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Monday, October 16th, 2006
12:38 pm - The Tyranny of the Cutscene
Man, do I hate cutscenes in computer games. Paper and pencil RPG designers figured out about 20 years ago that pulling lame crap in a module's boxed text was a sign of:

1. Awful design
2. Railroading
3. Innane plotting

Bad boxed text:
As you open the door, you see beyond a magical goblin. The goblin laughs at you as he begins the ritual needed to summon Cthulhu. You gasp in horror as the ritual commences. Your entire group huddles together as the goblin does his thing. Finally, after 10 minutes, Cthulhu appears.

Anyone involved in the professional creation of RPGs can see that the above example is horrendous. It wouldn't make it past any semi-clueful editor's desk. RPG players hate being told what their characters are supposed to do. Any reasonable person, especially a fantasy adventurer wearing magical platemail, carrying a badass flaming sword, and backed by an arsenal of a dozen or so spells, knows exactly what to do in the situation above. DECAPITATE THE LITTLE BUGGER BEFORE HE FINISHES HIS CEREMONY!

Yet, in videogames the "boxed text", the beloved cut scene, is pushed as the coolest part of the game. There's a tendency among many videogame "designers" to undercut the entire point of games as an interactive medium. They want to tell you a story. Think of all the times where the important stuff in a videogame happens in a cutscene, while the player is forced to deal with all the dull grunt work. If you made a movie out of a videogame, almost all the stuff the player has to do would end up on the cutting room floor.

Paper and pencil RPGs are almost the exact opposite. The moments with the most interaction, where the players have the greatest say in how the plot moves along, are also the most important parts of the story.

(This is touched off by Dead Rising. My initial opinion of it remains unchanged. It'd be a great game without the story or cut scenes.)

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Friday, October 13th, 2006
10:53 am - It's Friday the 13th
Be careful out there.

Seriously, be careful.

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Tuesday, October 10th, 2006
1:51 pm - Living Rule Sets
Over at shootingdice.blogspot.com, Malcolm sez:

"After D&D; last night I found myself able to articulate something that kind of sucks about the rules. D&D; is designed to strictly assign responsibilities and outcomes for dungeon crawling. This breaks down into a number of standard tasks that players constantly undertake. D&D; mandates rolls in short intervals in tasks like Search. D&D; also assumes that players declare the task each time.

The unspoken balancing mechanism here is that as players have to declare that they're doing exactly the same thing over and over again, somebody will slip up and miss the trap/monster/door. Basically, D&D; relies on player boredom to create tension and conflict."

I simultaneously agree and disagree with this statement.

For n00bs, rolling things like Search is fun. The players have little experience with the rules. They aren't familiar with how the game works, how play is supposed to proceed, and how the cliches roll along. Novelty alone makes it really fun to worry about what's behind that door, or what you need to do to properly check an area over for hidden stuff.

After a while, the novelty wears off and that stuff becomes boring. You've opened the door with the trap a dozen times. It's old hat. Rules that were once fun and exciting are now boring.

The problem is that the rules fail to evolve in response to your group. It'd be a mistake to tell people to just cut past all that stuff, since there is a segment of gamers who enjoy it. But the people who don't enjoy it should have some simple tools for getting around it.

The key is striking the balance. You want the DM of the vets to see that it's a good thing to avoid boring roles. You want the DM of the newbies to see that, for many beginners, the sense of novelty injects interest and tension into everything.

I have no insights into how to make that work without confusing both groups or wasting energy. I suspect that, in many cases, DMs who need to change how they do things just ignore the advice to change (that's why they're bad at what they do, they ignore opportunities to improve). The good ones already know tricks like assume the rogue takes 10 on Search, throw in traps for the rogue to find on a take 10 as a tell that tougher traps are coming up, or to reveal something about the plot ("This scything blade trap is brand new. Someone has been in this crypt in the past week!")

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Friday, October 6th, 2006
9:55 am - Podcast Link
Here's the link to the podcast page. It has info on how to subscribe to the 'cast via iTunes, plus a link to an mp3 of this episode.

http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/pod/20061005a

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Thursday, October 5th, 2006
9:42 am - New Podcast
It looks like the second D&D; podcast is now available through iTunes. Listen in as I sputter and mutter my way through an interview with D&D; developer Andy Collins!

