Bad Game Design That Leads To Immortality.
Magic: the Gathering was a horribly unbalanced game from the outset. Part of that was not the game designers’ fault.
Nobody expected Magic to be as popular as it got, so with this new collectible card game designed in the days before eBay, the designers (sanely) assumed that nobody would buy enough cards to collect all of them. They assumed most people would buy a few packs and play games with the handful of cards they had, which was inherently safe. Maybe it would be nigh-impossible to beat someone if he got ten of all the best cards… but what were the odds on that?
Whoops.
But more importantly, the designers didn’t understand how powerful some effects were – a decision that warped Magic for years. They didn’t understand that “drawing cards” and “mana for free” were actually so powerful that anyone who harnessed these strategies for cheap was effectively unbeatable. So cards like Black Lotus and Ancestral Recall, which seemed so impotent to beginning players that many of them actually traded them away as crap cards, turned out to be so ridiculously strong that today they’re worth… well, click the links if you wanna see what they’re worth.
Which meant that the early days of Magic play often consisted of hunting down these overpowered cards, jamming them all into a deck, and making a deck literally unbeatable by poorer and less-devoted players.
Was that a mistake?
I was pondering that while I walked Shasta the other day, because early D&D seems terrible and overpowered, too. Wizards were glass cannons at the early levels – “Cast your Magic Missile and fall asleep” – and then effectively unbeatable at higher levels. Meanwhile, boring old fighters kept leveling up and doing the same things over and over again.
Plus – and this is a huge design flaw – Wizards can do pretty much anything except heal people. What can’t a spell do? The slate’s almost unlimited. There’s no actual thematic feel to what a “Wizard” spell feels like, aside from being cast by a guy in a robe, which means that of course the characters are going to be imbalanced when there’s nothing a spellslinger is incapable of, given a high enough level and a thick enough spellbook. If the D&D game had said that Wizards were masters of elemental energy, or controlled the mind, then Wizards would have been a lot narrower and given others room to grow… but as it is, you get to ninth level and getcher hands on Time Stop or Wish (Time Stop is better), and it’s game over.
Except.
Except as little Ferrett, ten-year-old boy, those ridiculous levels of spells were what entranced me about the game.
I loved living out my little power trips in my head. I figured out exactly what spells I’d be kitted with on any given day, obsessed over which spells would be most useful in the greatest variety of situations, imagined the potency of a Time Stop at the right moment. And talking to some of my old buddies, I’m not alone; in real life, people often played fighters or thieves, but I’m pretty sure that when lonely little kids were imagining the fun of campaigns, it’s Wizards who got played inside their heads.
If the early rules had been more balanced, I don’t think I’d be a D&D fan today. Some of what made it fun was that overpowered nature – and while I acknowledge that as a game, it’s far better if all the classes are mostly equally useful at every level (or, at least, you’re open about some character classes flat-out being inferior like Ars Magica), for purposes of popularity I think it was the right move to have those ridiculously overpowered and all-encompassing spells.
We can fix the game balance in future editions. But without future editions, we don’t have a game.
Likewise, I know a lot of the dorks in Magic who were thrilled when they discovered that shit, that useless-looking Mox Sapphire was actually really overpowered, and the chase to find those literal gems in trade bins was what got their juices flowing. Yes, some cards were too strong. But they weren’t obviously strong, and I think a large part of what leveraged Magic up to the next level of popularity was discovering that hell, these bleah cards were actually so good that you had to have them, and then a certain portion of high-profile fans got off on collecting the rarest cards and building unbeatable decks. Their energy, their commitment, towards making the “twenty Black Lotuses, twenty Ancestral Recalls, twenty Fireball” deck made Magic spread further than it would have if all the cards were roughly equal.
So is that bad game design? Or is it inadvertently brilliant game design?
I can’t decide.
I'm Suspicious Of Anyone Who Idolizes Me, And You Should Be, Too.
