Why the Battle of Hoth Was a Disaster – For the Empire

Posted by Rampant Coyote on February 15, 2013

Just last week, I re-watched The Empire Strikes Back with my youngest daughter, who couldn’t remember the original Star Wars movies all that well. Yes, it’s been that long. Yes, I’ve been failing in my duties as a geek parent.

The movie reminded me of just why I used to love Star Wars. And it also reminded me that I still do. Yes, the prequel movies soured our relationship somewhat. The plans and plots of George Lucas never made much sense to begin with, yet the brilliance of the original movies hid the lack of logic in his character’s mastermind schemes. At least, they hid it enough that you could willingly disbelieve the incoherence because it led to REALLY REALLY COOL action scenes. I mean, Luke’s plan to rescue Han Solo was… what exactly? He seriously planned to be fed to the Sarlacc? And knew R2D2 would be assigned to the prison barge, and made custodian of his light saber? The dude’s got some serious precognitive powers from The Force, I guess.

And the whole video of how Star Wars should have ended is perhaps the best in the series. Sadly, it got much worse in the prequels.

Sadly, the Battle of Hoth doesn’t quite pass muster, either.  Spencer Ackerman rips into the military fiasco that was this particular battle, which is nevertheless portrayed as a victory in the movie. Just goes to show that you can’t trust the media to report the truth about what’s going on behind the fog of war, doesn’t it?

Inside the Battle of Hoth: The Empire Strikes Out

Filed Under: Movies - Comments: 6 Comments to Read

An Inconvenient Combat

Posted by Rampant Coyote on February 14, 2013

The game was “Western Hero,” many years ago. It was a dice-and-paper RPG based on the Hero game system, the same one that fueled the Champions superhero RPG. The designers had taken pains to make Western Hero not very superheroic – following the style of movies and books about the American “Wild West” of the mid-to-late 1800s, there was no magical healing or protections or other contrivances of fantasy and science fiction to give adventurers a leg up in the world.

The culmination of the first adventure had us in a shootout that put the O.K. Corral to shame. We had the initiative, and the bad guys were spread out over an encampment  that gave us plenty of approaches and cover. There were six of us to something like 9 or 10 of the bad guys, and we were able to take out most of the bad guys by ones and twos until they could mount anything like an organized defense. When the smoke cleared, all the bad guys were down, and our group had suffered only minor injuries. Luck, good tactics, and having the initiative won the day.

In the next adventure, the game master – a long-time member of our gaming group – decided the battle had been far too easy, and tried to give us a greater challenge. It ended in a gunfight with more bad guys (something like a full dozen, IIRC). But more importantly, we were not on the attack. We did not get to pick where to attack and plan our tactics in advance. I thought we did pretty good, actually, given the circumstances. But this time, when the smoke cleared, half of us had to create new characters.  It was a devastating victory.

But the game master was the most devastated. We had a good game and had enjoyed the campaign, and were quite ready to keep on gunslinging with new characters. But our friend felt that he’d let us all down. And yeah, he had screwed up, although from our perspective it wasn’t that bad. I know I’ve done worse. But he never ran another game for us after that, which was a loss for us. While perhaps he lacked a solid sense of balance for this new game system we were trying (it was Hero system, which we were familiar with, but the changes to fit the genre did take some getting used to), he was an entertaining GM. He moved away before we were able to convince him to take on another game.

His biggest ‘mistake’ is a lesson game designers need to learn (and relearn) often: It’s very tough to gauge balance changes when you are changing multiple variables at once. In this case, he changed the difficulty of the encounter (at least in numbers – I’m not sure if they were more skilled NPCs or not), and the context of the encounter – from allowing us to take the offensive to forcing us to react defensively.  Both (or all three) increased the difficulty level substantially, and combined with the fact that in some ways we just got lucky in the big shootout in the previous adventure, he didn’t understand the consequences.

Now, in dice-and-paper games, GMs don’t have the luxury of testing and tweaking and re-testing the same encounter multiple times for ‘balance.’ You have to go with your gut and vary things to keep them interesting. So changing multiple variables at once wasn’t the mistake that it often is in video game design.  Guys who run dice-and-paper games have to do that regularly to keep things interesting. That’s probably where my own bad habits come from.

But here’s the main thing: Even if the fight had been with perfect clones of the bad guys from the previous encounter, it would have played out very differently – and been much more challenging – because we did not get to choose when and how to attack.  It was different. And variety is the spice of RPG life.

Another example, from far too many 3.x edition D&D games (including their CRPG counterparts) is dragon encounters. A planned dragon encounter in D&D (with the dragons color-coded for your convenience, so you know what sort of attacks and resistances to prep for), particularly one that takes place underground where the dragon does not have the opportunity to use its mobility advantage (flying), is not that big of a deal. But encounter the same dragon when you aren’t expecting it, out in the open somewhere… and what would have been an an almost uninteresting encounter before can easily wipe out an adventuring party.

This is a bone I have to pick with many RPG design. Combat often occurs at the player’s convenience. Unless you are reloading from a previous save, you may not know exactly how it’s going to play out, but the decision to risk combat is almost always in the player’s control, normally via geography.  You can hang out on the other side of the door all day long, resting, casting buffs, exchanging equipment, and nothing will happen until the moment you kick open the door.  Or move into the area not currently visible on the screen.

This trend has led to a complete abandonment of things like resource attrition between combats.  After all, if the player can simply rest outside the door to the monster’s lair to get all their hit points and spells back, then why bother having that be a ‘thing’ at all? Why not just set a cooldown guaranteed to pop between combats, and auto-heal the player when a fight isn’t active? It’s an obvious streamline if that’s how the game plays.  But then the same designers who make these decision struggle to figure out how to vary combat, and fall upon such goofiness as always having ‘waves’ of attacking enemies. When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail, I guess…  Here’s a hint: When a variation is used all the time to address a weakness of the game system, the variation ceases to be ‘variety’ and all, and can get pretty tedious. Either come up with new ways of keeping things interesting, or un-paint yourself out of the corner and change the fundamental flaw in the system.

CRPGs have the “advantage” (if you want to call it that) of having the game force the encounter situation, preventing the player from optimizing tactics and preparation before the fight, to shake some variety into things… but I’m not so fond of forcing the player to be stupid like that.

Ultimately, I believe the player shouldn’t be able to dictate the pace of the game – or the timing of the encounters – with 100% accuracy. Sure, there should be times and places where the player should be completely safe and can hang around all day without fear.  That’s important. But at other times, I feel it’s important to shake things up, to have encounters happen when the player or party is not 100% ready. Yes, those inconvenient fights are going to be more difficult (although I know of no game that awards extra experience for those kinds of encounters to make up for it), but they do help vary the action.  And they make ‘hostile territory’ feel hostile. I like the feeling that the bad guys are there, taking initiative and planning counter-attacks and marching patrols around to actively defend against adventurers like me.

