Games

That’s Not Your “CHARACTER,” You’re Just A Dick.

/ G. Scott Huggins / 2 Comments
Image may contain: text that says 'theMAZC @theMAZC2009 Replying to @StrahdVonZ It doesn't matter if your character is fun to play as, if it isn't fun to play *with*. Play someone you'd like to be around for 4 hours every week, because everyone else will have to. 7:15 PM 25 Dec 18 Twitter for Android'

Been thinking about this rather excellent observation for a bit. And it’s been awhile since I did a good, old-fashioned listicle here on the blog. Okay, it’s been awhile since I really did much of ANYTHING here on the blog, but I’m a high-school teacher at the end of the Second Semester Of COVIDS and a Dad planning Christmas with 3 school-age kids, so give me a break).

There are always players — and, I think, writers — who confuse characters that are fun to play and write with characters that are fun to play WITH and fun to read. I’ll also admit that I haven’t always been innocent of these. So with that in mind, I’m going to dive right in to Characters That Are Dickishness In Disguise.

The Character That Can’t Be Told What To Do aka Contrarius: Most of these characters are power fantasies (which there’s nothing wrong with as such: that’s kind of what RPGs are for.), and this one is no exception. You kind of get the impression that the player is someone who is never allowed to say “no” to anyone in real life and he’s by all the gods gonna make up for it now. Often comes right out and says, “My character doesn’t like being told what to do,” and every experienced player cringes. It doesn’t matter how good a suggestion that your character makes, or some other character makes, or the NPC giving advice to your party makes, or how good an idea is. If it wasn’t Contrarius’s suggestion, that’s reason enough to fight it tooth and nail. Often, Contrarius gets his way because of Don’t Split The Party.

The Character Who Deliberately Annoys NPCs aka Impertinens: Impertinens doesn’t like it when the party has friends. To Impertinens, the rest of the world consists solely of people who aren’t good enough for the party. Gods help the king or duke or wizard who has the temerity to summon the party, pay the party, or warn the party. They are in for a heaping helping of mockery and abuse simply because Impertinens’s player finally gets a chance to say what’s on his mind. Impertinens can’t really be shut out, because he’s at his most annoying at the safest parts of the game, i.e. when the DM is desperately trying to actually establish a plot, and doesn’t really want to, for example, have Denethor tell the Guards of the Tower to throw Pippin off the Citadel for being an ass.

The Character Who Is Deliberately The Opposite Alignment Of Everyone Else In The Party aka Spoilerus: Spoilerus loves being the party pooper. Everyone else is a champion of law and good? Spoilerus is going to be the chaotic evil sorceror that’s hanging back to eviscerate and torture the fallen. Everyone wants to do a thieving dungeon run? Spoilerus will be the worst example of the stick-up-the-ass paladin, looking for ways to give away the party gold. Spoilerus is basically Gollum, except that he’s not trying desperately to keep the rest of the party safe so he won’t lose his shot at the Precious.

The Character Who Can’t Be Told The Odds aka Kamikaze:
DM: “Okay, you’re squatting outside the Black Gate of Mordor, honeycombed with caves full of thousands of orcs, bolstered by flying Nazgul. The Orc patrol gets closer and closer to your hiding place…”
Kamikaze: “I CAST FIREBALL!!!”
Kamikaze doesn’t believe that anything worthwhile happens in D&D that doesn’t involve attack and damage rolls, and believes that combat is the first, last and only option for dealing with anything. And Kamikaze always has an excuse for fighting literally everyone. They’re too strong? Well, they need to be taken down a peg. Too weak? Easy kill. You’d think that Kamikaze would get his throat cut in short order, but the problem is that he’ll take the rest of the party down with him.

The Character Surrounded By Theme Music aka Energizer Bunny: The Energizer Bunny NEVER STOPS. Is he a rogue? Well, he will steal things all the time. From other party members if nothing else is around. Is he a necromancer? He will animate everything that is dead, up to and including dead squirrels the party runs across. Is he a warrior? He will challenge shopkeepers to duels for haggling with him. The dead giveaway for this character is that he asks the same question in every room in the dungeon: “Is there a <object my character is obsessed with>?” Then he pouts when people get tired of him.

