Dragon Age Inquisition Playthrough: A Whole Lot Not About Nothing

Yes, I know that is a contradiction, and it feels like the game is a whole lot "not about nothing" in our view. It would feel better if the game were a lot about what you were supposed to be doing, which is, at this point, something we are uncertain about. There is something going on, it just doesn't feel like any of it is relevant to the main story. It is "not about nothing" and it is also "something about something" all the same.

Yes, we are stuck in the middle of MMO questing, clearing zones, solving the world's problems, and helping out the ineffectual locals to correct every little problem with their lives. It is the one thing that bothers me about the MMO design model, the world must be inhabited by incompetents all the way from villagers who can't solve their wolf problem to the king who can't solve his dragon problem. Enter the hero and their band of miscreants to save the day every time.

It feels like a lazy world design model. In reality, the king's dragon hunters would be already fighting the creature (and likely ineffective), and you would be hearing news about the dragon when you started your career back in the village fighting wolves. I love a world where you are thrust into the middle of everything, where groups are trying to solve the world's problems (and either succeeding or failing), and the entire world is this fluid and ever-changing mess that you (as a hero) must be wading through and constantly judging the best path forward based on your personal goals - whatever those may be.

I hate wading into a "zone" with static "quests" waiting for me. I want games that let me set my own goals and chase them however I see fit. I want games that let me side with a faction of my choosing, or build my own, and support my slow rise to power (if that is what I want to do). I don't want the traditional "sandbox" experience as it has been defined in recent years by games such as Watchdogs or Grand Theft Auto V, where the world is a fun sandbox, but there are still static missions and activities waiting for me - I want a more dynamic world that lets me choose sides.

To be fair, there is a sense of achievement in Dragon Age: Inquisition when you clear a zone. It is a tedious task, filled with a whole lot of worthless treasure, endless harvest after harvest, and long XP grinding, but it does feel good. The grind in this game is brutal, and often the maps are empty and devoid of enemies, so there is a lot of boring running around in empty maps as you head towards the next objective. It reminds me of an un-modded Skyrim where you have the game set on too easy and you cleared the area, and you are criss-crossing an empty area and praying for the spawns to re-pop.

Give me a hacked-up Skyrim with the respawns turned up any day. I love fighting for my life across a dangerous landscape. I love judging if that next group of travelers has my best interests at heart, are they merchants or bandits? Are they neutral or a faction who doesn't like me? I love dangerous worlds filled with danger. Or at least, give me a way to turn up the monster spawns in Dragon Age to give me some constant and ever-present challenge.

Dragon Age: The Novel: The Videogame

Another point, we dislike the ever-present "notes as narrative devices" used in Dragon Age: Inquisition. We constantly come across these notes and journals that make no sense, and feel like they are written towards the next player character who happens by:

Dear diary, I harvested potatoes in the field today. I dug up a strange amulet and wondered what it was. All of a sudden, a giant spider attacked me and AIEEE!

Who writes this stuff? We have a joke that the mayor of the next town we find will be a book. It feels like there are way too many notes and books in this game that just send you to the next note or book so the quest can advance.

It would also help if the books you found weren't written in ALL CAPITAL LETTERS like some sort of Internet rant. Seriously, next time, a little larger text, a much larger text box, decent smooth scrolling, and use a readable typeface next time so these long homework assignments will be a little easier on the eyes. Even some of the 'war room' reports are written on such stained parchment that you struggle to read them at times.

Problem is, I love the lore and I am interested in the story. The game fights the reader and goes out of its way to present the information in the worst ways possible, and even the loading screens time out on you as you are in the middle of reading some long piece of interesting historical-

Yeah, maybe I will catch that next time. Seriously, let me have the option to press X to continue.

Tough Going, but DLC is Keeping Us Going

To be honest, we are still playing so we can hit level 18 and go buy those sweet level purple weapons in that 'black market' DLC shop up north. Having DLC gear has hurt the game I feel, we had some good stuff to start with, had no desire to craft better, and mid-game, we are waiting for the really cool stuff at the late to end-of-game. There are some cool schematics in the shop, but most of our endless harvests are going towards requisitions, so crafting would mean more collecting (and we are at our limit for scavenging tolerance right now). We are finding just enough stuff to get by, so we don't feel a need to spend time crafting and farming up materials.

I would love a Diablo-style drop and item modification system in this game, where you can break items down for materials, and find cool gear with interesting mods and stats. But yeah, we are putting a lot of hope in the DLC gear at end-game, and can't wait to get a hold of a couple of those later.