 

Filed Under: Design - Comments: 4 Comments to Read

Talking Indie Games: Drinking From the Firehose

Posted by Rampant Coyote on February 13, 2013

It was approximately ten years ago that I first made my tentative explorations into the whole “indie game” thing. Even having been an ‘insider’ in the games biz, and having seen (and, sadly, dismissed) the first couple of indie game festivals at GDC, I really had no clue. And to be honest – there wasn’t much there. Indie games were the grand frontier, still heavily rooted in old-school “shareware” roots from a decade earlier, and generally hard to find. It still had a very underground feeling.

When I met Russell Carroll a couple of years later, I found that he’d started the website “Game Tunnel” with the idea of indie games being underground and the ‘tunnel’ being a way to access them. The challenge back then was very much the same as it was now – discovering what games were available, particularly identifying those that were not of the soon-to-explode ‘casual games’ category.

I remember it being a banner event when I’d discover an indie RPG of any variety.  I was thrilled to learn that there was a trickle of old-school graphic adventures. And here and there were sparks of additional, cool stuff – space combat simulators, real-time strategy games, turn-based strategy games, a lot of action games (especially Breakout / Arkanoid – inspired titles, shooters, and unsurprisingly, platformers). Not to mention the really cool, weird stuff. But when I started this blog, there really wasn’t a whole lot to say about non-casual indie games, other than evangelize their potential.

Now?

Strangely enough, I still feel it’s hard to talk about indie games, but not because of their relative scarcity or difficulty of getting information. Now it’s because I feel like I’m trying to drink from the firehose. Even if I was playing indie games fulltime, I couldn’t keep up anymore, even with just the RPGs. Let alone do that PLUS have a family and more-than-fulltime (these days…) Day Job, a side job actually making games (and contributing to the deluge), blogging, AND actually playing some mainstream games (new and classic) occasionally.

It’s a paralysis of choice, now. It’s like how there used to be only a few dozen fantasy novels to choose from at the local bookstore. Now – assuming you can find a “local bookstore” – there are so many of such varying quality that someone who is NOT a well-informed fantasy reader won’t have a clue where to start. For indie games – there are a few ‘darlings’ out there that have garnered enough word-of-mouth and subsequent press that it’s possible to have heard about it. But they aren’t the best. Just the closest thing a non-hardcore aficionado of indie-dom might have to a ‘known quantity’ before they waste the time (or even money) to check some out.

While “indie” is no longer as obscure as it was a decade ago, the number of titles – and the difficulty of picking out the gems from the crap – is harder than ever. This means that even talking about a niche like “indie RPGs” or “indie Adventure Games” (or “Interactive Fiction”)  with some hardcore indie fans is going to involve talking about games that hardly anybody has played or even heard about.

All the more reason to talk about ’em, huh? Just gotta find where to begin.

Considering the first CRPG I ever purchased and played on my home computer was Dungeons of Magdarr, a title so obscure I have never met someone who had even heard of it, let alone played it (bad news: It sucked). So I guess the more that things change, the more they stay the same, huh?

Filed Under: Indie Evangelism - Comments: 5 Comments to Read

Guest Posts Wanted

Posted by Rampant Coyote on February 12, 2013

Hey indie fans!

I’m gonna be out of town next week, and while I’m trying to get some articles pre-written, I can always use some help.

Got a rant or commentary relating to RPGs, indie games, adventure games, classic gaming, game-making, whatever? Please send it my way. You can use the feedback address. Or jayb.

Anyway, this is a pretty open invitation – at least to those who are serious about writing about games. I tend to ignore emails by writers who just want to cross-post about ‘any subject.’ You don’t have to wait for when I’m out of town. But I can always appreciate the help when I have no idea if I’m gonna have time at night to prep a post.

Then again, that’s pretty much described me for the last three months or so, even without the travel…

Thanks in advance!

Filed Under: Guest Posts, Rampant Games - Comments: 2 Comments to Read

The High-Level Game: More Than Just Bigger and Badder

Posted by Rampant Coyote on February 11, 2013

Many years ago, when the third edition of Dungeons & Dragons was still current and even kinda new, Necromancer Games created a revision of a Gary Gygax module called “Necropolis” (or, officially, “Gary Gygax’s Necropolis”). This was a massive revision and expansion to an original module created for his “Dangerous Journeys” game system, following his departure from TSR.

I have a soft place in my heart for that one, as Necromancer Games ran a contest for creating a module to take a party from a more traditional setting to the land of “Khemit” (an ancient Egyptian analog). I won, and they produced my module as a free PDF download (you can download it out here if you are interested in checking it out in all it’s 3rd edition D&D glory).

Now, Necropolis was described by many people (including, I believe, Gary Gygax himself) as being “Tomb of Horrors on steroids.” For those unfamiliar with Tomb of Horrors, it was an early module in D&D’s history (also written by Gygax) that had a reputation for massive character mortality rates.  What’s more, it did so with very little combat – it was all traps and puzzles. Oh, there were a couple of nasty fights, but even those were more in the form of puzzles. Trying to brute-force the final battle against a demi-lich (which didn’t exist until that module) would kill the party in a hurry.

Necropolis was a bit like that, but with more combat. And it had a dungeon the size (and lethality) of the Tomb of Horrors or larger inside almost every chapter.   Fun stuff, right?

My players were warned about the lethality levels of this dungeon in advance, so they came to it with a healthy dose of paranoia. (Is it paranoia if it really is out to get you?) It was a departure from my usual style of adventure, so they altered their approach appropriately. They succeeded – though only barely, in a couple of cases.  As the guy running the game, I learned a lot more than they did. I learned some lessons in game design – particularly for ‘advanced’ higher-level characters – that hadn’t quite sunk in by that time.

One of the faults with third edition Dungeons & Dragons and its descendents was accidental, in that it contradicts its own stated philosophy (as embodied by “Rule 0” – The GM’s word always trumps the written rules). As with all editions of D&D, the actions of players are supposed to be relatively unbounded, with the rules working to map these actions into mechanics. But the rules system did such an extraordinary job of defining so many actions that it took on the feel of being a constrained system, like a computer game. The games seemed to portray a menu of available actions which players can choose from, rather than simply guidelines and rules for the most common actions. Again, this runs counter to the designer’s wishes, but it seemed to be a philosophy players adopted – and (to me) it got worse with 4th edition.

Going into the module, I reiterated my usual rules orientation: If it’s not forbidden by the rules (or logic / common sense), I allow it. I thought it pretty important given the challenge of this module, and this approach encourages players to think outside the box.