The Character That Hates Another Member Of The Party aka Nemecyst: Nemecyst is as much fun as a huge boil you can’t get rid of. He hates orcs. Or paladins. Or just YOU, because you know more about D&D, or you had an idea the party liked better than his idea, or because Fuck You, that’s why. Nemecyst my plot your death, but is more likely to simply argue with you at every turn and/or degrade your character gratuitously. Essentially, the character is a bully, and often a racist bully at that. Not that there aren’t sometimes moments where being a “racist” in D&D can’t be realistic (being racist against, say, vampires, can be a survival trait), but it sure as hell isn’t a fun thing to hang around.

Of course, confronting the players with these things tends to get a defensive response featuring the chorus, “I’m just roleplaying,” or, “Well, that’s what my character would do!”
If you’re having to say these things more than once a campaign? Yeah, you might want to examine why that is, and whether one of these “characters” applies to your play style.

Your party and DM will be glad you did.

Video Game Rant: Faster Than Gossip

/ G. Scott Huggins / Leave a comment

I really like 4X Games. My favorites, back in college, were Civilization (yes, I am literally older than Civilization. None of my students get it) and Master Of Orion. Lately, I have been overjoyed to discover Stars In Shadow, which feels like the sequel to Master Of Orion that I always wished had been made and never was. MOO 2 was trying too hard to be Civilization In SPAAAAACE! and MOO 3 is best set on fire and forgotten. But Stars In Shadow has done everything right: Their planetary improvements hit the right balance between monotonous and gimmicky, the ship combat is wonderfully differentiated, with several equally valid styles of play, and the tech tree is interconnected and awesome.

But there is one thing that the game just absolutely falls flat on… the diplomacy.

To be fair, most 4X games handle diplomacy with all the poise and finesse of a drunk Chihuahua. it’s HARD to get AI to simulate negotiation. But the two things that just make me want to punch a fist through the screen are:

  1. The AI Mean Girls Club: No matter what you do in SiS, the AI players know about it. Instantly. And react to it. Instantly. Also, they have an eidetic memory for all your slights. So that means that if I am, say, playing the Gremak, the interstellar slavers, and I enslave members of a race? Everyone knows about it. And everyone cares. I perform experiments on the slaves? That’s instantly known and remembered, too. In fact, races I don’t even know about will show up holding a grudge a hundred turns later. And that sucks because first, it’s a bait-and-switch: “Hey, PC, your race has this super-cool ability, sort of a balance to other races’ super cool abilities you don’t have! But don’t you dare use it, or you will be permanently at war forever, because everybody will hate you!” But it’s not just that: the races will have bad impressions of me because “We heard how you treated the innocent Ashdar!” Which leads to the more important point, that it’s not reciprocal. No one comes to me and says, “Hey just so you know, those evil Orthin have attacked two other races because they noticed that they had inferior navies and thought it would be fun!” No, I get to float in blissful ignorance.
  2. I Don’t Get To Speak The Language: The AI almost always, in these games, has options unavailable to the PC. So I’m constantly getting messages like: “You have a world that is rightfully ours. Return it, and we will stop hating you,” Or, “Sever the diplomatic relations you’ve spent  lot of time forging with our enemies, and remember if you don’t we will dislike you. A lot.” Or, “Give us money and we won’t attack.”
    Meanwhile, I don’t get any of these choices. I can pretty much say, “Let’s have formal relations, let’s have a trade/research treaty, let’s have an open ports treaty/alliance, or let’s have a war.” That’s it. I feel like I am constantly the foreign exchange student just arrived to a gaming party, and I know a third of the language and a quarter of the rules.

I mean, some of these are admittedly hard to code, but hell, the option to demand tribute from enemies was included in Civ I for crying out loud!

You know, it’s still an awesome game. But it really should be better.

Gaming Rant: The Keymaster and the Gatekeeper Need To Go

/ G. Scott Huggins / Leave a comment

Without a doubt, my favorite trope in fantasy RPGs is the cult of the Key and Lock.