Of course, it is DLC gear, and probably not the best in the game, so we may be setting ourselves up for a bad experience. Still, I would have loved a system where you could crunch old gear for materials, salvage items, and build up your stocks of stuff to craft new gear (or enhance what you have). It could be the game has this type of crafting system, but it is presented so obscurely and hidden off in a room or system somewhere we are missing it entirely. Don't laugh, it happens.

More on our playthrough soon, and it is always interesting to share thoughts on this game from a game-design perspective.

Dragon Age Pen-and-Paper: Playtest Report #1

We played the quick start rules adventure for the Dragon Age RPG, and we noticed a couple things about the game. Well first, we noticed one big thing about the sample adventure included with the quick start rules, it supposedly forces you to make a moral choice in the middle of the adventure which turned out to be an entirely morally reprehensible choice.

It is really a terrible situation to put fresh characters in, even as a supposedly moral choice it is on one hand horrid, and the other a terrible way to start a campaign with the local royal family hunting you down. It’s dark fantasy, I know, but I would never play a situation like the one in the module as lighthearted as the module designer attempted to do (I felt the consequences of 'go dark' were dealt with a bit hand-wavedly and flippant).

Even as “dark fantasy” it is just not what my players expected or liked. To be fair, this isn't the big book (as shown), this is just the older free starter adventure, and it left us a bit wanting.

Our Adventure: Inquisition Prolog

We ended up running through the first scenario of Dragon Age Inquisition as our sample adventure instead of the quick start adventure and found a couple more observations.

DarkgarX plays a ranged rogue in the videogame, and we noticed an immediate lack of damage output with ranged rogues in this game. Compared to the videogame, rogues with bows have it good, and they are a decent damage dealing class. In the pen and paper game ranged damage per second for rogues felt woefully inadequate. They addressed this concern in a forum post where a developer suggested letting rogue ranged attacks use the rogue melee talents, such as backstab and dirty tricks. They further corrected this with an even better solution in the sister game Fantasy Age.

We ran into a situation where our melee character in our playtest, the heroic warrior Cassandra from the videogame, where she out damaged the rogue using the bow with her sword. DarkgarX was playing the rogue, and his arrows struggled to get through the darkspawn’s armor. As if the darkspawn should have any armor, as I was using the sample darkspawn monsters out of the module. That was probably a mistake on my part, but I did not have any monster statistics on hand so I used those.

DarkgarX expected to be able to do decent ranged damage, but his bow only did one die plus five, where Cassandra’s longsword was doing two dice plus three. This was to five points of armor, and Cassandra’s blows were consistently cutting through and the bow was typically rolling 1 to 3 points of damage per hit. He got this feeling of “why bother, grab a sword” and we struggled to replicate the feeling of the videogame. It was a frustrating start, and we found ourselves wondering why a longbow would do a base of 1d6+3 damage to the longsword’s 2d6 base. I could see a shortbow doing 1d6+3 (which does 1d6+1) and the longbow 2d6, or possibly halving armor versus bow damage (and keeping the damagers the same), but as it is the bows feel weak in this game.

Mind you, there is little need for a shortbow at all, and the game doesn’t go into too much detail on why and when each was used. I wanted more detail in this area as well.

Fantasy Age makes a huge improvement with rogue bow DPS, allowing rogues to add 1d6 to one attack per turn if their DEX is greater than their opponent’s with a “pinpoint attack”. This solves a lot of problems, and I am sorely tempted to port in this rule to make rogue bow DPS feel on par with what we experienced in the videogame.

Hell, I am sorely tempted to port in the videogame’s power list and give the characters some cool pyrotechnics. I would love to have the videogame’s ‘explosive shot’ available as a rogue archer spell to charge up an arrow and let fly. The pen-and-paper game is decidedly “down” on powers, so the characters play more like real people than action game shoot-and-blast MMO characters. Still, the videogame powers are fun, and they are what the world is like for us now.

There is something to be said for reflecting the world as most people enjoy it, and I would love to have an Inquisition sourcebook listing all the powers, magic items, and other cool bits for use in the pen-and-paper game. Actually, I would pay good money for that, and I would love for the game's super cool stuff to make it into the pen-and-paper game somehow.

Maybe I will spend some time with the Inquisition hint book and do a full conversion. If my hint book would stop being back ordered and ship, that is....

I am hoping we get another session in, this looks like a fun game and I like how it plays. It’s just how it plays isn’t really matching up with how we expect, and that is our problem. Fantasy Age looks to have better, more cleaned up rules, but I don't want to feel I have to pull in rules from that game to compensate.