They did not disappoint. Neither did the module. It was a fascinating experience.

There are all kinds of things in Necropolis that can kill high-level characters very, very quickly. My players’ characters were at around 17th level at the time, so they were quite powerful, generally resilient to damage, and had access to a ton of magic and special abilities.  But the module was still plenty deadly.

The adventure did have its share of “bigger, badder” challenges – simply scaled-up encounters suitable for high-level characters. That’s fine. Sadly, in too many CRPGs, that’s all you get. If that’s all, the game feels like a treadmill. Your reward for gaining additional power is encountering more powerful enemies, forever. But many of the encounters in Necropolis took a different approach. They’d just kill ya. Or otherwise ruin the party’s day.  Many of these traps / puzzles were of the kind that have been complained about for decades by D&D fans.  Really nasty stuff that leads to… bu-bu-bu-BOOM… CERTAIN DEATH. Oooooh!

But here’s the thing. At least most of the time, these particular puzzles weren’t as unfair as they seem. Yes, against third-level characters, they’d have been horrible, arbitrary, and not much fun at all.

But at 17th level, things are different. First of all, “certain death” is often more of a painful setback than a game-ender.

Secondly, most of these situations were either telegraphed in advance, or the players were given a chance to respond before the consequences took effect. So as in the Labyrinth clip above, having one door randomly lead to certain death would be incredibly un-fun, but telegraphing the possible consequences in advance changes everything. Especially at 17th level.

At the high-level game, players have access to all kinds of powers that can change the game.  This was always by design, from the early days prior to even the first edition D&D rules. Does one door lead to certain death? Okay, well, the players should have all kinds of divination spells to learn what is behind each door. They can cast disintegrate spells on the doors (or the walls next to them) to bypass whatever might be on the doors themselves. They can teleport to where they want to go, bypassing the doors altogether.  They could animate an object or summon an extra-dimensional being to do the job for them.  Or they could try far more mundane tricks to figure things out. Simply tracking footprints to learn which door has almost all of the traffic could solve the problem.

That’s exactly how my players operated – with a combination of character abilities and their own personal problem-solving (and trying to see patterns everywhere to give them further clues).

I think that’s how the high-level game in RPGs should go, in general.  At high level, characters should be able to change the rules of the game, to make the unfair reasonable. In a fantasy game, maybe it’s using magic to warp reality in their favor. In a science fiction RPG, maybe it’s calling upon powerful (perhaps alien) technology to do the same. Or in a more mundane setting, it’s calling in contacts and favors and paying bribes to redefine the problem. ‘Cuz sometimes nuking the site from orbit is the only way to be sure.

RPGs at high level should demand that the players do the impossible.  Not just beat ever-tougher bad guys.

In my perfect world, CRPGs would be exactly the same way.  The only way to do this is to create a more open-ended design, and to make what some games would term bugs or exploits to be perfectly legitimate approaches to solving encounters.  Think less Dragon Age and more Minecraft.  It’s the approach Richard Garriott seemed to embrace back in the earlier days of creating the Ultima series.

What would a CRPG need to accomplish this?

#1 – A very strong, if simple rules system.

#2 – A very flexible quest / plot progression system that makes no assumptions about the manner in which quest goals are achieved. If the scepter is in deepest dungeon of the Fortress of Horrible Death, the quest to obtain it shouldn’t break if the player simply tunnels under the fortress and grabs the scepter in five minutes.

#3 – Lots of player-acquired high-level abilities that change or break the rules.

#4 – An open-ended approach to creating challenges, including a willingness to make them completely unfair against a “brute force” approach, and a willingness to let the player ‘cheat’ his way to victory. And no more making ‘boss monsters’ impervious to the most debilitating spells!

#5 – Some cool acknowledgement of the player’s clever actions periodically. Was the player able to obtain the Sword of Thumb-Smiting from Lord Gregor the Thumbless without killing poor Gregor over it? That’s quite an accomplishment no matter how it was achieved, and surprised NPCs should make a note of it.

It’s possible. It’s even been done, to one degree or another. But we could do much more. I feel this is an area where indies could really exceed in, because the plot-specific voice-overs and cut-scenes and unique animations that are the hallmark of mainstream, high-production-cost gaming are a poor match for the more open-ended world design this entails.

Filed Under: Design, Dice & Paper - Comments: 6 Comments to Read

Four Joys of Dice & Paper Gaming

Posted by Rampant Coyote on February 8, 2013

Back in the old days, when we stone computers and stuff,  computer RPGs were really not much more than an attempt to provide a pale imitation of the tabletop gaming experience for existing Dungeons & Dragons fans to get their “fix” when a real game session wasn’t convenient. With game names like “DnD” and so forth, they were really just a substitute for a different experience.

That’s changed now. A lot. To the point where the last couple of editions of Dungeons & Dragons seemed to have been designed as substitutes for the MMORPG experience. How’s that for a switch?

There’s  an obvious problem with tha. Unless you live in a place with no broadband, it’s hard to imagine a situation where getting a bunch of local friends to coordinate schedules enough to have a tabletop “dice & paper” gaming session would be more convenient than logging into one of many MMOs out there. These days you don’t even have to go to the next room to do that – you can just log in via your iPhone.

The late Gary Gygax, responsible at least for popularizing RPGs and co-inventing D&D, likened tabletop role-playing to attending a play, while MMORPGs and single-player computer RPGs were more like TV shows and movies – respectively, if I remember correctly. I can’t recall the details of the analogy well enough to decide if I agree with it or not. Personally, I think dice & paper gaming, MMORPGs, and single-player / small-group computer & console RPGs have all grown in different directions over the years (decades, now). A computer RPG is no longer a substitute for a tabletop session with friends – it is it’s own thing, a cousin with some strong family resemblances.

But you are really going to get a different experience out of each one. I’m still an active dice-and-paper gamer (I prefer that term to ‘pen and paper’ for some reason… although the use of paper, pens, or dice are all a little optional these days). I play almost every week. And, as Frayed Knights demonstrated, I’m still mining that experience for ideas to borrow and reshape for the CRPG experience.

So what are the somewhat unique joys of dice-and-paper gaming?

1. Social Interaction

Playing “live,” face-to-face, is fundamentally different from playing with a headset on. Yes, the latter is fun, too, and provides a form of social interaction. But for me, playing an RPG together in the living room, at a pace determined by the group, encourages social interaction.  Computer-generated worlds and challenges tends to demand attention from the players, distracting from interacting with other players beyond the game mechanics. Now, I know that some tables have rules against “out-of-character” chatter, and the dynamics are different with every group. But this is an aspect of tabletop gaming I’ve always valued.

