the game still remains. I think the statement "If I do poorly, it's my fault" is the defining belief of a hard-core, old-school gamer - we believe this, and we seek games out that give us that experience. The more unforgiving, the more arcane knowledge needed to do well, the more learning and perfecting technique needed - the better. You see it with some online shooters, and other games where mastering the game (without cheats) leads to success. There has to be a skill set you need to earn the hard way, and this separates the good players from the bad. D&D3 used to call it system mastery, and it still applies today.

Contrast this against games like Farmville, most of the newer content for the World of Warcraft MMO, or any other modern MMO where if you show up and do anything, you will succeed. If there is a challenge point in the game where only 10% of the people playing it can get past - that is seen as a bug or game defect, and the community complains until it is eliminated. If you do bad, it is often seen as the 'game's fault' first. This theory is the dominant game design theory in most new games, they handhold, they make it easy to level, and any sort of challenge is weeded out by complaints from the community.

In old-school games, these challenge points are what separates the bad players from the good. You get a series of these challenges, be they strategies, dungeons, learning your class in different situations, power selection and use, and any other activity where you need to learn and apply a skill set - and you get a natural filtering process. This creates a system where less-skilled players fall out and never get past certain points, and great players learn and adapt. Yes, this is an article on creating an elite group of players, with a real cost to get there. You won't be able to buy your way to the top, nor will you be able to grind your way up there with time - only skill will get you there.

I like to have my butt kicked, and have to learn a new set of rules every once and a while - even within the same game. I like not having things told to me, and having to figure them out or ask others. I like a game that creates tough un-winnable situations, and the only way through them is to adapt and excel at the limited set of abilities you are given. I like games that reward the time put into them, and that don't have easy ways to win, or ways to buy your way to the top. I like being that 'uber player' and I like games that make it next to impossible to get there.

If I am going to spend my time in your game to be the best at it, the highest measure of respect a game designer can give to me is to make it hard on everyone to be the best. Like in life, we can't all be the gold-medal snowboarder or star basketball player - but we can be that in MMOs. If you make it easy for everyone to be a 85th level Michael Jordan, no one will ever be the best or be special. You have just robbed me of the respect and awe of others, and frankly, I am less interested in your game. I will always play 'screw around' games, but games that I am serious about require a serious effort to them to succeed at.

Challenges where players quit and fall off are good. Not everyone can be the best. And if I do poorly, I want it to be my fault.

System Lock In: Bad for New Players?

Part of what cemented the term 'system lock in' into the pen-and-paper lexicon was D&D3. For those in the know, system-lock-in is a term taken from the world of computer operating systems meaning, "It would be hard to switch to another operating system because all my data and applications are on this operating system." In other words, switching, trying something new, or changing things on the computer would mean a substantial amount of pain involved for the consumer.

In the roleplaying world, system lock in means, "I have so much money invested in this system, and I have spent so much time learning the rules I would never even think about switching to another game system, or even trying one out." To enforce system lock in, pen-and-paper games are typically expensive, complex, and huge. Since all your friends have invested the same in buying books and learning rules, the system lock in is strengthened, and we get a 'network effect' - meaning if all your friends are locked into X, you will play X.

This is all well and good, and companies are free to write games however they want them - I support the free market of ideas. But the question comes up, is system lock in hurting the new player experience? To have system lock in, we need three things: buy-in, size, and complexity. Let's break this down in three short sections.

"Buy-in" is investment, and this typically means the game books are a substantial purchase. For a game like D&D4 this would typically include the player's book, a referee's book, monster book, and maybe one or two others. New players are reluctant to part with that much cash, so asking a new player to invest in that many books is going to be a challenge. Beginner sets are not the answer to this, they are merely an enticement to make the big purchase. System reference documents are not an answer to this either, they are often unwieldy and require hundreds of pages to be printed. Contrast this to a more new-player friendly game, like Labyrinth Lord or Basic Fantasy RPG. These games can be bought for $20 or less, and you get everything you need to play and referee the game. An argument can be made that cost scares away new players.

"Size" is the cost of ownership, and also the amount of space the game takes up on your shelf and in your mind. This is both a physical quality (space the books take up), and also a mental one (how important the game is in your mind). Good art can increase the mental size of a game, and Pathfinder gets this down in spades. Once you have invested, the size of the game controls how often you keep coming back to it and using it. Some people equate size with fun, what is more fun: a 5' long shelf of Pathfinder books, or a quarter-inch thick copy of Labyrinth Lord? Size definitely drives away new players, it is a commitment to store and use the books.

"Complexity" is how much effort it takes to learn the rules. A game that is easily learned is also easily put aside for something new. Granted, I like complex games with a lot of options, but there is something to be said for a game that is easy to learn, but conceptually deep. Forcing new players to learn the rules for flat-footed and attacks of opportunity is cruel, we have had to do it many times, and a player new to roleplaying often gets the wrong idea about the game, "I can't get into this." The skill system in D&D3 and Pathfinder is similarly difficult to use correctly and teach, and all these complex systems intended to create options mostly make the game difficult - without adding real options. If my thief character needs lockpicking X at level Y, why make me go through this complicated skill system to get there?

Again, these are just more random thoughts on the state of the pen-and-paper industry, where things are driving players away, and how things can be made better. It seems the more we go in hobby shops, the more space is devoted towards big-box tabletop games, and less space is devoted to traditional pen-and-paper games. All the innovation in the gaming industry seems to be in the board game area nowadays, and a lot of today's pen-and-paper innovation seems stuck in the past.

It seems like we are long overdue a revolution in pen-and-paper gaming, and we get back to games made to be entertainment. Aping the tactics Microsoft and Apple use to lock in users may lock in some players, but aren't they driving off the majority or new players to just keep a few legacy users?