Escalating Hit Points and Damage

D&D 5 made an effort to reduce the range of to-hit modifiers in the game, from +20 at maximum level down to a +6. Now, this can be affected by other modifiers such as ability scores and magic items, but the range is down from D&D 3 and Pathfinder era modifiers that are in the +30 range down to a more reasonable and d20 range friendly +10-ish level, or about half-ish.

"Bounded accuracy" is why, the design team wanted to get the modifiers to dice rolls under control and back within a meaningful amount. Some players feel the difference between low and high level characters is too tight and it creates a feeling that to-hit progression has been taken out of the game, with level only really contributing a 4 point difference between level 1 and level 20.

It does eliminate a key difference between low and high-level characters. Players like to feel empowered, and they like the feeling their epic ranger can deal death left and right at will, hitting impossible shots. But, the whiff factor feels pretty static throughout the game. Yes, this does create the 'will I hit?' tension, but some feel that expertise and skill of higher-level characters has been reduced drastically.

This is a math discussion, so I forgive you if your eyes glaze over. But it does setup discussion for today's subject, escalating hit points and damage.

Damage Output at Level X

Now, hit points and damage output? Unchanged in the scheme of things, and D&D remains a game about the high-level haves and the low-level have-nots. Yes, a low-level character can hit and damage a high-level character, but it doesn't matter because of hit-points. The next turn, the high-level character can sneeze and obliterate the low-level character in one blow, so being able to hit matters less. Only in the game-breaking tactic of massed attacks do low-level character have a chance, and this applies to everyone in the game.

While the designers have addressed the die-roll ranges, not much was done about the ever-escalating power curve of hit points and damage output. In a sense, the only difference between high and low level characters is damage output, and that has been the design ever since D&D 3 came out. In AD&D 2nd Edition, higher level characters could do more damage, but not to the videogame-like extent of D&D 3 characters and that design.

In basic D&D, if a level 20 fighter "hit" you with a longsword, it was still one attack at 1d8 damage plus ability score modifiers. He could hit auto-you all day with one attack a turn, but that damage per turn was still on a flat curve. With D&D 3, multi-attacks and a whole host of feat-based damage modifiers were introduced, which slowed up play with fistfuls of d20s being rolled for melee attacks, and damage output soared and continued to rise with almost every edition released.

But still, overall with most all editions of D&D and also Pathfinder, escalating hit points and damage output tends to turn the game into a combat simulator heavily focused on numbers. There may be some winks and nods towards non-combat skills and problem-solving, but the game lives and breaths on its combat system, and most modules focus on 'good fights' and 'balanced encounters' with a combat focus. It feels at times the D&D based games want to be videogames and MMOs with that heavy focus on combat and escalating numbers.

Who cares about problem solving when your character has 200 hit points and that dagger does a d4 damage? Do you know my damage-per-turn rating? It's awesome.

Yes, a great referee can mitigate this with varied challenges, but when we played the D&D games, we always had one player at the table who focused on character builds and combat, and this infected many other players with the optimization bug and focusing on combat rather than roleplaying and problem solving. The game is focused along these lines so it feels like you are unfairly punishing the min-maxers by putting skill and roleplaying challenges in front of them.

The Game Becomes Combat?

If you compare D&D with a flatter power curve system, such as Savage Worlds, Legend, or even GURPS you notice a couple things. Non-combat skills in those games feel equally important as combat skills. D&D has always had this feeling of a Superman syndrome at higher levels, especially the later versions past 2nd Edition AD&D. Who cares about problem solving when you have this much raw combat power?

Yes, you can make players 'lose' a mission and feel bad they didn't rescue the princess, but in a way, it really doesn't affect them.

There is a danger in making every player Superman. The game becomes about bashing bigger and bigger things, and the little things don't matter anymore. You lose a sense of scale. Combat becomes the only important challenge. A good referee can make the game be about other things, but still, the 500 hit die gorilla in the room is still combat. It's so big, the players are so powerful, and the system is tuned around making characters combat gods that the primary way of viewing a class is by its combat potential.

The first version of rogues in Pathfinder were 'skill monkeys' and 'couldn't contribute meaningfully to combat?' We got balanced and high-damage output rogues in Unchained?

Two questions:

1. Why do non-combat skills suck?
2. Why are we playing a tabletop MMO?

I have this feeling it is not a problem with the adventures, but the entire endless escalating hit point and damage output system of games like D&D past the basic set, and also Pathfinder.