2. Role-playing

It’s still fun to play “let’s pretend” and take on a new role, playing somebody different from yourself, and try on some different personality traits in a safe environment. In this respect, playing in a live group is much, much more conducive to this than computer games. We’ve had the bulk of some play-sessions involve purely in-character discussions. I wouldn’t want that to happen every time, but it’s certainly an enjoyable way to mix things up.

I used to believe that role-playing was impossible in single-player games, feeling it was something that was only of value when there were other people to share it with. I’ve since been converted somewhat to allowing for some variant of single-player roleplaying, where you are free to experiment with the world using a certain image or role for your character. Some games allow it, some don’t. Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines is perhaps my favorite for allowing and even encouraging different character-driven approaches, flaws notwithstanding.  But it’s not the same as role-playing with real people. And I’ve tried role-playing with like-minded individuals in MMORPGs, and experienced only limited success. I feel it’s possible, but the computer-moderated environment has to be conducive to that. I haven’t played a commercial MMORPG that did that, though I admit my experience is limited.

3. Player-driven stories

A human game-master… and human-controlled characters… can mean that stories can grow – or at least change shading – based upon the characters you role-play and the desires of the group. As a group, you can customize the experience in a way that no computer ever will (although I applaud game designers who try).  Villains, rivals, allies, and goals can emerge from character back-stories. Rewards and challenges can be made personal. While in a CRPG, you may be able to go through an adventure with a custom character, and maybe even have the world respond to you in a canned or algorithmic way to certain character-driven choices, it’s nothing like the organic and dynamic possibilities of a good table-top game.

4. More Complete World Interaction

In a computer RPG, you get what you get. If it’s not been built into the game, it doesn’t exist. While some games take pains to try and hide this fact (as a game designer, that’s one of my goals!), it’s still a truth that works on a subconscious level. As a player, you quickly learn that certain houses and doors are purely background pieces, facades with nothing of interest to be concerned about. Deep down inside, you realize that there’s literally nothing over the horizon, and no sense in deviating far from the obvious path.

In a human-moderated game, though the game master might wave off some details, or obviously struggle to make up a name for an NPC who wasn’t expected to actually have a long conversation with the party, there are no such limits. Players can press the game master for details on the appearance of a lock, the location and state of hinges on the door, and the favorite color of a formerly-nameless character. And your human-controlled fellow party members aren’t limited to having generic conversations with you except at particular plot points.  And you always have the opportunity to do something really weird, creative, or entirely bizarre, like attempting to kiss the bugbear leader instead of bribing him.

Now, the quality of these interactions may be subject to the skill of your fellow players, and it’s very rare that something come up with on the fly will match the quality of carefully pre-designed elements (at least until the next game session…). That’s an understood trade-off. But while 90% of your actions may mirror what you’d do in a computer-moderated experience, it’s the 10% that makes the other 90% feel special and interesting.

So there you have it. If you’ve never tried dice-and-paper gaming, I do recommend it, though it can be a real challenge finding a good group.  I’ve been lucky enough to have been able to be in a regular group since college (consisting partly of the same players, even). Getting together to game is often the highlight of my week.

Filed Under: Geek Life - Comments: 6 Comments to Read

An XBLIG Post-Mortem

Posted by Rampant Coyote on February 7, 2013

XNA – Microsoft’s game library for XBOX, Windows, and Windows Phone – is riding off into the sunset. The “XBox Live Indie Game” marketplace is probably not far behind. And now one of the most successful developers in that space has a sobering analysis of its failures:

What Went Wrong With XNA / XBLIG?

All of my information on this is secondhand, but it seems to mesh pretty well with a lot of what I heard.

One of the most stupid aspects of all was this: Your games must be approved by your competitors (effectively) to be allowed into the marketplace.

Now, compared to the mainstream “AAA” industry, indies are a pretty happy, cooperative group. And to be fair, down at the studio level, the mainstream games biz can be pretty friendly, too.  In the main, game developers are gamers at heart, and we play each others’ games, and we love to see the games we love be successful. And as an industry we’re constantly partnering with each other, going to work for competitors, and whatnot. So the “being approved by your competitors” thing is NOT as horrible as it sounds.

But just because it’s not so horrible in practice doesn’t excuse it for being a bad idea at its core.

There are a bunch of other problems that Thomas Steinke brings up. Some of these problems remain in Steam’s “Greenlight” system (which may not be long for this world, either…)

I have my suspicions that the next iteration of the XBox is going to far more closely resemble Apple’s app store. Although, knowing Microsoft, they’ll probably add their own special sauce of “improvements” that do little for the end-user experience but make life more miserable for developers. Just my guess. But I think overall their initial foray into indie gaming will probably be viewed as a success, so we can at least expect to have access to the system, unlike the gaming consoles of past generations.

If nothing else, this article points out how the strengths and weaknesses of indie gaming are often the same thing.

Filed Under: Biz - Comments: Read the First Comment

Four Steps to Making a Video Game In Just a Few Minutes a Day

Posted by Rampant Coyote on February 6, 2013

Last week, I had people ask me how to get indie game development done when you only have about an hour or something to get the job done in an evening.

I’m not going to pretend I’m some machine-like super-programmer here. When the Day Job has me working 12+ hours a day (sadly, a description applicable to for far too much of the last year and change…), it’s pretty dang hard for me to jump right into more software development when I get home.  And I do like to do things like spend time with my family, etc.

I’m not perfect at it. Some days I really don’t get crap done. Or I just end up “tinkering” and not really making much progress (though it’s helpful, too). But sometimes I can make it work, and I actually get ‘in the zone’ and really make progress even with a limited amount of time. Here are some things that help me make this happen:

#1 – Face Reality

Even when you do pull it off, there are some real limits to what can get accomplished on only one hour a night.  An RPG epic is going to take a lifetime to complete at that rate.  If all you can possibly devote to indie game development is a few hours a week, scattered in little 1 or 2 hour blocks, you have to scope your vision appropriately. In my case… well, I really haven’t done this very well, but I also didn’t anticipate this last year being one giant crunch for the day job. But I anticipate that changing very soon.

But if that’s all the time commitment you envision – at least at first – then you need to face reality and scope your project appropriately. At 5-8 hours a week, it will take you about one month to create a game equivalent to what you’d do in a 48-hour game jam weekend. Make sense?  Plan appropriately.  Contract out where you can (which will take time on its own). Work within your limitations. If time issues are temporary, that might be a good time to work on pieces of the game that are less time-intensive, or stuff that doesn’t have too many dependencies. And – again – working with contractors for things like art and music.

