Mutants and Masterminds foe and friend design.

A little late for me but it seems Wednesday is the weekly bug friends day. Project combat test is in debug and low level code work right now. With that said there isn't much that may be interesting so I think I'll talk about something else. As I've mentioned before I play and run Mutants and Masterminds second edition. So today I'll talk a bit about making characters from the DM side of the table.

There are three things to consider when making NPCs in Mutants and Master minds 2nd (and 3rd) edition. What it can do, how does it stay alive with pesky players attacking it, and what makes it interesting. The first two are relatively easy as there mechanic based so I'll start there.


What can your being of pure evil do?
The question we ask ourselves in the morning, it's less about what it does and more about what it can do to your Players. This is is more or less the characters "Attack". This does not necessarily mean it's brute force abilities to cause players pain but more often does. In some games it could be the NPC social connection or even it's ability to enable others to be the big problem with them staying the background. Those social ones can be covered in a few skills and feats or if you get fancy emotion control and some sort of boost system if you don't just hand wave it for the sanity I seem to lack. After that we have the "main" power that work wonderful for refluffing what it can do.


The offensive powers in question are Damage, Fatigue, Nauseate, Paralyze, Snare, and Stun. While this isn't all the attack flagged powers it's the ones I see most useful as apposed to trip and dazzle which have a more limited use. First thing I would like to say which is odd is that third edition had a real good idea which I will explain in a second. first every attack in mutants and masterminds is resisted by a "save" on the targets side, how much you fail by chooses the effect. In Second edition the effects listed above had two or three stages of failure of varying degrees of severity but were set based on the type chosen. In 3rd edition they combined everything but damage and let you choose the effects beyond the powers name. This allows for a lot more customization and more fitting effects. Though either way it should be aimed at some how taking someone out of combat. Which isn't too hard for damage, the non damage abilities have a harder time of sticking though they have the benefit of "stacking" and increasing the severity of their effects if a player has failed a save earlier. Either way these should be kept near the "Power level cap" or how much the game allows you have them at though this is to taste for a Game master and their musings.

While this list isn't impressive it is all based on your execution and proper extra use. For example Paralyze is slated in game as some sort of debilitating attack on a persons ability to react be it having to work through the confusion of some sort of poison or some monsters attack that saps the strength away from them. I have taken it's frame work and used it for an ice based attack from a foe that tries to encase in a layer of ice. I could have also used snare for the effect or even stun for this idea but paralyze was an interesting choice as it could slow players down. The only change was making it a "fortitude" save. I could get into a lot more on this but the bread and butter of any person making something in mutants and masterminds is using the same thing in different manner or even just a different weakness.


What can't your being of pure evil do?
The flip side of what we just discussed. It being inconvenienced, its defense and possibly an Achilles heel in the design. There are less things to consider here but they are very important. The first is do you want this to be a boss or a group of enemy encounter.

There is a big difference, the mutant and masterminds system runs on saves against everything, and a low roll means you fail and possibly takes you out of the fight. For players this is mitigated by hero points which can reroll the save around a "safe" zone or even higher for most attacks they would take. If you make a solo NPC to take the players on it is going to be thrashed by each one of them. Taking the group route hopefully means a division of attention as his buddies will be taking up the slack even if he goes down. Before I can go into the intricate parts I have to talk about saves in Mutants and Masterminds, if you played 3rd or later D&D they should look familar.

Saves in Mutants and Masterminds are Toughness, Fortitude, Reflex, and Will. From a mechanical standpoint they have more to do with the offensive powers above than what they mean in game but I'll go through the general explanation of each one. Toughness is effectively your HP in Mutants and masterminds, it allows you to shrug off attacks like nothing and take a lot of hits. For the most part only straight up damage. This one should always be near "Power level cap" for a villain because damage saves are rigged to have a higher chance to fail and plainly mess up a character than anything else. Other saves have roughly a 55% chance of succeeding if you are matched with it, damage saves have a 30% chance of passing so it is key that these are up to limits or the character in mind will go down far more easily than would be imagined. For this reason I tend to call everything that isn't Toughness a secondary save as they aren't the primary means of ending combat in a mechanical sense. Fortitude is the "strength of body" save, things like poison or shocks to the system go here. Reflex is actually one of the more import of the secondary saves, some powers may target it directly but it covers area of effect avoiding. Willpower is the flip side of Fortitude as it is the "strength of the mind" save that generally allows overcoming illusions and pain among other generic slated things.

