Chaos Engineering

Run a Game: The Pick Two House Rule

I was going to link to this last week and then a derecho blew out my internet for a couple of days. Last week Mediaprophet explained his “pick two” house-rule to character advancement. I wanted to highlight this game mechanic as I was probably among the first guinea pigs for it years back.

It’s actually the seed of what is the advancement system for Asylum. I call it the “milestone” system. Instead of tracking experience points, the Narrator designates certain events as “milestones.” When the players reach a milestone they are allowed to improve their character in some simple way.

The Narrator can hand out either major or minor milestones. A minor milestone allows the character to learn a skill or advance some small plot point. A major milestone allows the character to improve an attribute or a power. As a result, players no longer have to kill all the monsters or inject themselves into every situation for XP. Instead they need only focus on actually propelling the story and achieving their character goals in order to advance.

The point is that this cuts down on the bookkeeping involved in playing while allowing the Narrator to relate the rate of advancement with the pacing of the story. It also allows us designers some trade-off flexibility with the parity of player choices. Basically, while all minor milestone options need to be roughly equivalent to each other, we don’t have to force any cardinal relationship between minor and major milestones.

Sorry for the delay, I just finished moving across a few states and am now settling into my new home in the Research Triangle!

If you’re familiar with Dungeons and Dragons, then you might be aware of the Five-Minute Workday (or 5MWD). To those of you who aren’t familiar with it, the 5MWD is a style of gameplay where players tend to deal with only a few obstacles before resting or refreshing their resources. This allows them to expend their most effective renewable resources for overwhelming effectiveness at just about every obstacle. The 5MWD is a phenomenon infamous in D&D where resources tend to refresh on a daily cycle, but it’s also relevant to many other styles of gameplay.

It’s critical to note that since its inception the 5MWD has been a disparaged style of gameplay because it deviates from the way that some players (and designers) interpret “proper” player behavior. Presented here is the ideal behavior that D&D was supposedly built around:

• Characters start the day mostly refreshed of all resources (hp, spells, X/day powers) and therefore close to their maximum potential. They decide to set off on some grand goal.
• The characters gradually encounters hostile and dangerous obstacles to their goal. To overcome these obstacles they attempt to most efficiently expend their daily resources (hp, spells, powers). Much of the challenge of the game is determining if the number of hitpoints those orcs will drain from the party is worth expending a fireball or an action surge to mitigate.
• With each new encounter the characters’ resources dwindle a bit more and decrease their potential effectiveness. This gradual decrease helps increase the tension, uncertainty, and challenge to overcome more obstacles.
• Eventually, with several encounters overcome and most of their resources expended, the characters decide to find a safe place to rest to renew their abilities. If they’re cautious then they’ve reserved just enough of their resources in case circumstance (the GM) springs a surprise encounter. That way they’re still capable of dealing with the problem or escaping before resting.

Having grown up playing D&D, I can respect that model of gameplay. Unfortunately this behavior is actually a large cause of why the 5MWD exists in the first place. Essentially, if much of your party’s effectiveness comes from a daily resource cycle, then the safest and most effective strategy for resource management is to have as few encounters each day as possible.

So why is the 5MWD really a problem?

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kierongillen:

mckelvie:

kierongillen:

sexpigeon:

Encourage your players to wear leather and mirrorshades.

I did all this when paying cyberpunk as a teen. All of it.

You didn’t really need the “when playing cyberpunk” in there, be honest. 

I was living in the midlands. The dark future WAS here.

Because of course Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie are Cyberpunk 2013/2020 fans.

F for Fake // dir. Orson Welles

I hated this movie the first time I saw it because I figured out the trick the instant Welles uttered “For the next hour, everything you hear from us is really true and based on solid fact.” There are few things more annoying than waiting an hour for a magician’s trick that you’ve clearly seen through.

(via mattfractionblog)

higgins34:

I would play this game…

It’s too bad she won’t live! But then again, who does?

A Virtual Weimar: Hyperinflation in a Video Game World

If historical cases of hyperinflation — real, and now virtual — have one thing in common, it is the instinct among its victims to blame the symptoms rather than the disease.

A very interesting but flawed article on virtual economies from the Mises Institute. I’m sure I’ll take some flack from my libertarian friends, but unfortunately in his effort to make this relevant to Austrian School economics the author misses several important issues. There are critical differences between Diablo III’s currency crisis and the failed historical fiscal policies of the Weimar Republic.