#2 – Plan out tasks

One of the most critical productivity tools for me is to maintain a task list. I have lost count of how many times I sit down for a development session (or finish a major task), and look at the screen and say, “What now?”, and end up puttering around for an hour or two surfing the web, playing a game, and dinking around with things in the code that really don’t have much goal or purpose. While these things may be useful (surfing the web may involve hitting engine tutorials or whatnot), they don’t do much to get the game done.

Having a list already planned out really helps me get in the zone faster, and stay there. It’s motivating to see items getting marked off the list, even if their impact on the game as a whole aren’t really noticeable.

If you know you are only going to be working for an hour at a time for a while, break the tasks down to things that can be completed in that time period (or less). Rather than tackling the entire main menu as a single task, break things down to their component tasks. Like getting the audio options sliders working. Or getting the load game mockup done with fake data. This sort of thing.

#3 – Vary Your Activities

If your day job has you doing pretty much the same thing as you are doing as an indie game developer, it’s helpful to plan activities that offer a chance to shift gears. This is especially true for us programmers. For those who don’t know, here’s a shocking surprise – writing game code isn’t really a fundamentally different experience from writing any other kind of programming.  The results on the screen can be a hell of a lot cooler, but when you are down in the depths of your save-game code, you might as well be writing database access code or customer report functions.

So when the day job is going into overtime and I have problems jumping right into doing Yet More Hardcore Coding, this is a fine time to plan other non-programming tasks. Writing this blog is one way I shift gears. It’s a good time to do design work, to play around with art, to do biz-related activities, or other things that don’t involve straight-up programming.

#4 – Commit and Make It a Habit

The real dark, dark secret of all of this is actually pretty simple: Commit to a time frame for which you’ll work on your game, even if it’s only fifteen minutes, and stick to it like your life depended on it. Every. Single. Day. Ideally, this should be the same time every day. Maybe even cue up a “work mix” of music in your media player to play when you start.

Make it a serious commitment. Shut off the web browser unless you come into an emergency that requires you to look something up. FOCUS.  And plan on only fifteen minutes or something – that’s all the time you’ll truly “commit” to, and at the end of the session you’ll be done, but in that little fifteen minute time frame you will be doing NOTHING but making your game and knocking out a task or two.

There are two things that will happen here:

The biggest advantage is that eventually it’ll become a habit. When it becomes a habit, you will find your brain shifting more easily into game-dev mode, and you’ll be able to take better advantage of your limited time. You’ll get “in the zone” faster. And if you have a family and other considerations, they’ll hopefully adjust and plan around it as well. It’ll become part of your life.

The other advantage – more easily realized in the short-term – is that inertia will take over in your sessions, and once you start chugging along doing the game development thing, it’s easy to keep right on going. That’s one reason I tend to work at night, after all my other commitments are done… I’ve got nothing else scheduled for the day but sleep, and I can push that one back if I really need to. So I may only be committed to getting a single task done, after which I tell myself that THEN I can play a quick gaming session or something.  But if an when I get into a zone of unbridled productivity, I can stay there for a longer time and get a heck of a lot done. I’ll ‘cheat’ in a good way.

So there you go. Four steps to making a video game in just a few minutes a day. As always, these things are easier said than done, but when I actually do them, they work for me. Maybe you’ll need to vary them in some way to make them work for you, based on your schedule and the way you work best. It’s not a miracle formula, but I find it really makes a huge difference in my own productivity when I follow them.

Good luck, and have fun!

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Everything I Needed to Know I Learned From Game Jamming…

Posted by Rampant Coyote on February 5, 2013

While I agree with Chris Hecker that indies need to set their sites beyond game jams once in a while, it’s still a very useful exercise IMO and can teach you a lot about game development.

Sam Coster counts the ways Game Jamming teaches you to be a better game developer.

As I’ve said before, a properly handled Game Jam experience – whether formal or informal – is a powerful exercise and tool. You go through the entire game development cycle in micro,  from design, implementation, testing, iteration, and release, all in a matter of hours rather than weeks. If you have a weakness as a game developer, a game jam may expose it. If a game jam can teach a guy like me,who worked as a pro in the mainstream games industry for about a decade, quite a few things, it ought to be especially useful for new and aspiring indies.

One interesting thing I learn from these experiences is the true cost of features. When “puttering” on a longer project, it’s easy to forget how many hours of work got sucked into a particular task. When I get sucked into something I enjoy, the hours can slip away without me recognizing them. When I’m suffering from distractions, it’s easy to pretend that if I was “distraction-free” the task could have been done in a fraction of the time it took. But when every hour – and indeed, every minute – counts, you can’t let that happen, and when a “quick feature” ends up taking two or three hours, it brings painful awareness. Learn from it, and use it when planning and estimating features in the future.

This works both ways. Sometimes I also get impressed by how much I can get done if I really focus.

Speaking of focus, this is perhaps one of the best lessons to be learned from a game jam. It’s very easy for games to become cluttered with features and “cool ideas.” But often these don’t serve the core focus of the game. Sometimes, they even detract from the game. The harsh limitations of a game jam can really help you learn how to focus on what is really important in a game. As the minutes tick away, the focus comes in sharper and sharper relief: In the amount of time remaining, what is the most important thing you can do to make the game a success?

I think this is exactly the kind of attitude indie devs should have every day of development on a commercial project.

The most important lesson of all is just to do it. There is very little that unifies indie game development – we all make games for different platforms, different audiences, with different passions and business plans and a hell of a lot of different personalities. But one thread that unifies us all – perhaps the only thread that unifies indie game development – is that we don’t need to seek anybody’s permission to make a game. We just do it. It’s how things ought to be. You don’t need a publisher’s approval, an education, or a special license (before you start selling, you technically don’t even need a business license). The tools to make games are often out there and free. All you need is drive to learn and to do. And each time you do just that, you’ll get better.

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2012 RPG Watch Game of the Year Awards

Posted by Rampant Coyote on February 4, 2013

RPG Watch does the annual thing:

RPG of the Year 2012

Indie RPG of the Year 2012

Most Anticipated RPG of 2013

Sadly, there were no “editor’s choice” awards for this year. 🙁

I am somewhat astonished to see that Diablo III didn’t garner 5% of the votes to make the list. I can’t remember for sure if it was in the poll, but I would assume so. Or am I just blind?