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Sunday, September 24th, 2006
6:48 pm - Dead Rising
I've been playing Dead Rising on my shiny new Xbox 360. The game is about one step away from greatness. Unfortunately, that last step was the one that was going to take it from "contrived, cliched, and unoriginal."

Dead Rising is two games in one.

The first game is pure, awesome survival horror. It's a desperate attempt to save yourself and others in a mall filled with the walking dead. The 360 shows its chops here. The screen holds dozens, maybe even hundreds, of zombies at a time. The really, really cool thing is that there are zombie personalities and "types" that you learn to deal with.

Some zombies stand around and never do anything. Others wander. Others charge at you. Others stand still then lunge at you when you get close. Even cooler, someone at Konami said, "People like to shoot zombies in the head, so when we design these guys let's make them move in all sorts of different ways." When it comes time to turn the mall into a shooting gallery, some zombies bob their heads up and down. Others go side to side. Others quite thoughtfully keep their heads still. Cool stuff.

There's also a nifty scoring system. If you save people or do cool stuff, you score points. Points allow you to level, increasing your health boxes, carrying capacity, speed, and unlocking zombie killing ninja moves.

Oh, and the protagonist is a photojournalist. If you snap photos of zombies, dudes getting eaten, zombies getting blown to pieces, or just random havoc, you score more points.

Wait, did I mention that you can fight zombies with about 10,000 different things? There's obvious stuff like guns and baseball bats, but they also threw in skateboards, bowling balls, giant umbrellas, a lawn mower, and more. There's nothing like wading into a mob of undead with a chainsaw, all arms flying, torsos chopped in half.

At this point, Dead Rising scores 10 stars out of 4, a new world record.

But, and there's always a but, they couldn't stop there.

Yup, there's a story. There are missions. There's a Mexican dude who dresses like it's 1978. For vague reasons, you have to fight him again, and again, and again, and again.

Did I mention the time limit? You have to fight the annoying Mexican Disco Godfather at certain times. If you don't, YOU LOSE START OVER KTHX BYE! Imagine playing GTA, and while rampaging through Vice City the game suddenly ground to a halt and said, "You were supposed to take control of the porn studio by now. You didn't, so please start over. Yes, do everything over."

The game isn't designed for the kind of fights it wants you to fight. The human bosses are invariably stupid, goofy, and annoying. The controls are perfect for survival horror, terrible for everything else. The story is a random pastiche of every bad (and I think they're almost all bad; the exceptions are scarily rare for an industry hellbent on turning itself into Hollywood) videogame plot line. You want to fight zombies. Maybe 80% of the people who worked on this game want you to fight zombies. But at some point, someone in charge decided that a game about rampaging through a mall, killing zombies, was just too good. Perhaps there were fears of an intentionally triggered zombie apocalypse. Maybe there's a UN taskforce whose mission is to make zombies look as terrible as possible. They realized that there was no way that Dead Rising could be so thoroughly crippled as to make the game lame while keeping zombies in it. In the end, they added in a bad story, a seriously goofy villain, and a game experience that should be secondary to SHOOT ZOMBIES IN THE HEAD IN A MALL but instead became the most important part of the game.

Dead Rising is the greatest survival horror game ever. Unfortunately, someone decided to make that game secondary to a game about battling an Angry Mexican Disco Godfather.

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Friday, September 8th, 2006
9:58 am - Me Wantee!
URGE TO BUY, RISING! MUST NOT FIGHT!

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Wednesday, September 6th, 2006
11:23 am - Podtastic!
The D&D; podcast is up! Each month, Dave Noonan and I, along with various and sundry other folks from WotC, get a bully pulpit from which we get to rant about whatever the heck crosses our minds. This month, we talk GenCon.

http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/pod/20060905a

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Monday, August 21st, 2006
9:20 am - Treasure Tables Interview
Martin Ralya of Treasure Tables interviewed me, and the text is now up. Treasure Tables is a great resource for players and GMs. I enjoy Martin's no nonsense approach to the art and craft of gaming, and he asked a lot of good questions.

http://www.treasuretables.org/

Check it out!

