Minetest: The Great Fire

We have moved over to playing Minetest as our weekly streaming show for now. Minetest is a great Minecraft alternative, and the ease of modding this game is just something you have to see to beleive. It is a great game, and check out all the fun over on DarkgarX's Youtube channel here:

https://www.youtube.com/user/DarkgarX

For fun, check out our massive server forest fire at the 10:00 mark on this video:



And then the aftermath with the special coverage as the massive fire spreads across several biomes in this playlist:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrIVN3vVQ8le5NqxycWGqlRRCq_13xjqd

The fire is still burning on our server, and we are strategizing about how to put it all out - or if our Minetest world is a total loss. It is incredible fun, addictive, and just a blast to play. We have put several mods together for the fun of it, and the unexpected interactions are just too cool to describe.

We don't have a public server for this yet, as we are still working on mods, settings, and keeping the server speed acceptable. This is just an experiment for us, but a very fun and fascinating one we wanted to share.

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.

OGL & d20 SRD vs. Android & Linux

I am feeling unhappy about the OGL and d20 SRD today. There are so many limitations, there's product identity, no electronic gaming or software, no character creation, and all sorts of other 'so you have to buy the base book' limitations in these licenses you wonder if it isn't time to scrap the whole load and start over again.

There is a lot in the d20 SRD that is open and free public-domain content, and the D&D game mixes in copyrighted 'product identity' (mind flayers, beholders, etc) with that to create a unique game. It's their right, and they do an incredible job - I have no problem with that and I am a fan. But there are certain monsters and fantasy races that belong to humanity, and anyone can make a game with them - such as orcs or elves.

There are times where I just want to throw it all away, and start over with the original public-domain monsters and races that humanity owns, and create something the whole world can share. Yes, this means writing books, selling videogames, and everything else you can do with a true open source and open license product. It is for the good of the world, not for the good of the creators.

I feel the Creative Commons is a better, more creator-friendly license to work under instead of the OGL and d20 SRD. These two licenses created for D&D 3 are great, and at their time they were revolutionary, but they aren't free and open enough nowadays. They will also never change, and be stuck in the year 2000 when they were created and to some extents, abandoned.

A lot would have to be rebuilt in such an effort, and there would need to be a conscious effort to make things different enough from other fantasy games to keep the idea open and free.

It just feels like a moment in the open source movement where a project existed, and the creators realized it was being built on copyrighted or proprietary code - and a desire comes forth that 'we just need to rebuild.' Consider Linux/Unix, without that, there would be no Android OS (or to an extent, no OSX on the Mac). There had to be that base there that gave the creators of Android the freedom to build something cool and benefit humanity. There is no profit in the base system, but if you put in the effort and build a cool phone or tablet - that's where customers can say 'good job' and buy your stuff.

But the pen-and-paper industry seems stuck back in the days where you had to buy your operating system. Imagine if you had to buy the next version of Android when it came out - it would be silly and a mess. It's what you do with it that matters, it is the device and the functionality and ease of use. I could care less about rules, I care more about having a great time. As long as my device runs the current version and can be upgraded, I'm cool with it.

Presentation, device quality, functionality, and ease of use - that's what I look for in an Android product.

Presentation, book quality, functionality, and ease of use - that's what I look for in a pen-and-paper game.

Everyone Needs to Play This!

Yeah, that above line. That's what you want to hear. It's like the days when World of Warcraft was hot because that's what everyone at work played, and you had to too so you could be a part of the water-cooler discussions.

Pathfinder? D&D 5?

We're not there yet or the boat never got here.

Pen-and-paper games are terribly niche. It feels easier to sell a boxed board game in Barnes & Noble such as Arkham Horror or Risk than it does to sell a "concept" like "pen and paper roleplaying" to people. This is not for the faithful, this more applies to new players, you know, the next generation of players.

What would it take for fantasy roleplaying to go mainstream again?

You are platform building, like an operating system. Computer companies know how to get market share, and it typically goes like this:

1. Release an OS that is easy to pirate or get for free
2. Support lots of pirated and free software
3. When you control the market, lock things down because the party's over

It's a cynical view, but there's a truth to this. If your game or OS is everywhere, you will control the users, even if you are not making any money doing it. That's more important when you launch, because you can worry about locking in that user base later and monetizing them after they have built up a substantial investment in software or gaming books that it would be too painful to go anywhere else.

It was this way with D&D 3 and the OGL and d20 SRD. Paizo kept supporting those games, and took many of the locked in users with them. If D&D 4 was the "upgraded Windows 7 version" of D&D 3's "Windows XP," things would have been different. But D&D 4 went Windows 8 instead, and you got a split in the market where some people liked the concept, and some long-time users didn't.

So Windows 10 and D&D 5 feel like the "what did we do last night?" hangover games and OS's returning to the familiar way of doing things. They feel like iterative "return to the normal" experiences that you have to use rather than a breakout experience that causes a market hysteria and rush of new users and players. If you want to keep using a PC, yeah, you will probably need to use Windows 10 some day. If you want to be a part of the hobby store crowd, yeah, you will have to pick up D&D 5 and learn how to play. Pathfinder is always there for the D&D 3 crowd as well, existing like a Android or Chrome OS for those fans.