Oh, did I play it? Actually… no. After some of the early complaints by people whose opinion I respect, I figured I’d wait a while before picking it up. The “always on” DRM thing really honked me off, in particular. And then… well, I was just so busy and have way too many fun games to play that I never got around to it. In retrospect, it didn’t look like I was missing much…

One issue I had with the poll was that many of the non-indie RPGs didn’t really feel like RPGs to me. XCom? Hey, I loved it, LOTS, and it actually felt more RPG-like than its predecessor. But I’d hesitate to call it an RPG. And Borderlands 2? I’ve played plenty of it – it’s definitely one of my favorite games last year – but I play it to scratch the FPS itch. And Dishonored? I’ve not played it, but it doesn’t look at all like an RPG to me. I love that it is unabashed in calling the Thief series its spiritual ancestors,   as I loved the Thief games (particularly 1 and 2).  But I didn’t think of them as being RPGs either.

Yeah, I know. I’m the first one to harp on having a ‘big tent’ and allowing games to push the boundaries of the genre. Maybe I’m being hypocritical here, but if we start calling every game with levels and player-choosable skills an “RPG,” we’re pretty much committing a form of ‘genericide’ on the category. It’s just as bad as getting too exclusive. But every time we try to create some kind of canonical definition of Role-Playing Game, it ends poorly.

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GameBanshee’s RPG of the Year Awards for 2012

Posted by Rampant Coyote on February 1, 2013

I wasn’t involved this year, but I’d be hard pressed to argue against the pick for indie RPG of the year.

GameBanshee’s Game of the Year 2012 Awards

To be honest, and I can’t believe this myself, but I haven’t had time to play Drox Operative yet, in spite of being a major, major fan of Soldak’s games. I mean, Din’s Curse remains my favorite Diablo-like game of the last several years, and I still play it occasionally. I’m pretty dang sure I’ll love it. But I’m definitely running behind the power curve on playing my indie RPGs this year.

Other “close calls” for second place for me would include FTL, Defender’s Quest, Telepath RPG: Servants of God, and Swords & Sorcery Underworld Gold.  I think I spent a roughly equal amount of time being sucked into each of these games this year. And to be honest, roughly equivalent to what I spent playing Grimrock. For me, in terms of sheer fun-factor, it’d be a tough call. But I’d still give the nod to Grimrock for its technical excellence and audaciousness.

I had some fun playing several other indie RPGs last year, too, although some weren’t as good as others, and I didn’t have the opportunity to put much time into them as I would have liked. I keep promising myself that I’ll get back to them and give them a fair shake, but the backlog keeps increasing. And – awesomeness of awesomeness – there are several more indie RPGs released last year besides Drox Operative (and Loren the Amazon Princess!) that I haven’t played yet that I really want to get started on. I can’t keep up, especially when working on my own game. This frustrates me to a degree – I used to be able to at least sample all or most of the serious commercial indie RPG releases. But mostly, this is a pretty awesome thing. We’ve gone from practically nothing to tons in just a few years, and I don’t see the pace slowing down.

RPG fans – at least those who are looking outside the mainstream releases – have plenty to be excited about!

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Confessions of an Out-of-Phase Indie

Posted by Rampant Coyote on January 31, 2013

In spite of having been “indie” for quite some time, even before it was much of a thing, some days I look at what’s happening in indie-dom and really feel like an outsider.

I think a good deal of it stems from background and culture. I have been a PC gamer – a computer gamer – most of my life. I never had an Atari or NES or Genesis. My games were on the C-64, or in the arcade, or – later – on the PC. When other people were talking about Mortal Kombat, I was talking about Wing Commander.  My first dedicated game console was the Sony Playstation, and my favorite game (aside from our own) was a collection of emulated arcade games. My girlfriend was blown away by Super Mario Brothers and tried to get me just as hooked on the game as she was. She failed, due in no small part to my not owning the NES console and not spending THAT much time at her house. I ended up playing a bit of it over the next several years – it was as ubiquitous in 1989 as Combat had been for the Atari almost a decade earlier, and a lot more fun to play – and I enjoyed it. But I never bonded to it the way others did.

I’m very much a latecomer (and newb) to the Metroid and Mega Man series. Castlevania was, for many years, just an arcade game (not a series).  Zelda? I enjoyed it, and thought they did a very nice job pulling off an action-adventure with RPG “flavor” for kids for the Nintendo. But I wasn’t saying, “Zelda! WOW!” I was too busy drooling over Dungeon Master for the Amiga. While I can appreciate these older games, and have fun playing them, they aren’t my thing.

And sometimes I feel a little left out because of that. Is that really dumb or shallow? Or is it simply a case of where I was too jaded by the time they were released, my ‘generation’ of childhood games having been experienced a few years earlier? While I imagine there was a good deal of the latter, it hasn’t prevented me from re-experiencing much of the same thrill (if not exactly the wonder) of my early experiences in the hobby. If anything, I’ve probably gotten even more deeply sucked in by many modern(ish) games than I ever was as a kid. I can think of a half-dozen RPGs over the last several years that have eaten more of my time than Ultima III ever did.

Some days it feels like “indie” as a whole – the guys making the games that get (most of) the buzz and the fans – hearken back to the 8- and 16-bit console era. Sometimes I feel like I’m a little out-of-phase with “popular” indie-dom. The Sega and Nintendo generations are “all growed up” now and making games, and hearkening back to the era that inspired and molded their gaming. During their heyday, I was still playing on the C-64, or moving over to DOS-based gaming. I have friends who were all over Super Meat Boy, but I wonder what I’m missing when I had fun with it for about a 15-minute stretch, but then found it fatiguing.

Does that put me out-of-phase with gamers – my audience for games – as well?

It’s not like I’ve ever felt all that “in-phase” as an indie, to be honest. Back during the reign of casual, I … had zero interest in making casual games, even though I enjoyed time-management and match-three games well enough.

Hopefully, it is it simply a case of games and gamers coming in all flavors. Civilization will suck hours and days from my life like nobody’s business, and I’m hardly an outlier on that one. And obviously indie RPGs are making a strong showing. And if I make another action-game… well, at least I’ll probably make one that stands out from the crowd. Maybe being a little bit out-of-phase isn’t such a bad thing. I might not win any IGF competitions, but part of the origin of indie was to serve the niche gamers that were poorly served.

 

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Frayed Knights 2 Update: What It’s Got in its Nassty Little Pocketses?

Posted by Rampant Coyote on January 29, 2013

One might think that working  11 to 12 hour days on the “day job” – plus weekends – would make it impossible to do game development on the side. One would be wrong. But it really does slow development a lot. What used to be four hours a night of development time slows down to an average of maybe one, one and a half.

Frayed Knights 2 is turning into a bigger overhaul of the game system than I’d really planned.  Porting core game code over from the old system to the new one was almost as exactly as much effort as I’d expected – which is to say, not bad at all. But so much of an RPG is the UI, and the UI needed a complete rewrite from the ground up for the new engine.  And since I had to rewrite the UI anyway, I figured I might as well make some major improvements. In a lot of ways, I’ve gone back to the ol’ drawing board, which takes time. But while I’m working with a new engine (Unity), and a new UI system (NGUI), they are relatively easy to work with, even if my development time is abridged to only an hour or two an evening.