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Monday, August 14th, 2006
9:16 am - Back from GenCon
I think GenCon is necessary for any game designer. The positive energy it generates offsets the low-level but persistently negative energy generated by the Internet.

I think that the only people who care about 4e rumors are people who fabricate and report such rumors.

I think that if you tabulated total RPG sales per booth at the show, the Forge booth/IPR would have come in third behind WotC and WW. It's interesting to watch Ron Edwards's predictions from 1999 slowly come to pass.

I think it's terrible that on Friday night, [info]kabael ate about one onion ring from his midnight dinner before he had to run off and deal with a flooding anime room. Or something.

Bought: Rezolution, two Flip-Mats, a bunch of Reaper minis, Ptolus, DCC campaign setting and the $2 module, a few DCC miniatures, Agon, Shab al-Hiri Roach, Burning Empires, Mechaton, initiative tracking board.

Played: D&D; (several times), Agon, Dark Pages, Jungle Speed, Warmachine, Rezolution, Warlord.

Helped Invent: Fight Battle 2D Galactic Combat.

Redeveloped: Beholder.

Watched: An 8 year old kid score three straight crits to kill the Gargantuan black dragon; Derek's friend who hadn't played D&D; in years and rolled something like 5 straight 20s; the little girl who critted her dad's girallon on the first roll of the DDM demo I ran.

Awed By: The awesome volunteers who made the D&D; Open into an incredible event; the guys behind the Maxminis 70+ person, 10 PM Saturday night DDM tournament; 400+ people in the Dreamblade tournament.

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Sunday, August 6th, 2006
12:12 am - Water is Good
Q: What happens when your total fluid intake over 24 hours equals 1 can of soda?
A: Heat exhaustion!

Man, I need to hire a personal assistant or something.

current mood: sick

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Wednesday, August 2nd, 2006
4:47 pm - Mr. Beholder, the Doctor Will See You Now
I am hosting a GenCon seminar, based on my monster makeover columns at the WotC web site. Bring a pen or pencil and your thinking cap.

Title: Monster Makeover Live
Event Description: WotC D&D; developer Mike Mearls takes the beholder and rebuilds it in an interactive seminar. Discover the design procedures and concepts for creating D&D; monsters.
Event Start Date: Saturday, 8/12/06 5:00 PM
Event End Date: Saturday, 8/12/06 7:00 PM
Event Cost: $0.00
Location: Hyatt: Salon A

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Tuesday, August 1st, 2006
12:26 am - Stepping Stones
A few people have commented that my last two posts seem pretty obvious. And really, in many ways they are, but in other ways I feel like over the past week or so I've slowly been building a chain of thoughts that's leading... somewhere. Maybe nowhere. Who knows?

In other news, I had this real hankering for a new SF RPG, and lo and behold Luke's releasing Burning Empires at GenCon. Good timing, there.

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Monday, July 31st, 2006
7:15 pm - Another Thought
RPGs are collaborative entertainment. Each participant is responsible for entertaining everyone else, regardless of player/GM role.

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5:04 pm - Rules are Liquid
If an RPG is a language ("I use obfuscate to slip past the guards.") what we actually communicate with that language is far more important than how the language actually works.

For instance, if I fudge the rules for Tumble, and the game is more fun because of that, can we really blame the designer for not seeing that in specific situation X, change Y to random rule Z made the game more fun?

We don't expect language to remain static, a perfect crystal never to be altered, so why expect the same from all RPGs?

Instead, should some RPG designs strive to be flexible, easy to use, and easy to modify? Rather than dictate a specific style they provide a basic framework for playing a game in a style of the group's choosing.

Now, take this to the next step. Is it bad if a group has a ton of fun playing an RPG because the GM fudged things? I'm not talking a re-write of combat or a complete overhaul houserule of the game. I'm thinking of things like giving the big villain a few extra hit points so that the PCs slay him when the group is on the verge of defeat.

This might be an interesting approach to a design. For example, cutting out all save-or-die stuff from a game, because it makes it harder for a GM to manipulate things without hosing the game. The lower the power swing between outcome A and outcome B (let's say successful save against failed save) the more forgiving the system is to GM arbitration. In plainer English, the DM can decide that for the sake of the group having fun, your Death Fist Strike! doesn't hit the villain, but since it still has a good effect you aren't completely sad. Furtermore, a good GM keeps things balanced. He toughens up the bad guy to make a more compelling climax to the adventure, but also pulls a few punches here and there during the final fight.