Rain DeGrey wrote an awesome post over on FetLife called Take It Down A Notch, Rock Star, about how community leaders need to not accept the adulation given them. She talks about how it’s bad for the community; I’m gonna talk about how it’s bad for you, buying into your own hype.
Read fast. I’ve got five minutes to write this before my therapist arrives.
The thing you need to realize about people loving your shit hard enough to follow you about is that in many cases they don’t love you, they love the idea of you. They want a world where someone has it all perfectly goddamned together, where mastery of a technique or wisdom in an area spreads out to touch all other areas of life. They make you perfect because they want to be perfect some day, and if they can put you on a sufficiently high pedestal, then they can believe that some day they too will never make mistakes.
You made perfect art == therefore you must be perfect == therefore, I will one day shed this annoyingly inconsistent life.
Don’t get me wrong: it’s an honor to have someone love your stuff. There’s a core of you-ness at the center of it that they genuinely resonated with, and you did the hard work of transforming that you-ness from an internal to an external state. I demonstrate my being with words; others do it with rope, or guitars, or video productions, or what-have-you, and learning to translate your inner thoughts into a form that others can appreciate takes time and effort that should be appreciated. What you did was awesome, and many of the folks who stick around to see what you’re doing next are doing so simply, and rationally, because you make good stuff and they are eager to see your next…stuff.
So I am not, repeat not, saying that nobody should compliment you or like you or want to follow you. But I am saying that this compliment often inflates into a “She’s so good at rope, she must be perfect at playing in the dungeon, she must never hurt anyone,” and that chain of logic inevitably meets a messy end somewhere.
I’m really, really good at not accepting adulation. And I think that’s saved me from some pretty horrendous fates at times in my life. It’s a toxic drug, because you want to believe that life has quick-fixes where you’ll never have to feel lost or stupid or uncertain again, and here’s someone telling you that you know the answers.
When you know the answers, you stop asking questions. And it’s the questions you don’t ask that fuck you up the most.
Buying into your own hype stops your development as a person. And I think if you’re lucky enough to get any kind of fame, even a small one like “Having a C-list blog” fame, you need to learn how to shake off the idea that this means anything beyond the fact that you connected with someone, and that’s awesome.
Doesn’t mean you’re skilled in other areas beyond communication: some of the greatest writers were completely dysfunctional in their real lives.
Doesn’t mean you’re incapable of making mistakes: some of the best magicians still fuck up.
Doesn’t mean you’re a nice person: God hands out talent with one hand and kindness in the other, and you’d do well to remember that.
It means you succeeded as an artist. That’s wonderful. That’s killer. And if someone tries to bring more to your table, your best bet is to push it away with a pleasant “No thank you” and return to the hard and confusing and often completely dissatisfying work of improving your life.
And if you’ll excuse me, my therapist has arrived. Time to improve mine.
Numenera: How'd The First Session Go?
After reviewing the Numenera core book, some people said: “But Ferrett, you haven’t actually played the game! How can you call that a review when you haven’t had rubber hit the road?”
Well, last night I ran my first Numenera session. You want some impressions of the most interesting new roleplaying game to hit this year? Well, by God, I’ve got ’em.
Nice Thing #1 About Numenera: The Character Creation Is Superbly Flavorful
When I create a character, generally it’s “concept first”: I think of an idea (“What if I had an Amish kid who fought vampires with Jackie Chan-style antics?”) and then try to shoehorn that into whatever mechanics the game provides. Because the mechanics for character creation are often dry and uninspiring (“Oh, you’re a fighter, like all the other fighters.”).
But each of the four players in my game showed up with no pregenerated ideas of who they’d be, and the way the creation is structured actually herded them towards creating someone with a personality and a unique set of powers. Creation itself was like walking someone through the options: “Do you want to be good at fighting, good at technology, or a little of both? Okay, now what kind of personality do you have: Charming, Rugged, Mystical? Now that you know what kind of personalty and type you are, let’s hook you up with a badass power like Bears a Mantle of Fire or Works Miracles.”