But as I said before, much of an RPG *is* the UI. The UI defines interactions, defines so much of the look, feel,  and pacing.  So a change to the UI has repercussions back into the core game code. Things like haste and slow effects, or the impact of fatigue, have completely changed. For the better, in my opinion. At least in a way that’s simpler to understand and work with as a player.

A lot of the changes this last month  have been down in the guts of the inventory code. I think the inventory system took as much time as the combat system last time around, and this time is no exception. Most of the tricky stuff isn’t necessarily in the game logic, but in the UI.  Some of this is still in flux, and nothing is final until… well, as this is indie gaming, nothing is final EVER, but here are some of the things that are going on:

More Traditional Inventory Slots

I had some bizarro ideas that I’ve chronicled before about having multiple items per ‘slot’. Like you could wear a magical headband, an arming cap, a chain coif, and a helmet all on your head at once. Why not? That’s what they did in the old days! (Well, maybe minus the headband).  Or lose the helmet and wear a hat instead (over the coif). In theory, it should work. In practice… well, very little of that ever actually made it into the game.  I’m not saying layered armor or equipment has no place in an RPG (far from it!), but it was a poor choice for Frayed Knights, and it showed in the inventory UI. So now there are several ‘equipped’ slots – primary weapon, secondary weapon, head, torso, arms, hands, legs, feet, and three accessory slots. Accessories are any sort of item that can be worn that don’t really take up a slot – rings, earrings, noserings, eye patches, headbands, necklaces, bracelets, anklets, socks, garters, whatever. ‘Cuz yes, Frayed Knights 2 has plenty of non-traditional items. Now you can wear three. It can be three rings, or whatever.

No More Party Inventory

Since I’m still leaning towards having unlimited character inventory, there’s really no sense in having that leftover ‘party’ inventory from the last game.  This was another holdover from early development of the first game that I should have nuked before it had grown roots. The only thing that emerged from that complex design was the recognition that you could equip items in combat from your own inventory, but not from the party inventory. Originally, it was going to be possible to do it from the party inventory, but was going to take a lot more time… and it was just a dumb, useless, extra-player-input-required rule. Without things like encumbrance or item limits, there’s functionally no difference between an item being in the party inventory or another character’s inventory. It’s a pretty redundant place. So I’m getting rid of it.

I Will Gladly Pay You Tuesday for a Hamburger Today

The evolved use for the ‘party inventory’ was to stash stuff you didn’t really want to use but planned to sell to a merchant. Now, in FK1, I had some early code where merchants would have different buy-back rates and so forth. That’s going away in FK2 – stuff sells for constant prices. And rather than having this abstracted supply of ‘stuff’ you somehow managed to haul with you from the dungeons (I always imagined you buried it somewhere and hauled it into town later), why not just abstract out the whole selling process? Now, “discard” and “sell” have been combined into a single function – you can sell at any time. You don’t get the money until you visit a merchant, at which time everything you’ve dumped into the sell box since the last time gets converted into coin. This allows you to keep your working inventory uncluttered, and you don’t really need to go visit the merchant until you need to buy something, or actually need to pick up your money.

Scrolls vs. Spellbooks

Somebody made the suggestion that seemed obvious in hindsight of splitting off the functions of scrolls vs. spellbooks. I got stuck in the old D&D mode of allowing players to learn spells from scrolls, as well as casting them directly from the scrolls. That made pricing weird, it made balancing and UI weird, and so forth. So now you learn spells from spellbooks, and cast spells from (far cheaper) scrolls. Problem solved.

Click & Drop & Single Window Inventory

Rather than cycling through party members in the two-window inventory system of Frayed Knights 1, in the sequel you can just move the item to a character’s portrait to trade an item to them.  It greatly simplifies things, both as a developer and as a player.

 

Anyway, so there are some changes to how inventory is handled in Frayed Knights 2. It will still resemble the old way of doing things,  and pretty much every other RPG inventory UI of the last twenty years, but it should hopefully be easier to work with.  Which means you, the player, can focus on the more interesting parts.

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Matt Chat with Chris Taylor – and the Undetermined Future of Gas-Powered Games

Posted by Rampant Coyote on January 28, 2013

This is… sobering. And very frank.

I wasn’t really a big fan of the Dungeon Siege series. But I have played WAY too much Supreme Commander 2, and Total Annihilation back in the day. I really enjoyed attending a talk by him many years ago at GDC.

The interesting thing to me is the “vicious cycle” Chris Taylor describes. The traditional publisher model that leads to businesses going under.  This was pretty much all there was in the industry in the era in which I started my career. This was – and is – the situation in what I call the ‘mainstream’ games industry (which is a little bit of a misnomer, but I use it to differentiate it from ‘indie’ – mainstream really refers to the industry players and process, not the audience for the games).  It’s a circumstance caused by limited distribution channels that a few key players could monopolize, and it’s what indie – and the various aspect of indie including crowd-sourcing – emerged to solve.

That’s why big studios, who come out with hit game after hit game, surprisingly disappear. The deck is stacked against independent (as opposed to “indie”) developers. Their “advances” are really just loans against their royalties, and the royalty rates are designed to minimize payout for all but mega-hits. In fact, much of the time the publisher magnanimously forgives part of the advance, never seeing it fully repaid, and coincidentally never paying the developer another dime – while itself making plenty of profit. Effectively, the independent studios become “work for hire” studios that have little hope of ever getting ahead, while accounting procedures prevent them from doing much ‘padding’ to help them sustain themselves in-between projects. This is also why we have such a hiring / layoff cycle in the industry – without any real hope of back-end royalties, studios can only afford to pay their employees while they are actively working on a publisher-funded project.

And, from Taylor’s tone, it sounds like it is leading to the death of Gas-Powered Games.  From how he describes it in this interview, if the Kickstarter for Wildman succeeds, they have a chance of ‘beginning again’ as a leaner, meaner indie studio.

Overall – while the video is extremely long (I listened to it more than I watched it), it provides some very human insight into the industry. Matt supplements this interview with a a plea from Neal Hallford (long-time RPG designer). Neal offers some anecdotes explaining why Chris Taylor is an awesome guy, and how the community wants this guy to remain in the industry employing people and making games.  It’s something to consider.  It was enough to make me back the project, even though I’m not personally much of a fan of Taylor’s RPGs.

