Online Gaming

Earlier I wrote about not gaming much. We recently received an invite for a play-over-the-internet game with some of our old college friends. It made me think seriously about pitching in again.

However, the time commitment is tough to make. In order to have a viable game, I think you need to play 3 times per month. Every other week just doesn't cut it; after you miss a session or two it has been a month and then the campaign loses all momentum. The problem is that this wipes out a tremendous amount of time. There's usually 15-30 minutes of virtual "gathering" (ironing out connection problems, chit-chat, dealing with old business, etc). Then you game for 3-6 hours. Then there's some wrapup time. Plus, every week there is usually an hour or three of admin (usually on a bulletin board or forum or via email), which is good because it keeps people engaged throughout the week between sessions but bad because it sucks up more time.

So, basically, you need to BBQ one day almost every week for gaming, usually a weekend (the only way to make it work due to time differences). I am ok with making that sacrifice if I'm traveling on the road because I am kind of lame when I'm away from home and don't like to go out and party and live it up. But when I am home, I want to be home. I want to get out and do stuff with DW. I don't want to sit in the computer room for eight hours every week with a headset on. Now I have blown my weekend and it is going to be hard to do anything the other day as I need to catch up on errands at some point; I certainly can't travel anywhere far away from home.

In a conventional table-top game, there is some socializing that you can do when it isn't your turn. Online, it is much harder. I either find that I end up aimlessly surfing the net in between turns or sitting, slack jawed, starting at the screen. Either way, it is a lot of wasted time. This is kind of paradoxical. The computer is theoretically GREAT for splitting the party; it is easy to isolate players on different skype channels and reveal fog of war to different player, and there is instant entertainment for non-active players. However, in practice it just doesn't seem to work out well. I think playing online I would aim for a small group (3, maybe 4 players) and shorter sessions (2 hours). That would minimize down-time as well as admin/technical difficulties.

The last issue is the system. The offered system was 4E. I'm not a 4E hater. I think they did some things great. But I've played the game enough to know that I think paragon and epic tiers are broken. The "End Game" is non-existent. Skill challenges were poorly implemented. It just doesn't get me super excited. I'm not sure which system does get me super excited these days; I think a White Wolf game with a good storyteller could be interested, and so could an OD&D game, or a 4E game with other systems grafted onto it or fixes for my biggest problems.

Slowing Down

I'm sure y'all have noticed that my posting frequency has slowed down significantly. There's a few factors at work here:

• Busy with school. I'm working on a master's and that + working full time has been keeping me busy.
• Traveling. I've been traveling for work a lot and am kind of sick of being on the road. I'm ready to get home and have been running low on energy for side projects.
• Other hobbies. I'm getting geared up for the summer in Alaska which is going to be awesome. We have lots of hiking, camping, and hunting planned. I'm putting more energy, time, and money into planning those events than gaming.
  
• Not much gaming going on. The only game I'm participating in right now is a 4E play-by-post "arena" (not player v. player; players vs. monsters) game on RPOL. It is ok but not terribly deep as far as roleplaying experiences go. I don't foresee playing in another game in the near future. I may do another post on that issue.
• No profit in it. I don't do this for the money obviously, but at one point I was getting a fair trickle of funds coming in from Google Adsense from the blog. For some reason that has dried up in the last few months, even before my post frequency started to dry up. While obviously the profit/time ratio was never great, it was kind of nice to see $1 trickle in occasionally, in a "penny for your thoughts" sort of way.

So, my consumption of gaming stuff, brain bytes devoted towards gaming stuff, and time on this issue has declined. Sure, I've still got a bunch of stuff rattling around; all the tarot materials I read the other month were great inspiration and I've got all that filed away for the RPG future.

Meanwhile, over at the Dragonsfoot front, I have disengaged again from the 1E forum. It seems like all the key issues have been rehashed over and over again. I know where I stand on issues, I have a robust set of play-tested house rules, got it. I feel no need to argue with the new crop of posters over there. I don't think I'm the only one -- a lot of the old timers seem to have drifted away. The Workshop has some great threads, but for every golden thread with novel, good ideas I have to wade through countless, "CHECK OUT MY AWESOME NEW SPELL/MONSTER/CAMPAIGN SETTING!" Honestly, I don't care about new spells or monsters or campaign settings. I already have more of all of those than I can use in the foreseeable future.

So, not saying that I am abandoning this blog. But, I do foresee my posting frequency settling down to 2-4 posts/month. Maybe with some time to rest and recharge at home I will be energized again and kick this back up.