Unlike Toughness these secondary saves are probably not the best thing to cap. In mutants and masterminds second edition there was an odd design decision to allow these to go up to PL+5 which when completely maxed out allows for a 70% chance of passing the save in question, I believe this is more from 3.X D&D than anything and actually makes things a bit difficult in designing solo encounters or boss battles where the villains are a higher PL. There is also the fact that it is kind of cheap to just cap these, as unlike toughness there are only a few powers that can take a character out of combat like toughness and last like an unconscious condition. So in general I follow the Mastermind Manuals "level based progression" of the D&D good and bad saves. One of the secondary saves is chosen to be "good" which means it's roughly double the bad saves values. There is a formula to this equation of good and bad save but it would probably be too long and pointless so I'll post up a small mock up chart here which is effectively what I use anyways. A thing to be mentioned is M&M is assumed to be played around Power level 10, it can be played higher or lower but it's assumed to stick around 10. The result is a character that isn't a brick wall for non damaging powers to get through. These aren't quite up to cap and will have a little variance when attributes are figured out due to save calculation. It also adds a bit of flavor when the big huge monster has a higher fortitude save, the small nibble melee fighter has a higher reflex, and the psionic powerhouse has a higher will save though it may not always be the case.

Why is your being of pure evil interesting?
Hardest question to answer. At the end of the day you will have a pile of numbers to throw at the players but why about this one over the last one is always a challenge. I commonly refer to this as the gimmick portion of the character and it can either be in the power set or its flaws. This one I can't really answer but it should be a theme to the character and how it's powers work, it doesn't even have to be blatant just something to tie the numbers together. I have made bosses that have abilities that drain down and on depletion give them a nasty complication (players never saw this happen) and ones that had reactive effects to show their prowess in ability. Though I will admit over the year or so in this game I've gotten a lot better and faster at this. Early bosses and such were a horrible situation that were often far too easy which was fine in learning a system. There is a lot of mechanical potential just in the books for interesting situations with a bit of thought into what the NPCs.

Well this was far too long and possibly convoluted for people that don't know much about D&D. So as a question for those that have stayed through all of this have you played any table top games?

Difficulty

One Shaw made a comment on my last blog about difficulty. Saying "It's important to have the AI scale with difficulty." which I agree with. Though on thinking on this I reached my old problem of "what is difficulty?".

And to illustrate as I have not added images to this at all, have a horrible MSPaint quality image that I should have been ashamed to make.

Once again I apologize, but it kind of gets the point across.

So the first thing to start off with is what a lot of games like to do with difficulty being big numbers. This comes in all manner of flavors both hidden and not so hidden. One is hit points or the number of times something has to be hit or damaged to take it down, this is the oldest of the old for difficulty. If you played a mario game that had all bosses take 4 more hits it would be more "difficulty". This happens a lot in shooters where difficulty just means increasing enemy damage and enemy health. For real time games there is always just how far the AI can "see" you. As it stands I do not believe there is an AI in a game right now that legitimately uses 'vision'. It just calls a method for the location of any player, checks if there are any solid objects in the way of 'seeing' them then goes about all the other functions. The higher the difficulty the more easily the AI can spot you, or even see through walls so it can plan a route around them to shoot you. That once again is more "difficult". RPGs have a notorious difficulty increase purely by numbers. Every number used by the enemies is increased which means ultimately the player just has to kill a lot more monsters to level up to continue than if it was on an "easier" difficulty.

For me this isn't the difficulty I am after. It's what I like to call "lotto" difficulty. I mostly use the term as a trap in Pen and Paper design where fights can only be won if the player rolls high consistently while the monster rolls low. Nothing the player does actually in the fight matters only what the Random Number Gods decides to give them. Any input on the fight the player had was decided before hand in how much they beat up lower level enemies or the quality of equipment they are using. This effectively just turns the bread and butter of the game into a math equation. For shooters and RTSs some of this is mitigated as there is a lot more things to do than click a button but at it's core it's not what people want. People want some challenge which comes down to their actions influencing the outcome, not some long formula of success that has no bearing on what they did during the time of conflict.