Basic Fantasy vs. Modern Games

I use Basic Fantasy here because it is the most 3.5-like old-school game we have, and it's free so you can check it out for comparison. In my version of Basic Fantasy, an ancient red dragon with 13 hit dice has about an average of 59 hit points. In Pathfinder, it has 362 hit points. In D&D 5, it has 546 hit points. In D&D 4, it has 1,390 hit points.

What the hell, game designers?

Rolling ten to twenty times the dice for damage isn't fun, it's pointless. In Basic Fantasy, my 1d8+2 successful longsword hit to that 60 hit-point beast means something. In all the other modern fantasy games, it means very little or nothing.

The new games make up for it by putting a videogame-like power curve in place. Multi-attacks. Huge fixed bonuses. Powers that scale with level. D&D 5 tries to keep the to-hit static while scaling damage up. D&D 4 puts a 50% chance in place relative to level and scales damage. Pathfinder goes the multi-attack and fixed bonus route. It all scales with level.

Basic Fantasy is based off the old way of doing things. Your to-hit gets better as you level. You can do your damage easier. Your "damage output" increases because you are hitting more often. That's it.

Modern games put in an artificial power curve that scales both damage outputs and monster hit points based as you level. When you take that out and go back to the simple way of doing things, nothing much changes. That dragon is still dangerous. You are doing less damage, but it is meaningful damage.

It feels like the current design de-jour mantra is to go back to the original rules and make things feel like the older games. Well, there are games out there that are exactly like the way things were, and they are still different. The videogame-inspired power curve is still in place in all the modern designs.

Power Curves vs. Problem Solving

I feel the bigger issue is when the power curve becomes the game. Roleplaying problems, social challenges, and non-combat skill checks typically aren't included on the power curve. When you do put these on the curve, the result become nonsensical, like the DC 50 locked door.

I tried to run Pathfinder this way with DarkgarX. I promised him "non-combat skills will matter in this campaign" but still, he had that feeling that some module or situation was going to screw him over because he didn't make the best choices to satisfy the power curve.

With Basic Fantasy, you level how you level, your to-hit goes up, and you don't have to satisfy the demands of the artificial power curve based on your character design decisions. Your character levels up. You get a new hit die, maybe some spells, and you get a little better. That ancient red dragon still has 59 hit points, so even a 1d6+1 damage magic missile matters. It is closer to a flat system than any of the games which came afterwards.

There is still a power curve in Basic Fantasy, yes, but the original dice, in both the d20 for to-hits and polyhedral dice for damage, still matter. It is funny how a game with such a simple damage and to-hit model maintains the heroic feeling without all those extra added power curve rules. There was a simplicity and genius in the Basic D&D rules that was lost somewhere.

More importantly in Basic Fantasy, the focus is taken off combat and power escalation and put back onto problem solving. Combat still matters, but other things do too. Room descriptions. Puzzles. Figuring out how to take that chest of 500 gold pieces without a fight. Talking your way out of an encounter. Avoiding fights. Disarming traps. Stuff back at town.

Combat is not the best answer in old-school games. It is in many times, a last resort.

Sounds like real life, huh?

Find the Games You Like

It feels like the power curves designed into today's games are taken from videogames and slot machines where constant feedback, player empowerment, and 'combat as the answer' are the design goals.

Sometimes, yes, I want to play a game like that on the tabletop, and that's fine. I would rather play a videogame that does all the work for me though, such as Diablo 3, so there is that too. But if you don't realize the design decisions behind games, you play them because you feel you should, and not because they fit your preferred way of playing. This entire argument is really about education, and becoming more aware of how games are designed, and using that criteria to find games that better fit how you like to play.

If you like the power curve, great, but understanding a game and how its curve works will better let you select one you like. If you don't like the power curve, you need to know how to look for them and judge for yourself how the game works and if that fits your expectations.

If you never knew about the power curve and the design decisions behind games, that is a problem. Game designers aren't perfect, and they make silly mistakes. They also follow trends and design decisions sometimes without questioning them that lead the entire industry down a path it never realized it was following, such as chasing the power curve design model.

Realizing this and understanding game design makes you a better-informed consumer.

Dragon Age Inquisition Playthrough: That Was a Long Intro

Yeah, I bet you know what part of the game we got to. It is shortly after you lose all that stuff when you started, and then the real game begins.

Yeah, wow, that is a long intro part. I am wondering if the story wouldn't have been better served by cutting out a majority of that introduction and getting right to the good part. You know, cutting to the chase, and starting in the middle of the good part?