(In a related note, it’s really nice to be able to fit a mostly-completed character sheet into a Tweet: “Fred is an Intelligent Jack who Explores Dark Depths.” Bang. You know all you need to know.)
For the first time since I was a GM, “making the stats” really got people excited about their character as they worked through the process, as it told them who they were and what they were like. The only snag was “Okay, now why do you have these weird powers? What’s your origin story?” – but even then, the book had a generated list of suggestions, which led to a bunch of pretty kick-ass backstories generated easily.
Also, it’s right in the character generation that the players have to interact with other players – “Choose one character who is immune to your Mantle of Fire,” “Choose one character who you feel protective of” – so when we sat down, there was an instant knitting of a sense of Group as they all introduced who they were playing and then discussed how their backstories intertwined to create these unique player-on-player interactions.
Bad Thing #1 About Numenera: Stat Pools Presented As Stats
If I told you one character had a Might of 19 and the other had a Might of 3, and then told you each had to dead-lift a two hundred-pound weight without putting any special effort into it, what would you think each characters’ odds were?
What if I told you that in Numenera, barring some skill training, they had the exact same odds?
It’s a little weird, but all the “stat pool” means is that if the character wants to burn that pool to apply Effort, they can make the roll easier. Which means that having a ton of Speed doesn’t make rolls easier in itself, it just makes it so that you can apply bonuses to the roll more times in a day – the 19 Might gal can reduce the roll’s difficulty maybe seven or eight times before she gets tired, while the 3 Might guy can only do it once. But in terms of dead-lifting that weight, both the 19 Might gal and the 3 Might guy have the exact same chances the first time if they apply Effort.
It’s not a bad way of doing things, but people were a bit confused. Shouldn’t having a gigantamous Intellect mean that you have a better chance? Not without activating your Intellect skills, no.
Bad Thing #2 About Numenera: No Good Character Software (Then).
When I was creating the characters, the character generator wasn’t out yet, so I used an online generator linked to by Shanna Germain. It didn’t tell me when a character was incomplete (and I didn’t know, since I was still inhaling mechanics), so several sheets printed out lacking Edges and other vital-to-know stuff. I’ll have to check out the “official” app this week.
Nice Thing #2 About Numenera: The Characters Rolling Is Pretty Nice
As a dice addict, I was concerned about one of Numenera’s semi-unique features: the GM rolls no dice, ever. The players do all the rolling. If they’re on the attack, they make an attack roll; if they’re being attacked, they make a defense roll. That turned out to be a really nice system, because there’s a tendency for the GM to “seize up” during most games as he rolls dice and calculates damage, and you can see the little hourglass icon over his head as he calculates. Having the players roll for everything keeps them involved at every step, which made for a much livelier game, and I didn’t feel like I wasn’t in control.
Plus, the ability for players to spend Effort to reduce their rolls made the rolls interesting by default. It usually wasn’t just “Okay, hit a 6 or more,” it was “Do I do something cool to lower the target number? Do I spend my points?”
(This was also heavily encouraged by my on-the-fly-but-now-personal-canon house rule of “If you do not describe your attack in a gloriously cinematic fashion, the difficulty increases one step.” That’s right; anyone who says, “I roll to hit” without detailing the incredibly cool way they’re assaulting this monster – and thus giving me the chance to reduce the difficulty by assigning Asset bonuses – actually finds it harder to land a blow.)
Bad Thing #3 About Numenera: It’s A Front-Load Of Stats
The Numenera system is pretty simple, but because they’re doing all the rolling, they also have to do a lot of the calculating. As a DM, for novice players, I can often do a lot of the calculations for them if they’ve got that deer-in-the-headlights look, but Numenera encourages a fair amount of “You do it all!” And they’ve made it as simple as they can, but it’s still a fair amount to dump on a newbie. (And yes, you can do math for them, but when it’s not a complex chart like D&D, the easiness of the system seems to make them feel a little more stressed for Not Getting It in the beginning. Or maybe that’s me.)
Bad Thing About Numenera #4: You Can’t Save Them From Bad Die Rolls Early On.
