Arma 3: Roleplaying, 20 Years in the Future

This is a fun one, watch "Combat Mission" starring DarkgarX and myself over on Twitch:

Watch live video from DarkgarX on Twitch

Fun? Yes this is awesome fun. This is Arma3 using the Zeus RP server functionality built into the game. I am the dungeon master for these sessions, and I am also the voice of all the NPCs. I use some special software to do the radio voices, so it is fun playing the NPCs on the good guys side while watching the star of the show do his stuff. For everything I put him through, DarkgarX is a good sport and enjoys the heck out of our broadcasts.

I have control of the NPCs, I can jump into any one of them at any time, but they run on AI otherwise. It makes for some pretty silly situations as I play things straight when the AI has trouble pathing or run people over, but it's all in fun. I try to play this fair without making the enemies know everything, but that's just my DM skills coming into play.

This is awesome, and it shows what happens when game companies are brave enough to provide full dungeon mastering capabilities in multi-player games. This, this is roleplaying meeting online gaming, and it is incredibly fun and cool. Those who used to DM the old Neverwinter Nights game know what I'm talking about, and this is the more modern military open-world version of that game.

We have this technology now, and I can only imagine the fun that could be had with a swords-and-sorcery version of a game like this. Having an interactive world where multiple players can log into with AI opponents is one thing, that gets you to the MMO level, but having a real-living DM come in and play the enemies, layout the missions, and control the scenes is just so cool it's beyond words.

We're so stuck in this money-grabbing progression-dependent MMO world that people have forgotten about immersion, player input, creativity, and fun. This game, this one is a special one, and I enjoy the heck out of playing a DM in a modern-military sim in an online multi-player environment. Now only if the rest of the gaming industry would catch on with this idea, we would be having some serious fun online.

"Combat Mission" new episodes weekly over on Twitch TV, staring DarkgarX and myself.

The Numbers Game

I've always felt there's just way too much math and calculations in pen-and-paper games. The world of mobile and casual video game development and pen-and-paper games is about as far apart as I have ever seen them.

One one side, we have pen-and-paper, where calculating a basic to-hit can send you down a rabbit-hole of modifiers, situational considerations, character feats interrupting your train of thought, AC considerations, special defenses for monsters, and a whole lot of other "no wait!" thought-process stoppages before we can all agree on the number that needs to be thrown. Seriously, it makes me wish for a non-AC non-feat based system where that character has a flat chance to hit anything, and then when we hit we figure things out.

Feats are a huge problem. I love them, but they are used way too much to interrupt combat's mental flow. If I have "enhanced shield use" I get a +2 bonus to AC versus flanking opponents type stuff. It get maddening for high level play, and feat bloat and the rising complexity of the mental process needed to run high level characters is the number one reason my group dislikes high-level play in both D&D 4 and Pathfinder. I can't understand why no one has seen this and address this through design, it's the multi-feat elephant in the room, and when you get monsters with special defenses and feat-like abilities involved, the whole system just grinds to a halt for our group at high levels.

Let's go back to mobile and casual games. They almost purposefully hide numbers from you, and there are times when I wish I could see the math. It's an extreme comparison, but it's a good one. If casual games are getting rid of math to streamline games, I feel it's a valid consideration for pen-and-paper.

Let's examine the true purpose of a to-hit. It does two things, it reduces character DPS, and creates uncertainty when an attack is made. Assume another game says "characters always hit" unless a monster purposefully activates a special defense (dodge) and makes a special save, or some other external force is applied to the attack. This is just one example, there are probably plenty of other ways to do this.

It feels like a legacy of not asking questions why, and accepting further complexity as the answer for everything. It feels like one of the weaknesses of 3.x D&D, a system built upon a thousand interactions of factors X and Y, and that only gets more complicated as more books are added. I feel this is one area where D&D 5 may also fall to, as the base system is simple, as the calls for more flexibility rise, the inevitable (but welcome) add-ons will make the system the same heavy complex behemoth as previous editions.

Classic RPGs: Traveller

I've always had a soft spot for Traveller. It's one of those games I always loved to think about, but never played. It was so hard to put together a group for this one too, elves and dwarves make easier sells than hard sci-fi any day.