Yes, there was a reason to set everything up, and to let you get your sea legs under you, but the problem is now it feels like a huge reset button was hit and now the real game begins. Some of the NPCs have new power trees, and our core party feels etched in stone anyways. There are really only three we like taking along, and the rest of the group feels like castle bench warmers.

I miss the Shining Force series again, where everyone meant something. I am also missing the "split the party" moments in Final Fantasy 3/VI where you had to keep every character active and current because you just did not know if they were going to be called on later. Something feels wrong here when the majority of your team is on the benches, either increase the party size or reduce the number of characters, because we can't stand ignoring them.

Yes, it is us ignoring them, but laziness wins here. There doesn't feel like a need to use anybody else but our favorites, and the ones that work best in 90% of the fights. We are going with two tanks, a mage, and an archer. Other parties felt like they had sever problems with survival, and having too many squishies in the party just got too many people knocked out. When in doubt, take big iron. There are no healers in this game, so make those potions count with steel.

We are hoping things pick up, and I am forcing myself to forget that long intro and get around to enjoying the game again. It felt (to me) that things were dragging a bit, and you were being forced down a path where choices did not matter, and the endpoint was the same no matter what you did. I am hoping things break out now and we get some real world-changing stuff.

The game does feel like it is picking up though, more is open, more is happening, and the main map is coming alive. I am hopeful, and hopefully things start to get interesting from this point forward.

Car War Basic: Reissued!

It continues to be an amazing year as Steve Jackson Game re-releases the original Car Wars Classic Board Game game!

This one appears to have die-cut counters instead of the old flimsy "sneeze and die" paper-cut ones. Nice touch. And four dice in the box too, very nice.

This is also the basic version of the game, before Deluxe Car Wars or the Car Wars Compendium added so much the game became unrecognizable. This is just the basic game with a couple cars, a couple weapons, and a lot of tactical fun.

This game is a lot of fun, and by the reviews on Amazon, a new generation is discovering this gem. It may not be the fastest game around, but it is solid and it brings back many Mad Max style memories and good times.

Thank you to a great company for reissuing this classic game, and please check it out for some very cool and fun tactical car combat. This is one of the greats, and it is great to see it back.

What Happens When This Happens?

"It's a five!"

Mail Room: Basic Fantasy Collection (and the d4s, for fun)

All these books (minus the d4 sets) for about $30? All of them under five bucks each?

Super sweet deal.

606 pages of adventure that will last us months is an incredible value. Mind you, only about 100 pages of this are character creation material, 154 are monsters, so the remaining 400 or-so pages are mostly all adventures.

Do I care that it is not D&D 5 or Pathfinder?

Not in the least.

Why?

Unlike videogames, pen-and-paper roleplaying games never become obsolete. New games do not necessarily mean better. This is a modernized version of a classic game, and it takes a special set of skills to do well and survive in an old-school game. You can't sit back on a comfortable character build that you are used to or copied from a forum post, and you have little rules protection for your character at all. The strict limits are what makes this fun, because you need to rely on your wits rather than a bonus the rules gives you for a build.

This is old-school. You need to listen, be clever, think, and manage your resources carefully. You need to know your limits. You need to constantly struggle against bad luck. You need to pay attention to room descriptions. You need to use your imagination. You need that diabolical streak in you of how you are going to separate monster from treasure in the easiest way possible.

There are no 'search skills' or 'passive search rolls.' You need to say where your character looks, be specific, and just like that, the referee lets you know what you find - no roll needed. Of course, if you neglect to say 'I look under the drawer for anything stuck to the bottom' you may miss something important, but that is up to your cleverness to say and not your dice to decide.

There are no 'healing surges' and the to-hit modifiers are simple. +2 if attacking from behind (does not combine with thief sneak attack). Two range modifiers, +1 for short range and -2 for long. A -1 to -4 if the target has cover. A +2 to-hit and a -2 AC for a charge. A parting-shot (attack of opportunity like strike) for fleeing enemies at a +2 to-hit. And that's about it for how combat works.

Since this is Basic Fantasy, XP are given for story awards and monsters, so the reward system modern players are used to is in place. There is also an option for XP for GP as an optional rule so you can quicken advancement and get some of the old-school feeling back. That 500 GP ruby surrounded by lizard men? Yeah, that's my next level sitting there. Let's go for it.

I love the old school games. I don't need expensive books (nor do my players), nor do I need computer programs to create characters.

I am probably going to stitch all these together in a large shared world somehow and just play them all together like some huge old-school fantasy sandbox RPG. Morgansfort has a very nice overview map of a north fjords type area, and the rest can fit in wherever I want it to.

Overall, a great box full of fun today, and games we cannot wait to dive into.