This is my name for it, but you all know what I mean: it’s the conceit that the Chosen One, the Dragonslayer, the Bringer Of Destiny who shall Destroy Evil and Restore Peace to The Land, Before Whom None Can Stand…

…cannot break locks, doors, or chests.

I can’t count how many times my quests have been interrupted by the simple presence of a locked chest or a locked door. I can slay dragons, assume a phantom form, produce fire at will, and forge steel all day. But simple wooden planks and iron bars and locks stand in my way as an immovable barrier.

I can just about bet that someone’s going to say it anyway, but just in case it prevents condescending comments: YES, I am aware that game designers have to have a way (or it is most expedient to have a way) to keep players out of, to take just one example, the quests that are led to by other quests. It’s easy to break a game if, for example, you have a player just stumble upon the Elder Scroll before ever learning of the Elder Scroll’s existence. I realize that is a difficult problem to deal with.

The problem isn’t that the barriers exist. The problem is that the barriers take the forms of mundane barriers, when those barriers should be very special, because they guard the way to special places. I can think of any number of ways around this that wouldn’t carry such an overt stench of Because The DM Said So.

  1. Chests and Doors that absolutely needed to stay locked until Quest Time could be made of a magical substance, such as adamantium, utterly resistant to magical/physical damage.
  2. Locks on such Chests and Doors could function only with enchanted keys. You’d really only need to change the dialogue box for this.  Many times, I have come across “This lock can only be opened with a key.” Or “This lock is not pickable.” Replace that with “This lock requires the enchanted key.”
  3. Doors that absolutely must stay locked could function similarly to the Doors Of Moria in The Lord Of The Rings. Until you know the right enchantment or Questing Words, they won’t even appear. Or they will be magical gates. Break them, and you just face a wall.
  4. Chests that need to stay locked could function this way, too: They are invisible until you have discovered how to make them visible. Or appear from the Otherworld. Or they are disguised by a powerful illusion spell as a fire, or a bookcase, or something else that doesn’t look like a chest.
  5. Attempting to break such chests or doors might be known to trigger a one-shot kill, if you’re feeling particularly nasty.
  6. For less game-breaking events, like say, high-power items that you want to delay access to, but aren’t game essential, you could make breaking the chest containing them carry a high chance of destroying the contents.

I realize that to a lot of people, these are nitpicks, and in terms of mechanics, they are. But what makes RPGs great is their immersion. And “You Can’t Because The DM Said So” always breaks immersion. You can’t get away with such things in stories, and you shouldn’t get away with them in games. Not when you don’t have to.

The Challenge Of The Grind

/ G. Scott Huggins / Leave a comment

Grinding. Can’t count the number of times I’ve heard gamers complain about grinding, that moment when the game becomes more of a chore than a form of fun, trying to rack up more and more currency of whatever form the game requires so that you can trade it in for the shiny spaceship, armor, spell, plot-point, etc. that’s necessary to be awesome and go have FUN AGAIN!

But I’d actually like to challenge the notion that grinding is, of itself, a bad thing.

No, before you get out your machetes to sacrifice me to the gods of terrible game writing, hear me out. Grind is an inevitable part of gameplay. In fact, it’s pretty much the core meta-mechanic: Do these things according to the rules and you win. You just have to keep doing them. The problem isn’t grind: the problem is BAD grind. I submit that bad grind occurs when the players get the sense that they are having to repeat the same onerous task (whether too easy or too hard doesn’t matter) in order to get the same inadequate reward.

But good grind gives you the sense that the game is worth playing. That the universe is a challenge in itself. I will use two examples of this to prove my point: The 1990s Star Control II and the present incarnation of Elite: Dangerous.

Star Control II was a resource-gathering and exploration game. But in order to explore, you have to strengthen the capabilities of your flagship and its attendant fleet. And for this you need to mine planets. The genius of Star Control was its sheer magnitude and variety: literally thousands of brightly-colored planets, filled with millions of brightly-colored minerals. The more valuable minerals were mostly on the most dangerous planets to explore, presenting you with a cruel dilemma: do you take the chance of mining a dangerous planet for the rich rewards and losing your valuable shuttle altogether? Or do you content yourself poking about the safer, poorer planets, losing valuable time? I never heard anyone complain about the “grind” in SCII. And yet, all the elements of the grind were there. What saved it was the inherent tension, and the ability of the player to set his own pace.