Healing and Psychic Damage

Sorry for the lack of posting. I've been working on some other projects including my master's, getting another blog running, planning a hunting trip, and so on. And while I have lots of ideas floating around for an RPG, I am not sure when I will be able to play again.

But here's some quick food for thought.

I was watching a Band of Brothers episode on DVD the other day, "The Breaking Point." The drama centers on a young medic -- Roe -- from Louisiana who has a knack for healing. In many ways you might call him a modern paladin -- there are certainly allusions to the laying on of hands. Here's a discussion between Roe and one of his fellow soldiers about the somewhat mystical aspects of healing in his family.

Spina: "Hey, what do you call those people again? Those Cajun healers?"
Roe: "Traiteurs."
Roe: "You know, my grandma was a traiteuse."
Spina: "Your grandmother? No shit?"
Roe: "No, she was. Laid her hands on people and cured them. Took away sickness, cancer, you name it."
Spina: "Your grandma did that? You're shitting me."
Roe: "I remember she used to pray a lot."
Spina: "Yeah, I guess she had to."
Roe: "Talked to God about the pain she pulled out. Asked him to carry it away."
Roe: "That's what she did."

Roe also has a discussion with a French nurse:

Renée: "What?"
Roe: "You hands."
Renée: "My hands?"
Roe: "You're a good nurse."
Renée: "No. I never want to treat another wounded man again. I'd rather work in a butcher's shop."
Roe: "But your touch calms people. That's a gift from God."
Renée: "No, it's not a gift. God would never give such a painful thing."
Anonymous soldier: "Nurse! Nurse! We need some help over here!"
Anonymous soldier: "Got shrapnel through the stomach."
Renée: "How bad is it? Okay, get this one in first."

Another example of this sort of healing from fiction would be John Coffee in the Green Mile .

GAME SYSTEM APPLICATION

Anyways, I thought both were potentially good examples for how healing could work in any sort of gaming system or genre. The characters by laying on of hands can remove another's physical wounds -- but only at the cost of incurring their own psychic trauma. Clearly the laying on of hands is painful, something that can be borne only with great faith or innate goodness.

For example, say you have HP for physical damage and a Cthulu-style insanity meter. A healer could lay on hands (perhaps with minor first aid supplies to increase the chance of success) but risks incurring some sort of damage to their sanity. In WOD, perhaps healing physical damage costs sanity or willpower.

I can see this system working the other way too. Maybe psychic damage could be relieved by incurring a stigmata, exhaustion/fatigue or other physical damage. An example might be a priest doing an exorcism to heal a victim infested by a malign spirit: the victim's psychic wounds will be alleviated but the priest may be fatigued or even bodily injured in the attempt.

GAME DESIGN

From a game design point of view such trades cannot be "frictionless" at 1:1. Otherwise players will use it all the time. There should be some degree of loss or friction. Perhaps relieving one physical wound risks losing two mental points, for example. Here's an example in play:

Maximus the warrior has sustained grievous injuries. He hopes that Percival the Paladin can help him. Percival attempts to do so, with standard odds of success (perhaps 1/3 if untrained, 2/3 if trained, bonus for using equipment?). If he is succesful, then Maximus regains 1 wound point (whatever that is in your system).

Regardless of success, Percival must make a resistance check to prevent being overwhelmed by the horror. Again, the odds of success are 1/3 and 2/3 for untrained/trained respectively.

There are four outcomes. Let's assume Percy is an awesome healer and trained in both:

Maximus Healed / Percy Unscathed: 44%
Maximus Not Healed / Percy Unscathed: 22%
Maximus Healed / Percy Traumatized: 22%
Maximus Not Healed / Percy Traumatized: 12%

On average, Maximus regains .66 HP and Percy takes .33 damage.

This system clearly does not have enough friction. Players will be gaming it all the time to convert damage willy-nilly. There are several possible fixes:

• Arbitrarily limit the number of times per day this can occur
• Increase Percy's risk to be 2 x the amount healed (this creates an exactly equivalent exchange)
• Increase Percy's risk to be 3 x the amount healed (this creates inefficiency)
• Require Percy to expend one sanity point right up front, no save, to even make the attempt (this also creates efficiency, and makes it less likely that people who suck at healing will even try -- may be good, may be bad)

Anyways, just a sketch of a thought!

4E Complexity

4E has officially hit the point where I am no longer comfortable with its complexity.

With the core PHB, it was ok. I could pretty much grok what all the classes did, what the major class features where, etc. I knew that Clerics & Paladins had Channel Divinity, Defenders had marks, etc.