So this is the Mongoose rules edition, and I've heard some complaining about this one, but Mongoose has done a great job of putting together a classic Traveller experience. I guess with every edition you'll never make everyone happy and there will always be people that say "the next version" will be the one they will play. Yet when it comes out the cycle repeats again.

I have a rule: play what people can buy or reasonably get their hands on via downloadable PDF.

So the question remains, what makes this game any fun? As I said, it's a hard sell for most groups I have been around, especially younger players who know D&D and Pathfinder (or had some experience with fantasy), if given a choice many players I have been around will say "fantasy - anything" over sci-fi.

Part of it is player empowerment and fantasy fulfillment. In a Pathfinder-style game, there are a number of paths a player can take a character up for incredible power and legendary ability. You start out the game as someone who can do a couple cool things, and you are waiting to get to the incredibly cool stuff. It's like unlocking powers in the Diablo 2 skill tree and building your character. There's that sense of "I can't wait" and "I'm going to build a character who...."

With sci-fi, it's typically not that way. The only game that I saw recently that did character builds was Fantasy Flight's Edge of the Empire Star Wars game, and that game had deep skill and talent trees for cool character builds. Traveller, on the other hand, is almost 'anti character build' with its career system giving you what you need with a random system, and then you are good to go.

So the motivation is not personal power. It really has to be story. Great stories require great storytellers, and those are rare. Especially in the semi-defined world laid out in the Traveller rulebook, where you make your own subsectors and stories, or the all-consuming Third Imperium setting of this game. The Imperium is cool, but it is also really large and overbearing for some of the groups I played with. Some would much rather be playing in one sector with a homeworld and a bunch of unexplored systems with cool alien races, and not have the heavy Imperium zeitgeist floating out there.

It feels like the difference between a game with open oceans and pirates, with unexplored land waiting over the horizon and treasures to be found and something more cosmopolitan. The Third Imperium sometimes feels like a giant roadmap of Europe, of course you're a Traveller, you're traveling between all of the dots on the map, aren't you? Groups I've played with wanted something more like Expllorer, where they are the ones doing the mapping and discovering and cool brave new worlds stuff.

Of course, nothing is stopping you from doing that with Traveller or even the Third Imperium setting, but you will have to go a long way to get to "your part of the map". You still have that overbearing feeling of Imperial zeitgeist though, like the things you are doing matter little in a galaxy so huge and impersonal. It feels anti-heroic to me in a way, and it is something that throwing out the default setting and starting fresh with a small subsector gives you. That is a tough thing to do with Traveller die-hards, since the Third Imperium is so entrenched and powerful to the faithful. It's a cool setting, but I can see how it scares new players away - especially those coming from fantasy who want their heroics to matter.

I still love the game though, and even if I only 'play' it by reading it and imagining the stories I could tell, it's still a part of my sci-fi roleplaying experience. Still a classic to me, and I love all the support and things Mongoose publishes for the setting.

D&D 5: Waiting and Seeing

All right, well, our playtest with the D&D Starter Set is over. Thoughts?

We will wait.

It's just too early to make heads or tails of the system. Here's the issue, the number range is kinked very tight. So tight that in order to get a feel for the full range of character options, magic item upgrades, combat options, and upgrades we need the full three books to make up our minds about this. I don't know what a max-ed out character does, or the power of the high level monsters. What upgrade paths are there? How many build and character options will there be? What magic items and power upgrades will be available, and how rare are they?

Granted, a lot of this will be answered when the PHB and the MM come out, but those are a long wait. I want to see the DMG too, since the encounter creation and rewards sections will be critical for my feel for the pace of rewards and building challenging encounters. The complete three-book package is what I want, and that won't happen until the end of November.

To be fair, this needs a better and more complete review. It's just way too early to say if this is a good system or not because the things they released are clearly not complete. It would be unfair to make that judgement call.

What they have released hasn't really excited our group, to be honest. the free PDF is incomplete and only covers one path per class. It gives you a good mechanical feel for the rules, but you know, rules systems are just that - rules. They are streamlined and cleaned up, but that PDF doesn't do a great job organizing them and presenting them in a simple and new-player friendly way.