I'm reminded of Apple's new OSX Yosemite upgrade and how nothing really changed much but some backend stuff, the UI, and some icons. It still feels like the same solid design, and they didn't go all iPad on us desktop users and force a new way of doing things on us. There was no major change in the way things were done, there is no "hangover version" of the OS, and things still work the way they did. Apple is conservative, because it know not to mess with the way users know and love how to do things, unless a major-major change is needed and they have no good options (Final Cut, etc).

In a way, roleplaying is already mainstream, it's just online games and communities have taken the torch from pen and paper games and people "roleplay" in a million different ways in a million different programs everyday. D&D has to become relevant to those roleplaying fans again, a platform for people to express themselves in fantasy settings and worlds. They are split off roleplaying in World of Warcraft to Second Life, often roleplaying in games that don't even have basic support for meaningful player interaction or dungeon mastering.

Those are your users.

I feel we are three of four generations of D&D style games away from this point because we just don't have the vision and willpower to make this a reality. D&D does not need a new set of paper rules to get to the mainstream conversation again, it needs a vision of what the product can be.

Specific Worlds vs. Semi-Generic Games

There's always been a conflict in pen-and-paper gaming between specific worlds and "semi-" generic games.

Lord of the Rings vs. D&D

Star Wars vs. Traveller

[cool movie they borrow from] vs. Shadowrun

That last one is a bit humorous, but it's true, Shadowrun typically borrowed cool idea after cool idea from various fictional and cinematic sources and stitched them together in a narrative. Think about that. It's essentially the D&D model as well. "It's the best of everything!" tends to be the rallying cry of generic fantasy gaming systems, Pathfinder among them, and D&D was born out of this belief.

Purists, of course, like to play in specific worlds. How many times have you tried to play generic sci-fi with a group  and heard "It's not Star Wars" or Star Wars did not come up at least once during the gaming session. You cannot get away from the big pop-culture franchises no matter how you try with some groups, and that is all some groups will play.

Same thing with Lord of the Rings and gamers who prefer the original source material to D&D's odd menagerie of things pulled in from everywhere, plus what Lord of the Rings has. D&D's odd mix is a genre to itself nowadays, so repeated and used repeatedly it has became a specific game world in itself, a copy of the copies of the copies - that people copy.

Copying isn't bad, but it does create strange bedfellows, and often requires a lot of hand-waving to explain. The more you add to D&D or any game for that fact, the less believable it gets, and the less playable it gets. It's the "Universal Rule of Game Gluttony" - generic games expand until the point that they die of over-expansion.

The more books you buy, the worse it typically gets.

Contrast this with specific worlds, and no, Expanded Universe Star Wars does not count (and even Disney got rid of it likely because of the Universal Game Gluttony rule). With specific worlds, the cannon is already set in stone, and that's what you have to play with. With some, you can even choose to play with a subset of content (everything in Star Wars and Empire for this game, the rest is out).

Side-note, I like games that are smaller and more specific, expand-ability usually isn't a big selling point for me or my groups. It's always nice to have new stuff, but we are at the point today where desktop and web-publishing models can easily super-size a game to a degree where no one can collect or play it all. More is not better.

Some games try to create their own universes and have you play in those. These are often difficult to find an audience for, either you have a big commercial property that everyone knows, or you have a generic game that can ape along with the times. Finding a group excited about a niche world developed by a role-playing game company is always a tough thing and a hard sell to new players.

It is tough to sell a new world in today's climate, because the licensed players are bigger, make more noise, and have legions of fans with instant communication 24/7. Even if you did make noise, it is still a challenge being heard unless you are a known designer or have something really, really unique.

In a way, it's why we have the semi-generic games we do. They get around the licensed property hurdles by leaving up what people want to borrow from pop-culture to the individual group, and the fact these games are built to do so gives people that avenue.

Adventure Design, Then and Now

I remember when adventure design was creating a dungeon map and stocking it. You didn't really need a reason to go down there, playing AD&D was like a game of Diablo where you smashed the monsters and grabbed the loot.

There was a point soon after where adventures became stories. Railroading became a common complaint as player freedom was removed for the grandeur of the adventure writer's brilliance. It's a great story, but a lousy dungeon. We needed reasons to go places, we needed to develop stories for tabletop gaming, and smashing monsters and taking loot was seen as a lesser form of play.

It's just hack and slash!

Point taken, but some people play the game for exactly that. We don't need to call why they enjoy things as a lesser form of play, or design games to discourage it.

So we get closer to today, and we went through a phase of "storytelling games" like Vampire the Gathering and others which engineered the experience for playing stories than playing dungeons. In a sense, these were purer expressions of the story-telling ideal, and they worked very well for that purpose.

And then in the 2000's, the "games to be all games" appeared with D&D 3 and others. You can actually trace this sort of "system game" back to GURPS and Champions, the original "big box" games, but d20 and its spawns tried to be everything to everybody, just like World of Warcraft and other all-inclusive fantasy experiences are today.

Adventures could be stories! Adventures could be dungeons! Adventures could be flowcharts, randomly created things, relationship maps, or any other construction.