I'm playing in an online 4E arena game where out of about 16 players, teams of 4-6 are put together on an adhoc basis for a series of 3 encounters. Everyone is in the low or mid levels. At this point I just can't keep track of what abilities everyone else has. Luckily, WOTC has actually done a decent job of enforcing role boundaries so I know what I expect a defender, striker, leader, or controller to do. But they have not done a good job of enforcing power source boundaries. Plus, the plethora of new powers makes it hard to keep track of the options for just one class, much less the rest of the playing world.

I think a better approach would be to have a series of "menus" with limited (5-9) options. For example:

1. Pick a role (Defender, Leader, Striker, Controller, perhaps multiclass)
2. Pick a power source (martial, divine, arcane, primal, psionic)
3. Pick a style (offensive, defensive, balanced)

Each choice from the menu could give a specific feature. That lets players customize but keeps the choices manageable. Such an approach will not sell many splat books however so I understand why WOTC has not gone this route.

Dark Tower

Sorry for the lack of posts. I just had a week of vacation, then a week of catching up after vacation, plus tax time. So its been busy. Plus, any limited spare time I had was being used rocketing to the end of Stephen King's Dark Tower series. Worth a read!

Perhaps next week I'll get some thoughts up here.

Tarot

Sorry for no posts recently. I've been reading about the tarot, which is a nice mish-mash of all the renaissance neoplatonic ideas I've been talking about lately. Maybe some posts/reviews later!

Resources, Damages, and Scales of Play

Earlier I've talked about various scales of play and how to move between them. One thing that becomes obvious when considering this is that you need to have different resources at each level of play.

Let's jump to an example. In older D&D, the primary character resource is the Hit Point. This resource is primarily depleted on a round-by-round basis, and its fully restored theoretically on a weekly or monthly basis (1 point per day with rest), but practically restored in a day or two (using clerical magic -- a down day where the cleric packs a bunch of healing spells will take care of most seriously wounded parties). The other resource is the Spell Slot, and this is also restored on a daily basis.

This works pretty well; by the mid-levels a party often has enough endurance for a few encounters denominated in rounds and then their daily resources are done. It has some major implications in the end game, however. For example, Delta has pointed out many times that the end game in D&D doesn't work. This is because an attack in one round that does 1d6 damage will do 10d6 damage over 10 rounds; and if the figure making said attack over 10 rounds consists of 20 orcs, then it will do 200d6 damage.

The HP transitions equally poorly for other purposes as well. For example, take forced marching in AD&D. Dealing some HP damage as a consequence of forced marching is meaningless as HP were restored every day. What's the point of incurring some damage for a long day's march if its just restored again in a day anyways? So, in AD&D the rule for forced marching incurs a loss of HD and it will take several days to fully recover. Other events start to pick up longer recovery times on the order of a magnitude as well: recovering after being in negative HP, the time it takes for a high level caster to fully recover all expended spells (add it up; its longer than you might think), ability score damage, and so on.

All this points, IMHO, to the need for different resources at different levels of scales. For example, I could just use HP at the segment level and then multiply all damage done by 10 for events played out on the round level and 100 for events played out on the turn level. But this leads to "no heroes in war."

WOTC realized this, at least in part, with the advent of Healing Surges in 4E. This mechanic works well on at least two levels of scale: HP continue to be used for things where the recovery time is measured in about a turn (the "short rest" of a few minutes), and Healing Surges are used for things where the recovery takes a day ("the long rest" overnight). Healing Surge loss could be used for quickly abstracting an entire situation (for example; "You have a boring random encounter and lose one healing surge; the environment is very hot and you all lose a healing surge. We all move on with our lives.") operating on the turns or even maybe hours level. I could see it working well for mass combat, where a formation of orcs attacking a hero might result int he loss of a healing surge or two rather than the massive (and lethal)loss of HP that would otherwise result.

It still doesn't work well for events occurring on the "many hours" level for things like forced marching as they're all recovered overnight. After this was exploited many times in skill challenges, our DM implemented a house rule of "resistant healing surge" loss which persisted for a longer period of of time or until several milestones were reached.

White Wolf also realized this with the use of three different types of wounds: bashing damage recovers in a few minutes, lethal damage takes days, and aggravated takes much longer. Additionally, there is a Willpower resource, which is recovered bit by bit on a daily basis but requires around a week to top off from empty.

So, my bottom line is that you need to consider having more than just one consumable resource if you want to be able to move between scales of play.

I've got more thoughts but for now this has turned out to be a fairly robust post, so more to come later.