Poor Jerry rolled more 1s that evening than I’ve seen ever. The dice hated him. And while in a longer-term campaign he could have burned XP to reroll bad dice (which he did!), in this first session the only way I could give him XP to avoid the hatred of the dice was by making things harder through GM intrusion. As it is, thanks to a slew of bad die rolls, nobody emerged with any saved XP, and I felt bad about that.
Good Thing About Numenera #3: The GM Intrusions.
Numenera is unusual in that you get XP by the GM “intruding.” I say, “Okay, I think it would be interesting if your sword got stuck in the monster’s head and it was snatched out of your grip. Do you agree?” If you do, you get two XP immediately, one of which you have to hand to another player, and your sword goes bye-bye; if you disagree, you pay me one XP and keep your sword.
I was worried this would be too heavy-handed. As it was, people seemed to enjoy them, as I used them only to make the fighting more chaotic and not to generate insta-kills, because if I say, “Okay, this beast carrying dead bodies suddenly produces a flamethrower cypher,” that’s actually kind of cinematic and cool – and you get rewarded for it with immediate XP. We’ll see how it goes when things go more to their detriment. But I think while it’s a bit of explicit hosing of the players – as in, we’ve lifted the DM’s screen to make it very clear when you’re engineering events as opposed to pretending that was supposed to happen all along – that leads to a little less “pretending the world is seamless,” that cost is offset by the “Well, we’re all mapping out this world together.”
If you’re the kind of guy who wants to pretend that the world was this way when you got here, then the intrusion system is a constant ping that “THE GM IS MAKING THIS STUFF UP” that may distress you.
(Also, the players seemed a little nervous at first trying to figure out who to give the bonus XP to, not wanting to hurt anyone’s feelings; one suspects that’ll fade in time as they’re more comfortable with the characters.)
Thing To Learn About Numenera #1: The Intrusions
As a GM, it quickly becomes apparent that the #1 GM thing in Numenera (outside of storytelling, obvs) is when to intrude, and how often. I don’t think I did intrude often enough in the first session (only three times), and I need to determine when that works.
Good Thing About Numenera #4: The Cyphers
The “cyphers” are Monte Cook’s attempt to give players a variety of powerful, one-shot effects – because in D&D, when you know exactly what your 1st-level thief can do, it gets a little boring. They’re scavenged tech that works once and gets replaced, and I explicitly told my players, “Use these things, you’ll get more.” And they added a lot of fun to the play – in the first combat, they burned two cyphers: one on a nanotech grenade that actually hurt everyone in the area (because the players all agreed they’d take some damage if this damn thing went down), and another awesome use of an intellect-destroying cypher when they were all running from a monster with an about-to-explode rocket embedded in it, and used the intellect dampener to confuse the monster so it didn’t explode while hot on their heels.
That added a lot of variety to the game, because otherwise each character did have a small, discrete set of powers, and the cyphers added variety. “Oh! I can do this! Once. And I trust I’ll get something else later on!”
But I think you have to be explicit about the “Cyphers show up a lot” as a GM, otherwise some players (like me) will hoard their magic items for the Ultimate Moment of Distress – me, I always show up for the final battle in videogames with a thousand potions I’ve been too chicken to use – so my advice would be to say, “Yes, yes, use them flagrantly.”
Bad Thing About Numenera That Wasn’t Really Numenera’s Fault #1: The Pre-generated Adventure
Rather than spend valuable novel-planning brainspace on a campaign, I instead used one of the canned adventures. Which is a perfectly good adventure for what it is, but it’s not quite my style: it’s combat-heavy, very rails-oriented with one branching point, and funnels the players along. This is what you want in a starting adventure, but it’s clear that my personal style (lots of talk and personal exploration with one big cinematic setpiece combat per session) is going to conflict with the pregen stuff… as it always has. I’ll want to create my own adventures that interact with these characters explicitly – oh, the raging barbarian has a soft heart, let’s explore that, and the parkour-exploring Jack has commitment issues, let’s craft an adventure around that.
