System Complexity and Winging It

>

One of the key differences in a player's enjoyment of D&D 5 versus Pathfinder is the expectation of how low-level rules mechanics interact with characters. If you enjoy the lowest-level, fiddly, make this choice for the best result I would say Pathfinder is your game. If you enjoy the story more than you do the rules, then I would say D&D 5 is more your game.

I enjoy both. The groups I play with tend to enjoy story more than complicated rules, but they still haven't bought on to D&D 5 yet (and I fear the time they do I will be buying and selling them D&D 6 - I know I am missing out, spare me the grief).

Winging It Kinda Sucks

You know those times when you are either developing a rules system, you have a story-lite system, or you are playing without one and you have to wing something? You know, what would be handled in a more rules-heavy system, like fighting a balor demon or other specific creature, and you find yourself in a system where:

• You don't have stats for the creature or its powers
• Your rules can't really do the fight justice
• You end up making everything up and handling a lot off the cuff

Those, for me, are the times things kinda suck. Now, both Pathfinder and D&D 5 each handle what they do well, and I rarely get those feelings of rules inadequacy. With lighter systems like Savage Worlds or FATE, I feel I am making more of these 'jumps' and the original creature being fought isn't really the original creature. It is an interpretation, a translation, and the fight doesn't feel 'real' to me at all.

Now I also get this feeling if the entire situation and scenario is within the Pathfinder or D&D 5 rules and I don't have the time to handle it correctly and 'by the rules.' Granted, in Pathfinder I get this feeling more because of the complexity of the system, but also in Pathfinder I find there is a greater feeling of success in handling an encounter like this 'rules perfect' as a referee while maximizing the creature's offensive and defensive capabilities and tactics within the rules the best I can.

In D&D 5 I can handle larger and higher-level encounters easily, since the system went through a round of simplification and streamlining. I can also handle a larger number of players without my mind melting and turning into a gooey pile of special cases. But again, in Pathfinder I feel that greater sense of mastery with a more complex system in handling a complex situation, even if at times I question the need for all the complexity.

But in both cases, at the end of the fight, I feel I have done my job, made the creature fight to the best of its ability and worked within the rules to make the fight challenging, memorable, and exciting. The players can say they beat the encounter "by the book" and with the characters they designed with the tactics they came up with. Everything "worked" within the rules, and the players have this experience they can share with others who know the system.

When you wing it, players don't get that satisfaction, and that feels like my problem. Now, for you, you may not care. The story may be the more important thing here, and translating a monster from one system to another and not have it be "perfect" may not even matter to you. The story mattered more. The fiddly nature of the rules matters less. People are here to have fun.

Rules Matter, At Least For Me

I like the satisfaction of playing something by the rules and winning or losing based on my choices. That is how I would feel if I were a player (the few times I do play). I mostly referee, and I feel the same way there. Even in a story-based game, I like my choices to matter.

Sometimes, I translate systems and settings, such as Pathfinder's Golarion setting or World of Warcraft to Savage Worlds. With video-games you have much more leeway, because there is rarely an up-to-date pen-and-paper system to cover all the material (or any at all). With established settings, you start to feel "conversion dissonance" when you start meeting some of the iconic monsters of the setting, and begin to use a number of the big name spells. You get players who may have tried to hurl a fireball against a fire elemental, and while it may not have worked using the official rules, the conversion handles it differently and things seem out of whack.

With a lower level goblin everything works well, since there isn't much of a difference between a one-hit creature in this system versus that system. When you start to encounter monsters with special defenses or ones that rely on certain rules or in-game conditions, things start to fall apart and you need to start patching on the fly.

Some Groups Don't Care

I have been with groups that don't care for all the detail, and just play for the story. While I can do that, I feel something is missing from the action in the more story-based and rules-light games because the rules and fiddly parts should play a role in the story as well. My weekly group cares less, and I play along, knowing how I feel but keeping the party going with a great time.

Then again, some groups don't care. You kind of have to be a fan of the rules system to really get into the complicated and rules-heavy side of the hobby, and if you are just here to play and have fun that may not matter. Having fun matters. Making choices and having 'just enough' rules to handle a situation is what is important to you.

Savage Worlds: World of Warcraft: Part 4

Non-cannon time, so break your lore sticks and let's talk.

The old World of Warcraft d20 game listed Stormwind's population at an incredible 200,000 people. This was later revised to somewhere down to 20,000 people, which for a medieval city is still huge. Medieval London from 1100 to 1300 grew from 15,000 to 80,000 people, so there is a nice real-world reference. Here is a map of 1300s London so you can get an idea of how big of a city you would need to fit 80,000 people:

Source: Wikipedia

I can tell you now that even fitting 20,000 people into the in-game city of Stormwind is going to be a stretch. The place can't even handle a couple hundred players as it is on a weekend night. But seriously, there is something to be said for the original 200,000 number.

Because 200,000 would work.

If you said that "Stormwind was it" and the rest of the lands around it were mostly wild and unsettled (save for a couple dozen miles of surrounding farms thinning out as you go), such a high population would work. The city would be massive and the central castle would likely look something like a spaceship towering above that mass of people, but as the sole population of the world for most of humankind, that number would work.

Take that map of 1300s London and multiply it by three to get an idea of scale. Check the scale of 2,000 feet. I could see a Stormwind of triple London 1300, being that size, with 200,000 people, and the majority of humans on the planet. If the world is dangerous, people would flock together for safety, and we could have a huge scale world of 100 or 200 times and still have the iconic cities spread far apart. Fill the rest in with "wild, dangerous, and unexplored land" and we are back on track.