My feelings are if you make my pen-and-paper game more like a computer, a real computer will beat it any day of the week. New players seem to understand this concept very well, but most roleplaying game companies don't. We have to learn from the successes of companies doing well in the board game market, and innovate like they do. Really, this is the same type of game, and the same type of player. The question needs to be asked, where are all the new players going, and what is keeping them away?

Rules as a Fun Tax

It's helpful to think of game rules as a 'fun tax.' That is, a series off hoops that you need to understand and master before you start having fun. You can even break this down to individual rules subsystems, such as the D&D3/Pathfinder skill system, which I consider a pretty heavy rules subsystem for what it is used for, which is mostly for noncombat and background skills. I will sum up my feelings about the D&D3 skill subsystem with this quote:

"What do you mean I need to buy perform? I am a 17th level bard!"

The 'classes versus free skills conflict' aside, every player needs to understand the skill system in order to create characters and start having fun. Of course, you can always fudge it and have a veteran player pick skills for the player, but that is a kludge, and certainly isn't a good 'new player experience' at all. If you were making a Facebook or other social game, and required players to find a veteran player to understand the game and learn it, you wouldn't get many players. That is a crude analogy, but it is appropriate. RPGs are social games.

What to do about the 'fun taxes' of pen-and-paper games? Well, for one, I am a big fan of simplifying rules down to their base components, and reducing complexity. We need 'green' roleplaying games, built with simplicity and new player friendliness in mind. I like my tower computers, but we live in a tablet world now - RPGs need to lighten up and become more useful and relevant. They need to be approachable without roleplaying being a requirement, in order to broaden their appeal. Most all of the European-style boxed games you can buy at game stores like Arkham Horror, Catan, and others do not require RP (but can be played as RP, or modded to do so). This leads to an interesting point:

You don't need rules to roleplay. Players do it all the time in MMOs without rules, all it takes is an active imagination. RP can be encouraged in the rules, but rules are not needed for the act. It is an interesting 'take' on writing an RP rules set - write the game first, and then worry about RP as an optional add-on component later.

A lot of games shift off complexity on the RP subsystem, as in, "Oh, we don't need rules for that, that will be handled through RP." Without the RP subsystem to shift rules to, all of a sudden, the problems in game design become clearer. How is a door forced or a lock picked? Some games leave it to the group to decide, but this is not ideal from a complexity control perspective, and also from a new player perspective. If European boardgame 'Explore the Dungeon' has a 4 in 6 chance to force a stuck door token, and pen-and-paper 'Dungeon RP Mysteries' leaves the entire 'stuck door' procedure up to the group - the new player is going to feel better with the former, and not the latter.

Wow, that rambled a bit. But I hope you have an appreciation of creating heavy rules subsystems in your games, and see these burdensome systems as a 'tax' on the fun of the game. You should never force a player to be a 'rules compiler' - someone who has to sit there and figure out how everything works together. The rules should present themselves naturally, and be clear and apparent from when they are read. Understand, all 'rules taxes' aren't bad - but they do take away time and reduce clarity, and you need rules to have a game. How many rules you need, and the point when these rules overpower the game - these are both things you need to think about as a game designer.

This Doesn't Feel Like High Fantasy?

I was playing World of Warcraft the other day, and I was struck by one thing - the game's world has a high magic level, with teleporters, moonwells, places of magic (good and bad), levitating buildings, and a ton of other super-magic standards in the world. This is truly a good example of 'high fantasy' and it conveys the uniqueness and magic of the world very well.

Conversely, D&D3 and several of its game worlds are labeled high fantasy, but basically feel more like low fantasy. Note I said D&D3, the rules are forcing you to buy iron rations and 50-foot ropes, and putting most spells on a once/day casting time. The way magic is handled and the focus on survival pushes the world away from the super-fantastic, and gives you the impression of a 'boards and swords' world where magic is rare, magical races hide from humanity, and the world is another copy of Medieval Europe with Elves and Dwarves thrown in.

D&D4 is a little better, with the split worlds and fantastic races playing a larger role in the game world. They slip though, especially with the new Faerun and some of the settings. Even the fantastic world of Eberron with its Noir/Steampunk origins feels like low fantasy outside of a couple key locations. The default 'points of light' setting is a little better, since it leaves the world up to you, and you can add as many fantastical elements as you can imagine. This is a fantastic world, with magical places being written into how the world works, although the races sometimes feel they don't affect the world as much. Since there is no written world, this is expected, but the races and how they built the world is mostly up to the referee. To be fair, some of the later art in Essentials and the Dark Sun 4 setting is presented way more realistic than the books depict, looking more like 'bible art' than 'high fantasy art.'

Pathfinder has a unique split personality, where the rules are more simulationist like D&D3, and the art is way more fantastic and high-fantasy, with art depicting characters hanging in the clutches of Cthulhu-type monsters blasting them with magic spells. The game pushes the fantastic in the art, and then later on the rules catch up with unique classes and magic items. The later expansion books push a unique world a lot better than the basic guides, since the base books have to be compatible with other settings, they have to be more generic and D&D-baseline-centric.

It is a split more like hard sci-fi and science fantasy, and the rules and presentation matter. One example that is interesting is Mongoose Traveller's large book and miniature book. The rules are exactly the same, but the large book has art with a traditional hard sci-fi edge, and the mini rules book has art with sexier science-fantasy style art. Same rules, different presentation. I feel Traveller does hard sci-fi well, but science fantasy not as well as other systems built for pulp two-fisted action.

For fantasy, making sure the world-build matches the rules is critical to making everything seem like a unified creation. Design matters, and art plays a huge role here, because it sets the 'visual tone' for the game, and sets players' expectations for what they will read in the rules.