Elite: Dangerous has a different sort of grind: the grind of the journey. You can fly to the center of the galaxy. It’s likely to take about a month of game time, but you can do it. And on the way you’re going to discover nebulae, planets, wrecked ships and more. It’s a grind: a never-ending series of jumps. But you can play the game without doing it. And there’s always something new to see. And you don’t get the reward of taking the long journey without, well, the work of taking the long journey. Which is, of course, the entirely appropriate price to pay.

Coming Apart At The Seams: Sandbox Games

/ G. Scott Huggins / 2 Comments

Anyone who plays sandbox games knows about their “seams.” Well, maybe not. I just made up that term. But you know what I’m talking about: the places where you run into the edges of the sandbox and are pretty much forced into the realization that you are just playing a game, and it doesn’t have to make sense.

And yes, I realize that in some ways, this is inevitable. In others, it seems unimaginative, and in yet others it seems downright sloppy. I’m going to take some examples of each of these from the two games I’ve been playing the most over the past few years: Skyrim and Elite: Dangerous.

As far as the inevitable “seams,” the best example is that of borders. Eventually, you have to run out of playing field. An example of a really well-done “seam” is found in ED: the edges of the galaxy. It works because it feels natural. They even show extragalactic features such as the LMC and the GMC and M31. Why can’t you go there? Because human technology just isn’t that good. Makes perfect sense in the game universe: this is about as close as you can get to a seamless border. Skyrim is a bit less competent, but that’s the nature of the beast. Eventually, you just get to a place where your character runs into an invisible wall. You can’t leave Skyrim. I have to admit I don’t know how you’d solve that.

On the border of “inevitable” and “unimaginative” are the times in Skyrim where you run into someone who you really want to kill and discover that they are simply unkillable, or at least, unkillable yet. This has been the bane of D&D-like RPGs since they were computerized: your hero character who is supposed to be able to take down a Dragon God, and yet, cannot kill a shopkeeper and take his stuff. I’m not sure exactly how you do solve that. In the case of shopkeepers or very important plot-specific characters, especially in a magic-heavy environment, I wonder why it hasn’t occurred to the writers not to, for example, create 1) a giant alarm-spell that calls guards instantly to a scene of unjustifiable attack, coupled with 2) shopkeepers or nobles who always carry an emergency invisibility potion and sensibly use it an run the hell away when they’re attacked, leaving your character to 3) get dogpiled on by the guards, and 4) discover that they cam back as soon as you left out of boredom or being driven off by guards. Of course, once your character is up somewhere above 50th level, it still requires the game to explain why your character can’t essentially conquer the world single-handed since he is, after all, the person who is supposed to stop the Dragon God who wants to conquer the world single-handed. So there’s still a seam there (more on this later).

In the downright unimaginative corner comes a certain feature of ED that really annoyed me. Some systems in ED are permit-locked. The game won’t allow you to plot a hyperspace jump to them until you’ve accomplished something. A bit more on this in the next section.
Now, if you like thinking your way around problems like I do, you notice something: a shop in ED  really has two FTL drives. The hyperspace jump is the “fast” drive. It will take you anywhere from 8-40 light years in about ten seconds. But you get around each system using a “slow” FTL drive or “frameshift drive.” And when I say slow, it’s still really fast. Given time, it can build to speeds in excess of Star Trek‘s Warp 10. So you can’t JUMP to a permit-locked system, but given the time and patience, you could certainly just GO there…
Except you can’t. If you try, you discover that the star you have been heading for, which is a gigantic ball of hydrogen fusion and attendant planets when you jump there, is a mere point of light when you finish your hours-long flight. Sigh.
It occurred to me that a way around this would be to take a page from Zork: interstellar space is a dark place, and if you try to fly directly between stars, the odds are almost certain that You Will Be Eaten By A Space Grue. (For a really great classic SF story that uses this concept, read Cordwainer Smith’s “The Game Of Rat And Dragon.” It’s wonderful.)