It worked, and it still works with Pathfinder and other games, but we do see some "experience engineering" coming back into fashion with D&D 5. With the new D&D, we start with an assumption of "it's about the story" again, and map play and hack-and-slash feel like they are being pushed away.

For storytelling gamers, this is great, finally a version of D&D that appeals to our inner storyteller! For D&D 4 players, the battle-chess hack-and-slash game is gone, and feels like they are left by the wayside. Of course, D&D 4 can still be played, and Pathfinder has a strong map-based system, so there are things still left to play.

Two things. It's hard to be everything to everybody. It's true even in the 'real world' of work and life. Another thing, if feels like we are caught between this endless cycle of hack-and-slash versus storytelling again and again. Is it seen that hack-and-slash players prefer computer gaming to tabletop? Is it seen that tabletop players are more interested in stories?

The times dictate the games we play. But you do have a choice in your preferences, and the types of games that appeal to you. It is always hard to cut through the "dessert topping as a floor wax" style of marketing today that tries to paint something as everything to everybody, so you have to be informed and most importantly, comfortable in your own decisions and feelings about what you like to play.

Game Size Keeps RPGs Niche?

I just have this feeling that the size of pen-and-paper games keeps RPGs out of the mainstream.

Here we are in a tablet and cell-phone world, with our desktop dinosaur operating systems soldiering on as niche gaming and content creation platforms, when the majority of the world is moving on to lightweight, mobile, and simple "lightweight" experiences. This is an Android and iOS world now, the majority of computing devices from now on will not be desktop towers, and they will not run a "full" desktop OS.

Mind you, I need my tower for gaming, and I will need updates for it. It is absolutely needed for me, but computing and the role of computers in peoples' lives is changing. I am feeling tower-based computing and gaming is becoming a niche hobby compared to the size of the mobile and tablet user-base that keeps growing and growing. Tower usage feels stagnant or in a slow decline, while mobile usage is growing incredibly fast.

Now, compare this with the primary offerings for roleplaying today, D&D 5 and Pathfinder. Both are very heavy games in just book size alone, with D&D 5 being 992 pages for the PHB-DMG-MM combo, and Pathfinder clocking in at 896 pages for the Core Rulebook and Bestiary 1 combo.

Granted, you don't have to read the nearly 1,000 pages for each game to get started, and a lot of that is value-added options and extra content type of stuff. But it is still nearly 1,000 pages of rules, spells, monsters, options, character builds, combat rules, referee advice, magic items, and other options to at least have a basic working knowledge of before you can get going with the system without being in the start-and-stop phase.

Compare this with the TSR boxed games which included a 64-page rule-book for a complete game. Granted, those games did not have as many options as today's games, but they were simple, lightweight, and could be read and digested within the first hour of opening the box and setting up. There is always a place for complete, 1,000 page games in my life, just like there is a gaming tower, but the pen-and-paper gaming hobby feels like it is missing lightweight, casual games intended for a large audience.

There feels like two problems here. One, intro sets and beginners boxes do not count as lightweight, casual gaming - they are intros to the full set of books and do not count as complete standalone games. Intro sets are not complete experiences.

The second problem is the center-stage 1,000 page RPGs compete with any smaller and lightweight games. There isn't any room for them in the hobby other than very small and even more niche audiences. The big rule-book sets push everything else out because that is what a majority of players play. It is the dark side of the network effect, because the "most popular" game is large and complex, it keeps new players out of the hobby because there is no room for casual "market entry" games supported by the big players in gaming.

Then again, we need a casual pen-and-paper gaming market that can exist on its own, support the release of new games, and maintain interest from casual game to casual game to keep that side of the market happy and playing. It is not a "we lose D&D players" sort of thing, because some of these players would never play D&D anyways because of its size and (fairly or not) perceived complexity. The person who buys iPad games but doesn't get into PC gaming is the type of gamer I'm thinking about here, someone who would play casual game after game for the experience, but doesn't have the time, resources, or mental commitment for a full desktop gaming rig.

As an aside, it is a huge design challenge to make an RPG small and keep it to a 64-page target. It is a lot harder than you think because RPGs are supposed to provide options and enough content to maintain interest. Some dicing systems (D&D d20, 3d6 GURPS) as designed tend to fill pages faster than other systems, so there are some 'hard' dicing and system choices that can hurt you in page count before you even begin the project.

I love my big games like I love my gaming rig. I also feel the need for smaller casual - yet complete - games for the market to satisfy that market segment. I think a lot of the "big game companies" have stuck to the "game as OS" revenue stream model, and not the "game as commodity" model where complete, no-update-needed boxed games are sold on the shelves like Monopoly or Risk. Sure, you can theme, make minor improvements, or change up those games for new flavors and experiences, but the core game is still sold alongside and remains a stable product for generations.

Somewhere along the way it feels the word "roleplaying game" became synonymous with "revenue stream" and we went down this path with pen-and-paper games with open-ended systems. We need to understand some of the reasons why interest in our hobby feels difficult to push higher, and I wonder if game size has something to do with it, and not addressing a casual market with complete, supported, and purpose-built commodity products.