What would help? More player options, and I know, those are coming in the PHB. It's very hard to get a feel for the system until both characters and monsters are in place, since you need both to see what happens when party X fights encounter Y. I will argue you need the DMG's encounter-creation formulas too to have a realistic view based on encounter design. Still, I feel options are going to make-or-break this for my group, they need enough options to satisfy their Pathfinder design choices.

I feel the Starter Set is average at best. I would have paid more for a more complete experience, and to not have to rely on the PDF. I wanted maps and pogs, the back of the box looks like it has a large dungeon and overland map in it, but it is really just a starter module with some pregens. Character creation, monsters, level-up options, treasure - we just wanted more to get a better feel for it all. Due to the limited options, this didn't really catch on with our group. That I can't really help, at least we tried.

Only then can this be compared to Pathfinder and other games. Right now, it's too early to go around and make final judgments. The best outcome in my feelings? It becomes a cool and simple option for quick pick up games, giving Pathfinder some competition. The worst? We start another system war over this and the community gets more fractured and belligerent.

D&D 5: Adventure Prep Time

The prep-time for D&D self-made adventures has went up. The one thing I loved about D&D 4 was that you could throw together encounters pretty quickly, in general, X level Y creatures would match a party pretty evenly. Get +/- 4 levels away, and you started running into trouble. You could swap one creature out for 3-5 minions of the same level and be fine, and if you wanted to up difficulty, make some of those minions ranged attackers.

I tried winging a D&D 5 adventure, and it of course failed spectacularly. Either my encounters were too easy, or too hard. My roleplaying sections felt flat and didn't have much of interest to the players in them. I realized more prep-time would have solved this, and then I had this uncomfortable feeling that yes, I needed to commit more to prep-time to make D&D 5 work.

Granted, for games like Pathfinder this is similar, although I know Pathfinder's CR system to be able to put an encounter together in my head and have it be a the challenge level I desire. D&D 5's challenge rating system is skewed when it comes to lower-level creatures, so things aren't as easy to judge.

I am finding myself missing the advances D&D 4 brought to the table with prep-time and making the DM's life easier. I am also finding myself missing the tactical focus of D&D 4, and to some extent Pathfinder's. I miss that motivation of the board being the place where everything is decided, and that players could specialize in things the do on the table to succeed. It's that fiddly Warhammer 40K feel where the choices you make with your character matter on the board that I miss, the tight tactical game and interesting situations that develop on the tabletop.

I heard D&D 5 was going to get a tactical play book, and I am slowly feeling my group would enjoy something like this very much. Now, I am stuck waiting for it, of course....

D&D 5: Starter Set, Falling Damage

Okay Dungeons & Dragons Starter Set, where is the falling damage?

After about an hour of reading, I see what you did, you hid those rules from me inside the adventure in one of the encounters. I had to fall back to the PDF to find the official rule, but I was determined to find it somewhere in the Starter Set, refusing to believe they left rules for falling damage out. Sure enough, there was a 20' fall referenced in one of the encounters, and the corresponding 2d6 damage to let you figure things out from.

Arrgh! This set has been one headache after another for me running it. I am not sure about other groups, but our group hasn't been having the best of times with this set. I am going to try a reboot of our D&D 5 experience and run this again, knowing what I know now. We were severely hindered by not knowing the rules, having to constantly reference the Basic Rules PDF on a laptop (which slowed play), some issues with the very-tightly designed rules, and some of the background/trait rules led to a couple very-stiff feeling roleplay encounters.

As an aside, we also ran into a severe player motivation issue. With little or no magic items or other upgrades to collect, the driving force in my game became levels. With magic items also limited (due to the numbers being tightened up and also their lack of availability in the Starter Set/Basic Rules), my players felt really limited in the "sideways upgrades" they could gain. 