And then you get to the truly sloppy stuff: Remember the permit-locks I mentioned earlier? Well, that makes perfect sense when it’s, say, the Empire saying that you can’t visit their capital system without a permit. It makes somewhat LESS sense, when its hundreds of stars out in the middle of nowhere and no one knows who has issued the permit or why. And yet there are several such regions in the galaxy. It’s pretty obvious this is the game designers saying DON’T GO THERE. SIGNED, GOD, but it looks pretty bad. Honestly, it would be better to do something like marking them all “No pilot has ever jumped to these stars and returned.” and making it an instakill if you do, with legends of the disappeared pilots in game.

So, those are my thoughts. I’d be interested to hear yours.

The Mystery Of The Turd In The Truffle

/ G. Scott Huggins / 1 Comment

So, I’m playing Elite: Dangerous, which, I want to make clear up front, is one of my favorite sandbox games of all time. Seriously, this is the game I have dreamed of playing since I was a little kid: you can outfit your own ships, trade between the stars, fight Evil Space Pirates, BE an Evil Space Pirates, mine asteroids, the works. One of the ways you can earn money is to take on a Famous Explorer mission.

The Famous Explorer missions are a commitment, in game time. Because while there are lots of games that claim to allow you to travel around “the galaxy,” Elite: Dangerous features a playing field the size of the ACTUAL galaxy. You can take missions to the Galactic Core. (All of Human-populated space is a “Bubble” about 500 light-years in diameter in the game-year 3304.) And given that it’s 23,000 or so light-years away and your ship can do “jumps” of a maximum of about 40 light-years, that takes a LONG time.

So I took one of these Famous Explorer missions. Not sure I’d like it, I picked one that was ONLY 5,000 light-years away. It was the first time I had left the Bubble. And it was amazing how well this game was set up. First thing I noticed, suddenly, there were no other ships around. I jumped into a system, and it was deserted. Of course it was: I’d left the Human spacelanes, and the odds against seeing fellow explorer were incredible. I also noticed that signals — very common in Humans space, and indicating things like wrecks, distress signals, and convoys — those disappeared too, becoming very rare. There were no longer any Navigation Beacons around stars.

The I realized, as I continued toward the center of the galaxy, that all the things I was seeing in the big, glowing strip of the Milky Way were actual objects. I mean, they weren’t just images painted on a skybox, they were getting closer (minutely closer) with every jump, little smudges becoming enormous nebulae. I was having fun. I jumped into a system and found a strange object on my scanner and went to investigate. It was a neutron star, and do you know how I figured out it was a neutron star? Before my ship scanner told me so?  Because I could actually see the stars behind it being smeared around by the gravitational lensing! Yes, this game is that well-written!

So, by the time I reached my destination, a black hole, I was thinking of it as the climax of the trip, and rightly so. I had not seen one before, and as I got within 70 light years, I began to see it. Because the game designers had remembered that black holes form out of supernovae, so of COURSE there was a small, brightly-glowing nebula around this one, which got bigger and more ominous-looking as I approached, like the ghost of the dead star. I jumped into the system itself, and was surrounded by the bluish glow of the highly-energetic nebula. Carefully, I looked around and found the black hole. There was no brightly-glowing accretion disc around it, but you know, you can’t expect everything.

I scanned the thing, noticing that space was of course highly distorted around it, and expected that my mission would be over. Not so.

Interestingly enough, right beside the black hole itself on my navigational chart was an icon reading “Black Treasure” which was, after all, the name given to this particular black hole by the Famous Explorer currently sitting in my passenger cabin.

Very well, perhaps it was this mysterious object I needed to scan, which was, somewhat frighteningly, sitting right on top of the black hole. Okay. I locked onto it and dropped out of supralight drive.

It was a human-built tourist beacon. And there were other ships there. Several. Looking at the black hole. Just like any other tourist spot in the Bubble.

And the Hammer of Anticlimax smacked down on the whole adventure. It was like climbing K2, pulling myself up the summit after an agony of climbing, and discovering a sherpa grinning and ready to sell me an “I Summited K2 And All I Got Was This Lousy T-shirt.” T-shirt.