No new lore needed, just a scale change. A scale change with lots of "unexplored land" is a whole lot easier for lore-obsessed players to swallow than is all these new imaginary places and locations. They only need to agree that the capitals are massive in scale compared to the game, and that is also an easier sell because who doesn't like massive and huge?

So that is the answer. I will go back to the non-cannon mega-population hundreds-of-thousands "race capitals" sort of design, scale up the lands to be epic in size, and fill in the rest with dangerous and wild places. Also, take note of this comparison from the Warcraft movie and the game - these look like cities that could support the 200,000 number, especially Stormwind (compared with ancient London):

http://www.techtimes.com/articles/163429/20160608/warcraft-perfectly-mirrors-world-of-warcrafts-azeroth-in-these-comparison-images.htm

Another added bonus is this sort of design creates high drama. Because Stormwind is the capital for all of humanity, if it gets destroyed, that's it, game over for the humans. Same goes for the elves, the orcs, and every other capital. We can still have smaller versions of the non-important places, as I can't see scaling up Booty Bay to be gigantic, but I could probably add a couple rows of buildings behind the docks just for fun and to maintain that sense of scaling.

With one or two easy pills of lore-breaking to swallow, most of the world's the lore is intact, a sense of scale is created, and the design has a built-in high drama.

Excellent.

My Savage Worlds conversion of World of Warcraft is back on track. Next time, powers and classes.

Savage Worlds: World of Warcraft, part 3

 

I am being vexed in my Savage Worlds: World of Warcraft project by the maps. The maps of the MMO are not realistic at all, since they only cover about a 9 mile by 9 mile area. Both continents. You could see across those if you were high up enough. Here's a cool version of Google maps for the game's world, and it is cool.

So then I wanted to scale the maps and expand them, say by a factor of 100, so we have a 900 mile by 900 mile area, which honestly for a continent is still small (the size of the Western US; from California to the east side of New Mexico, and all the way up to Canada). That size could work, maybe, if the planet was smaller than Earth. Still, it's small if you want Booty Bay to be down by the Equator and the north side of the continent to touch the Arctic Circle. So maybe I need to scale by a factor of 200.

But we have another problem, once I scale this up by a factor of 100 or 200, there is a lot of room to fill. A lot of room. So much so that Elwynn and Stormwind are going to be hundreds of miles apart, when we want them within 10 or 20 miles. Add to that, just having one city and a small town isn't going to cut it for a powerful medieval kingdom, so there HAS to be something else here except Westfall and Redridge.

I know, there needs to be more cities and an expanded map...

...and the lore breaks here.

It was broken when I scaled the map, but it is really broken now. It is the Kingdom of Stormwind, right? Kingdom means "more than a city plus one small village with three buildings" in my book. Even the movie...looks like it takes some liberties.

Maybe I scale by a factor of 20 and give up trying to fill in new locations. Videogames are poor places to base worlds on, for one, because the distances are not realistic and they tend to be simplified "best of" mash ups, like GTA5's version of Los Angeles, Los Santos. Well, actually, GTA5 is huge and well laid out, honestly, and they are really sharp about how they lay things out to make each area appear bigger than it actually is.

Even the Chronicle volume 1 maps have no scale printed on them (my book is still in the mail, so I go by the preview), so this is a tough one. The world looks larger than it is. When I scale it up, I will need to fill things in. Now, if filling things in isn't a problem for me, I will go right ahead and do so.

But will my players agree? If I make two kingdoms of Hawkshire and Silverwind within the "Stormwind sphere" and have them fight over something, that will break lore. Those places don't exist, but if Stormwind was a "real" place and a "real" Kingdom, they should. Just like medieval England is not just London and some land around it. And maybe one or two villages.

If my players are cool with expanding the universe, this will work. If they are strict lore followers, this will not fly at all. Then again, do I even want to play in a universe where everything is so tied to the lore? The lore is cool but very strong, and I feel if using it makes life more difficult, then...why?

Some projects are easy, this one is not. If the big attraction here is WoW, then breaking lore is going to mess things up. But keeping the lore as-is introduces a sort of "videogame sized" world into a reality where it doesn't make much sense. I want there to be more room, more places, and the freedom to expand upon the world other than "game standard" places. If I am going to go and play only in game locations with game-standard content I might as well just play the MMO.

I wonder how the old d20 version of this RPG handled this, I never got into that because most of it is non-cannon now and the books are of lesser value to me.

So I am stuck. I don't want to do a lot of fill-in work (that players won't accept) and I don't want to break lore too much, so I am feeling the "go with what's in game" burn. And instantly my interest is lessened, and this is possibly another casualty of conversion-itis. It's a problem of converting a videogame to a pen-and-paper game - what lore we have is based on the game and that is hard to escape. WoW maybe will just be something that will be difficult to be anything more than just a videogame.

Is the lore even there for a larger, more realistic world?

Maybe Golarion is a better fit for this project. Maybe I can adopt the WoW feeling and make it work in that universe. Some things just may convert easier than others because they are based on something closer to reality. Still, I want this conversion to work. It's a tough thing.

I need to think more about this.

Savage Worlds: World of Warcraft, part 2

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But that isn't how things ended. 

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

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

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

Your best players leaving.

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

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

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

Just keep that credit card info current, your greatness.

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

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

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

Savage Worlds: World of Warcraft, part 1

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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