It's like this, in Pathfinder or D&D 3.x, if you were stuck at level 4, there are plenty of ways to still improve your character by going out and collecting gear. Even finding a 'utility items' such as an 8-charge wand of darkness could be a cool upgrade, and there's always another set of +1 chain to get, or perhaps you quest to find your party's rogue a +2 dagger. In D&D 5, a set of +1 armor or a +1 weapon is a game-changer since the numbers in the system are so tight, and I'm a lot less likely to hand those out early. 

So experience became our group's motivator, and then the inevitable "which monsters give us the most XP?' thing started...I know, story should be the motivator, but there always is this player-centric desire for upgrades and improvements at my table.

I want a reset, and another try at this to see if we can get the D&D 5 feeling going again. We will have another shot at this again soon, so I'm looking forward to running a group through this that experiences the new-game feel I read in the books, but haven't experienced yet on the tabletop. This system is turning out to a bit fiddly and requiring more prep-time on my part than D&D 4, which is also interesting. More on that later.

D&D 5: Cantrip Blasters and New Worlds

Mages and to a lesser extent clerics come with built-in blasters in D&D 5. Cantrips are cast-all-day at-will powers for both clerics and mages in this edition, and they have some pretty hefty 1d8 ranged damaging spells in there to choose from.

Pathfinder limits it's mage-blaster type spells to X per day, so there's a point where the powerclip runs dry. With D&D 5, it is an infinite reserve of magic with cantrips, and I'm feeling the number and variety of cantrips is only going to increase.

It feels like an odd choice, almost like 4E's at-wills, but only for mages and clerics. The martial classes just seem 'better' at melee, and get a collection of daily-type abilities, but I'm not seeing anything on the power level of this. Some of the mage cantrips scale up to 4d10 damage at 17th level, so that's a free 4d10 fireblast every turn for our mage-type classes that never runs out.

They also have multiclassing, so you can take one level of mage and have an infinite-cast cantrip blaster ready at all times. I'll be honest and I'll think twice about allowing that at my table just as a min-max build.

It feels like a balance issue for DPS at higher levels, and I admit, the math in this game is really tight. What mages lack in constant DPS that fighters have (with multi-attacks), they make up for with steady always-on magic-based DPS. This seems like a numbers-based design decision, and I hope fighters and rogues at high level are just as interesting.

In 4E, every class was a caster, and I do think the moving classes back to mechanically different play styles in a wise choice. But I can't help feel mages and clerics have it really good here in terms of resource management. It almost feels video-game inspired, where mages in games like DoTA and LoL have these magic-shot powers that can always fling something downrange.

This is a different style of world, almost video-game like and comic-book that the traditional D&D resource management scheme of things. These casters are almost like superheroes with their energy bolts blasting away at enemies than the casters I normally recognize as the traditional resource managers of 3.x or Pathfinder.

Granted, this is also probably motivated by a desire to get away from "magic item" blasters like wands of magic missiles and the like that characters depend on for DPS. Magic items are de-linked from character leveling and power level, and that is also a good thing. We shall also see if they are de-linked from the character DPS curve, and I can't help to feel this is also a good thing. Whipping out a wand of fireballs for item-based DPS seems less heroic than having that power inside of yourself.

It is different, and it is a new feel.

Which is why I don't feel this meshes with any of the established D&D worlds well at all, this feels like a new take on the fantasy experience. If I were to play this, it would be a new world entirely that supports this design and philosophy. In a way, each version of D&D has its showcase world which highlights its strengths and ideals. AD&D had Greyhawk, 2E had the Forgotten Realms, 3E had a mix of settings rebooted, 4E had Points of Light, and 5E I feel deserves something new and fresh. I likely won't be playing in the Realms with this, it doesn't feel like my version of the Realms, so I'm not going to force it upon this world in another "re-think" of the world mechanics.

I think this is one of the most contentious things about new D&D editions, they force a rethink of the world and another huge set of changes. I rather prefer to do a new world with each version and let players explore how things work with the new rules, rather than have those memories of how things used to be under the old rules. It's partially why Points of Light worked so well, new system, new world, and a fresh set of places to explore for 4E.

If I buy in, it will be with a new world that works the way things work now. I still want my Realms reboot, and possibly re-imagined with rules like these, but that can wait. I am in the mood for something fresh and new with a new system.