The major difference is that gold in Diablo 3 is created through individual economic activity. That activity, of course, is adventuring and killing monsters. Because gold is easily quantifiable and interchangeable it is technically a commodity good that is being used as currency in Diablo 3’s market. Because the game’s currency is based on a commodity that can be only found through prospect and labor, it’s actually a somewhat warped imitation of Mises’ Austrian School economics with tragic results.

The real issue, that the article does sort of touch on, is that Diablo 3’s gold sources proportionally diverge from its gold sinks over time. In layman’s terms, players are leveling up and taking on more powerful creatures that generate more gold. At the same time, their economic costs and risks are not growing in scale with their income. As a result, players not only accumulate gold but at rates that surpass any use they have for it. The in-game vendors don’t typically sell items that players particularly value, but the game’s player run auctions do. The result is that these auctions allow localized hyperinflation to quickly spread throughout the entire multiplayer economy.

Of course, nothing about Diablo 3’s world and economy is at all realistic so it’s not wise to make many correlations between it and real world economics. You have a world where new players are showing up all the time and the abundance of every good is directly linked to the frequency and duration of their participation. Consequently, you need a currency that will hold stable value regardless of the size of the player population and its distribution of classes and levels. It’s really no wonder that even Blizzard’s design teams would have issues getting that economy to work.

So the problem really boils down to the fact that the environment and  goods created by the game do not change based on aggregate player activity. Peter Earle wants to compare this to the problems created by centrally controlled currency, but in fact Diablo 3’s situation is the exact opposite! The currency scaled of out of control because it was an uncontrolled ubiquitous commodity. Unfortunately, if they had tied the commodity to a strictly finite commodity like the writer (and Austrian economists) suggest then this would allow for speculative market investment with cycles similar to what’s happened with Bitcoin recently. Such a currency could behave very erratically and significantly undermine the market and game experience that Blizzard was attempting to craft.

In conclusion, the most reasonable solution is one that Mises could never endorse: a centrally controlled currency. Blizzard should have implemented a means of controlling the rate at which both currency and commodities were introduced to the market based on supply reserves and aggregate demand. Of course, keep in mind that Diablo 3’s economy is completely chimerical so this should not be taken as an argument to endorse specific real-world fiscal or monetary policies.

Wong Kar-wai photographed by by Patrick Swirc

Of course Matt Fraction is a Wong Kar-wai fan.

(via mattfractionblog)

guilelessmonk:

Considering I write about games everyday (well not Mondays, I program for those) I talk about choice precious little. Choice is one of the most powerful tools games have and is a big part of what differentiates it from other art forms like books or movies. A book can tell a story but a game can have a player live a story, write their own story. So it is worth it to talk about how various games empower players to make choices.

Some games like The Walking Dead make choices explicit and force a player to choose via menu options what they want to do, but games can also force choices on players through scarcity. I’ve previously touched on this idea when I talked about Kingdom Hearts 2 where I said that if they reduced the number of ability points players had to available to equip abilities in that game the player would not just have more choices but more powerful ones as they are forced to choose between two abilities they really want as opposed to choosing which tier 2/3 abilities they wanted to tack on. 

Scarcity of resources makes how the player chooses to use those limited resources more powerful. If a player has enough money to buy all the new equipment a town has in an RPG they aren’t prioritizing their characters or min/maxing, they are just buying the best they can without having to think about it. I think a game that uses scarcity to enable choice really well is the game I Am Alive.

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I don’t really have much to add to this. Scarcity is an essential aspect of the economic and ecological relationships that almost all games are based off of.

Run a Game: God Machine Chronicle System Review

My associate, Mediaprophet, has compiled a detailed review of White Wolf’s new God Machine Chronicle Storytelling System. I think it’s quite fair in covering the many improvements and remaining drawbacks of the Storytelling System. Many of my specific complaints have been addressed so it’s almost like the designers have been reading our blogs.

This week’s project is a stress-test on the Asylum system. The Train Runs on Time is a playtest for 4 to 5 participants. That translates to one Narrator and 3 to 4 Players. The playtest consists of only one scene, which is concluded after about 30-60 minutes of play. After the conclusion each participant, including the Narrator, takes the role of the person on their left.

The scenario then begins all over again in a fashion similar to Groundhogs Day or Higurashi. Player characters only remember the notes that the other players have left for them on a deja vu card. Will the player characters eventually realize their temporal imprisonment and manage to escape?

The point of all this is to see how quickly different players can adjust to different roles in the game. The game is meant to be accessible even to players who have never run or played in a roleplaying game before. Consequently, we need to know whether our approach to content design and formatting can be read and understood at a glance. Having everyone attempt the various roles will also help us determine the amount that player personality and preferences influence how game content and mechanics ultimately perform.