It saved some time, which was the goal, but as a snooty GM my take is that the hand-crafted adventures are always superior. Yet first sessions are always awkward – “Hey, you’re all together and yet barely know who you are! How’s that work?” – as players figure out who they are, and it’s worse when you’re snorting mechanics and new concepts at a furious rate. This was a clunky session but the fun times we had were still pretty good, so I’d say this is working pretty well.
I'm Walking. Are You Donating? Please?
As a reminder, I’m doing a charity walk this Sunday to help my goddaughter Rebecca and all kids with cancer. I will be wearing a purple cape because her favorite color is purple. So if you have a few bucks to donate, that would be nice of you. If not, I’ll take prayers.
In a clarification that bothers me, technically speaking Rebecca is not our goddaughter. Rebecca is Jewish, and as such the Meyer family doesn’t have a tradition of godparents. But we’re basically the ones who are on-deck for so many issues, and so dear to our heart, that we call Rebecca (and Carolyn, and Joshua) our um-children, because really there’s no tradition of Godparents per se but dammit, they’re something significantly above “our friends’ kids.” And so when we were blogging during the initial crisis, we didn’t want to have to explain that shorthand seventy times a day.
Anyway. Rebecca is ill. Her proton therapy and chemo is going as well as can be expected – she has not been robbed of notable brain function yet – but she could still use your help. So if you’ve got a few spare bucks and don’t mind donating, here is the link. (And I’ve tried to thank everyone who’s donated to me personally, but if I missed you, please contact me for my personal “You are damned wonderful” comment. Seriously. You deserve it.)
Grand Theft Auto Again: How Do They Fuck This Up?
Grand Theft Auto is like a casino for me. And I don’t like gambling.
But so many other people love gambling, talking about how awesome fun it is, how glamorous the casino life, how great the food, and so periodically I question my own sanity. It must be fun, I think. Everyone else is having fun. I must have missed something about the experience. And so I head into town and find the blackjack table and shell out money, and just as I have the past seven times I’ve gone to a casino, find it deeply disappointing.
Not bad. Just so uninteresting that there are other clearly superior pleasures I could be wasting my money on.
And Grand Theft Auto gets so hyped that nobody but me ever seems to notice how they badly fuck up the small details.
For example: their tutorials are among the crappiest tutorials in the whole world; it’s like nobody ever played them. First off, they make the inevitable mistake of having the tutorial text be miniscule for no apparent reason. Seriously. I have a 55″ screen that is maybe seven feet away, and I had to get up to sit in front of the TV like a four-year-old watching Nickelodeon cartoons to actually read what the fucking text was. It was, literally, unreadable from my couch; if the button I was supposed to press wasn’t X, Y, B, or A – the color-coded ones – I had no idea what I was supposed to be doing. If it was, I pressed it blind and hoped what it did was obvious.
But then, the tutorial screens pop up as you’re doing other things. So I’m chasing a dude through traffic, and while I’m trying to figure out where he’s gone, alerts keep blipping up in the top left-hand corner of the screen to say, “WHILE YOU HAVE BEEN SQUINTING TRYING TO READ ME, YOU JUST LOST SIGHT OF YOUR BUDDY.” What would be wrong with a little confirm dialogue, actually pausing the game for slower readers so we don’t have to split our attention?
Oh, it’d be less cinematic. Fuck you, Rockstar.
And there’s no archive of these tutorial hints, so if you miss them you’d better get a goddamned FAQ. Hey, we taught you once, move on, move on.
Saints Row does tutorials correctly, which is why it’s been gaining significantly on Grand Theft Auto. Sadly, GTA was the biggest premiere in videogame history (in part due to lemminglike suckers like me), and none of the reviews I noted seemed to grok how GTA is very high-quality in some levels, but absolutely bombs in some basic usability tests in others. It’s one of those things that reminds me that what other people want in a videogame experience is often highly different from mine, and that my tastes are small and easily overlooked. GTA was a huge success, so why do we need to fix these things?
Because they’re fucking terrible?