The thing that bears emphasis is that Death Fist Strike! is well designed and perfectly workable in 99% of all cases, but in this specific scene, the DM as ringmaster/entertainer can see that if the attack misses (or the villain gets a magic hit point infusion to offset the attack) everyone will have a lot more fun.

This entire thing has been sparked by some of Eyebeams' recent thoughts in his shootingdice blog. Why should the game completely co-opt the GM's role as entertainer (as opposed to storyteller - I think they're two different things), when such skills can make a game infinitely more interesting? Are we so afraid of bad GMs that we undercut good ones?

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Thursday, July 27th, 2006
4:01 pm - A Special Thanks
I would like to think Mr. Ozzy Osbourne for the musical inspiration that his album, Blizzard of Ozz, provided to me this afternoon. My creative efforts were much aided by your musical stylings, Mr. Osbourne.

Thank you!

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Wednesday, July 26th, 2006
5:10 pm - Wonder Twin Powers [General Feat]
You have a twin who works in tandem with you. The two of you always act at the same time.
Benefit: You and your twin may roll once for initiative for the two of you. If you act on the same initiative, you may act simultaneously. You each take your move action, then each take your standard action, and so forth.
If the two of you attack the same foe, you gain a +2 bonus on the attack. If you both cast the same spell, the target suffers -1 on his saves and you gain a +2 bonus on your rolls to overcome spell resistance.
Special: You and your twin must both take this feat to gain its benefits.

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Sunday, July 23rd, 2006
12:11 am - Keeping Modifiers Hidden
It's really hot in Seattle. Actually, in absolute terms it isn't that hot. I'm sure back in New England this would be rather average, but for us soft, Eloi-esque northwesterners, this is daunting stuff.

Anyway, the heat made me think of something RPG related. It's hot out, and I know that because of this I'm not operating at full capacity. I move a little slower, I'm more likely to just sit still, and painting miniatures is right out. The heat saps the patience I need to do that.

Of course, this prompts a thought about D&D.; In the rust monster re-develop, several people commented that it's a real pain to keep track of modifiers. What if the DM did all that work? The players don't know the exact modifiers they face if those modifiers apply to all actions.

For example, the PCs are aboard a ship fighting a giant octopus. The octopus shakes the ship each round, causing unsteady footing and a -2 penalty to all attacks and checks. It doesn't matter what sort of attack or skill action the PCs take, they face the modifier. In this case, why bother burdening the player?

Even better, if a DM sees that the player fails because of the modifier, he can throw in a descriptive element to help describe what just happened.

The key is that these "secret" modifiers must be pervasive. If I take a penalty for ranged attacks but not melee ones, the player should at least know the modifier or have some sense of it. You don't want people making decisions and never realizing that they're taking penalties for them. OTOH, if you use description to give some cues, maybe that can work fine.

I have this intuitive sense that this might speed up play. It lets the players focus on what they can do to modify a roll ("Don't forget my bless spell!") while the DM takes care of monster and environment stuff.

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Friday, July 21st, 2006
4:44 pm - Another Makeover: The Ogre Mage!
I almost completely missed that the ogre mage article I wrote for the web site is now live. Here's the link:

http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/dd/20060721a

This has been my favorite RPG design project ever. It's been enlightening watching people criticize or applaud various changes. I've never had the chance to engage in this sort of experiment-feedback loop with RPGs.

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Thursday, July 13th, 2006
9:46 pm - Rust Monster Make Over
Over on the WotC web site, there's an article I wrote about the rust monster. I took this classic beastie and sent it through a mini-development cycle to illustrate what sort of stuff developers do to RPG material.

http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/dd/20060714a

I have a few other articles in the hopper that deal with similar themes. They were a ton of fun to write, and I'm looking forward to shedding light on the process behind the design and development of D&D; material.

EDIT: There's a thread at EN World discussing the article. That's a much easier place for back and forth discussion, and since the same issues were raised in the thread I'll post there. Here's the link:

http://www.enworld.org/showthread.php?t=168472

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