Which brings me to my title: The Turd In The Truffle. That’s how I felt. I felt as if I had been enjoying an incredible meal at a five-star restaurant, only to discover that there, right on top of the elegant;y arranged dish, was a dog turd. This is not the first time in my life I have felt this way as a reader/player. And my question is why — and how — writers can do this to their audiences. I mean, obviously the writers of this game were and are intelligent and thoughtful. Why, then, such a moment of careless anticlimax?

I remember feeling a similar way when I watched the film adaptation of Watchmen. A beautiful film, well-made. But then there’s the scene in which Rorschach is being pried out of his cell by a criminal Boss who wants to kill him. Rorschach manages to handcuff one of the henchmen to his cell door, blocking the Boss.

Now in the comic, the Boss has another henchman kill the guy to get him out of the way, and continues to come at Rorschach. But in the film, he has his free henchman cut the trapped man’s arms off with a power saw while he is still alive to get him out of the way. It’s an unnecessarily brutal and horrifying scene, which I could in no way believe. Underground bosses who occasionally kill their own men when necessary? Sure. Underground bosses who torture their men to death for fun, just to emphasize their own evilness? No. That’s crazy, and no henchman wants to hench for a guy like that. Again, a Turd In The Truffle: a moment of thoughtlessness in brilliance.

I really don’t have an answer for why this happens. I leave it as an open question for the reader. Why do we find Turds in Truffles. I await comments with interest.

The Population Paradox: When Is Less More?

/ G. Scott Huggins / Leave a comment

One of the hardest things about being a writer is differentiating between what your writing is like for you, and what it’s like for your readers. This is the source of the oft-repeated wisdom, “kill your darlings.” If you’ve put that much effort into making something exciting, it is likely to come across as overwrought and tedious.

Nothing reinforced this truth for me recently more than my own experience with two similar video games: No Man’s Sky and Elite: Dangerous. Both games are about 2-3 years old. Both are sandbox open-world games with no clear plotline. You’re supposed to make your own up as you travel through a galaxy that is literally too big to be explored fully, improving your ship and your capabilities. You mine asteroids, explore planets, and fight enemy ships.

The visual contrast could not be more striking, however. In No Man’s Sky, a solar system is full of huge planets, like something out of a science-fiction film. In Elite: Dangerous, it is full of, at best, tiny points of light. In No Man’s Sky, planets teem with life more often than not, with huge mineral outcroppings waiting to be harvested everywhere. Elite: Dangerous confines itself to barren worlds of rock and ice, with tiny mineral deposits that must be hunted down with radar.

And yet, somehow, those big worlds that fill No Man’s Sky seem smaller and less impressive the closer you get to them. All the mountains are low and flat. The lakes are shallow. There are almost no seas or oceans. The lifeforms quickly start to resemble a mix-n-match set of notable Earth-life features: “Hey, look: it’s that same bear-like creature as on the last planet, only now it has a wasp’s head instead of a rabbit’s.”

By contrast, Elite: Dangerous‘s worlds are tiny, and seem extremely similar, and yet as one approaches, they are full of canyons and craters that are, seen close to, huge. On one unremarkable moon, I flew down a canyon visible form space and landed at the edge of a tiny crater. And yet, when I drove my lunar rover over the lip of the same crater, it was big enough to take my breath away in a sensation I can only relate to the best horror games. It was like reading what Lovecraft kept trying to describe: a monstrous coldness, alien to humanity, that was terrifying in its sheer size and closeness.

I am far from an expert on understanding why this effect works, and yet I am struck by the fact that so many of the classic works of F/SF (and literature itself) are not the mega-series that are churned out in multi-volume sets, but are small, (and often single) works: The Lion The Witch and The Wardrobe. A Wrinkle In Time. The Metamorphosis. 2001: A Space Odyssey. While most of these did spawn sequels, none are as well known as the originals, and all would have been classics without those sequels. There is perhaps a lesson here to bear in mind, but as simple as it is, it may take a lifetime for me to explore all its nuances.