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Brewster’s Millions (of Gold Pieces)

Posted by Rampant Coyote on January 25, 2013

When I was a teenager, I read a book called “Brewster’s Millions” (which was, around the same time, made into a movie featuring Richard Pryor, which I’ve never seen).  The book was written just over a hundred years ago, when a million U.S. dollars was worth a heck of a lot more than they are today.  Using an inflation calculator, a million dollars back then was worth about a quarter of a billion today.

In the book, an all-around nice guy (Montgomery Brewster) inherits a million dollars from his grandfather. Then, just as suddenly, he stands to inherit seven times as much money from his uncle… who hated his grandfather. In order to inherit the seven million dollars, however, he has to squander his entire inheritance from his grandfather in a single year, without a penny to show for it. On the surface, that sounds pretty easy to do, but there were a large number of limitations and caveats on this yearlong party. He couldn’t give too much to charity; he had to show good business sense (no buying an expensive yacht and selling it for five dollars, for example… ); and he couldn’t go overboard with gambling. All the easy ways to get rid of the money (by 1902 standards) were pretty limited. Mr. Brewster finds that squandering that much money is not nearly as much fun as it sounds, and becomes quite a burden before the year is out. Especially when the occasional gamble or stock market decision actually becomes quite profitable.

But if he fails, he is penniless, except for whatever is leftover from his grandfather’s fortune.

I imagine it would be a bit easier in today’s age to blow through even that much money.  Not easy – a quarter-billion is still an incredible amount of money, even for someone like Curt Schilling and his 38 Studios. But inheritance tax would devour half of that right off the bat. 🙂 Anyway, I probably missed the entire point of the book, and sometimes wonder what it would be like to have more money than I knew how to spend.

In many CRPGs, though, this is a pretty common problem.  Going over The CRPG Addict’s blog, it’s not a new one, either. At a certain point, there’s really nothing worth buying. The best stuff can only be found through exploration and victories. Which is, in my opinion, as it should be.  It’s kinda anticlimactic if you just go to the store and purchase the best weaponry for your level.  That’s not what adventure should be about!

But, if not that, what do you spend your ill-gotten gains upon? How do you avoid ending up with enough gold to pay off the U.S. national debt and no place to spend it? How does an RPG provide enough ‘sinks’ in the economy to keep the cash flow interesting? While it sounds easy, as in Brewster’s Millions, it’s not trivial.

My favorite method is to provide disposable items that are significantly more powerful than permanent items.  But there’s a fundamental issue of game balance. An expensive one-shot item has to be VERY potent to justify its cost (and make the player willing to use it). But would having a few of this item in one’s inventory allow the player to simply blow through boss encounters with ease?

And then there’s early game versus end-game pricing. Things like curing at temples tend to be overpriced at low levels when you really need it, but by the time it becomes a reasonable inconvenience you can often have your own party members cast the same spells for free.

Gambling – a lot of “equipment-focused” RPGs (Diablo-style, Borderlands, etc) – sounds like a great idea, except in my personal experience I lose interest very quickly. I think only once – at lower levels – have I ever gotten anything worth keeping. In ANY game. When it is so clearly useless, people won’t use it, and it won’t be a money-sink anymore.

Some single-player RPGs do allow the player to purchase (and even furnish) houses. This becomes a nice thing to blow money on when you’ve got more than you know what to do with, but I don’t recall them ever serving a critical function beyond being a place to stash my stuff. It’d be cool if people came to visit you or something, but then you’d probably be playing The Sims instead of an RPG.  But seriously – it’d be nice if owning property actually unlocked interesting new quests and storylines. (Actually, as I recall, this was the case in Baldur’s Gate II, but I don’t recall seeing it anywhere else).

Outfitting NPCs – while this is frequently an ability with NPC companions, the only game where I’ve seen this be  a useful mechanic (rather than an amusing side-effect) for general NPCs is Din’s Curse. In Din’s Curse, the towns frequently come under attack, and outfitting the townspeople with your castoffs make defensive events a lot easier when the townspeople are a bit less vulnerable.  I guess there was a game (Morrowind?) where you could reverse-pickpocket NPCs and cause them to wear some useless equipment… right before you attacked them. But that’s more in the ‘amusing side effect’ category.

Of course, there are also recurring costs – like equipment maintenance (always a favorite among players – NOT!), rent, taxes, docking fees, etc… but these are not frequently welcome unless they provide an advantage — like hiring a mercenary. Even then, they might be only grudgingly accepted.

Training might cost gold – frequently used in older CRPGs like Might & Magic. I’m kinda surprised this isn’t used more in modern games than it is.  This is something that can easily scale with players as they acquire more funds. Higher-level training for higher-level (and richer) characters has significantly higher costs, right?

How about buying quests (or access to optional areas) for gold? Or bribery (if events calling for bribery are recurring and interesting – not just penalizing)?

If a game is going to go through the trouble of having an economy, why not make an interesting one where there’s always something interesting for a player  to spend his character’s money on?

Filed Under: Design - Comments: 23 Comments to Read

Why Female Fantasy Armor is (Usually) Stupid

Posted by Rampant Coyote on January 24, 2013

Once upon a time, when we were playing Fantasy Hero on a regular basis, the women in our gaming group started referring to the “companion” supplement as the “Stupid Armor Chick Book.” It was funny, and soon we were all calling it by that name.

The cover art was from a Larry Elmore painting, “Journey to the Gathering,” which is a somewhat notorious bit of “cheesecake armor.” Her only armor, really, is on her shoulder so she could set her sword on her shoulder? What was she thinking? (Well, obviously, she wasn’t, some guy was doing the thinking for her).

I guess I should add that I generally love Larry Elmore’s stuff, and participated in his recent Kickstarter.  I can’t wait for the book. I’m even okay with it if this painting is in it. We’ll continue to mock it. I expect Elmore would be the first to agree that it’s pretty ridiculous.  But then he did SnarfQuest, which is both awesome AND ridiculous.

Anyway, throughout medieval European history that modern fantasy tends to be based upon, women were not often participants in warfare (at least not on the battlefield), so female armor was a rarity. But if our medieval fantasy can include dragons and fireball spells, why not have lots of steel-clad female warriors as well?

I’m good with this.

However, the artistic liberties taken with the armor is often… stupid. Really stupid. Even if the woman is well-encased rather than depending upon the cheesecake distraction defense. A couple of experts have weighed in with their explanation of how female armor OUGHT to be, and why it’s so often STUPID as portrayed in art. And, of course, in video games.

Take #1: Fantasy Armor and Lady Bits

Take #2: “Why Do You Hate the Shape of Breasts in Plate Armor So Much?”

(Short answer to the latter question: The shape directs weapons right to the center of the chest, and a fall would direct the force of the blow right into the sternum. Sorta… the opposite of what you’d want armor to do…).

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