It isn't impossible but it is hard as a designer to address the problem. For shooters there is always changing up the map making the play have to choose the approach enemy, or by giving the foes tactics of their own while rudimentary can it more challenging for the player. RPGs have a lot harder time with their system not being twitch based but 'tactics' as some basic multi turn stratifies or nullifying players can prove quite rewarding if you're looking for a game that doesn't require a lot of grinding. Still it's a lot of work for what ultimately isn't what players really want, something akin person behind the scenes with forethought and a bit of an imagination. I fear it'll be a lot longer than we expect before we get such an AI and for now Pen and Paper games or ones with heavy Game Master involvement will be the closest we get to it.

Role playing games, the non table top kind.

I've been into gaming for a long time. I started writing up a brief history for my gaming but I'm thinking it'd be boring. So quick long short, started in shooters, got exposed to pokemon, played a lot of japanese role palying games, and don't grind in grinding games. That about sums it up.

Now onto something interesting. I have tried programing a few rpg like games over the years. A few ambitious goals considering I am not good at GUI work that I technically have enough framework to finish but never do. In the end I program things far faster and to completion more often for others than myself. I did get together a very badly clunky "fighter" rpg for giggles just to prove I could do it. "Fighter" being something a friend made in middle-high school with one of those programmable TI calculators. Hit things for exp, get spells, fighting his wacky idea of things with special abilities and all that. With X areas you could go go through. By areas I mean fight X enemies in a row and then the boss then you "beat" it meaning the next is unlocked and maybe something more in your home base. Simple design, enough that you can play with and test combat systems. Which brings me to my next thing.

I've had this one idea floating around for a semi roguelike. 2d "Odin sphere" maps as I don't want to deal with 2d maps and all those calculations. I actually have the system roughly built with some AI even. The problem was I had an ambitious  idea for an item format. You take some material and combine it with others to produce what is effectively your weapon parts. There is some rolling going on based on the parts used that give stat bonuses and even special abilities. It was when I wondered how good this was I realized I would rather test this in a less complex environment than my current game layout. That one failed, then I made my "fighter" just to say I could, then worked on a more complex version based on that ones workings and have just sorta stalled. It sits in a state of limbo due to how close it is to finishing with how I designed it, I have the parts to put them together but little reason to go through it as I'd have to get up to the next step of incorporating the item system in which could be quite frustrating.

This was a while ago. Recently I've been looking into the various combat systems in games. They are sort of disappointing. The basic mecanics beyond getting into magic spells which start to follow their own individual rules to a degree boil down to take a penalty to hit gain a minor effect. This is all well and good in pen and paper actually, the more complicated a mess you make it the more frustrating and long combat takes but for video games I want something more than that and the "know the elemental immunities" that pop up. I've heard of some complex RPGs in the videogame side but I can't remember them and missed out on them due to coming in late on the rpg craze with the 64 and no playstation till much later. So I think something for me to work on may be some "simple" ideas on enhancement to combat mechanics. While this sounds difficult from a programing standpoint it's just a few more functions to play around with in a combat loop. If I get it down to combat basics and a few enemies I'll call it a successful run.

So project "Combat tester" is go. Hopefully I'll have something by next week.

Probability the dice of life

Bad puns aside in table top gaming there is always a want or need for randomization and quite a few methods for randomization have been used for our polyhedron chunks of plastic. Every system has their own special name for what they're doing but more often than not you can compare it to something that's been done before. As no official name exists for any of these I'll just be pulling names out of thin air to get the point across.

The Basic Roll

Even had to pull out the bold and size change for this but I digress. The basic roll is the tried and true RPG odds generator of choice. Can function on as little as one die and is typically the same for all characters and non playing characters. The most basic idea is you roll a die or a few dice add them together, modify it with some number from somewhere, and compare them to a number to see if it's higher or lower to see if you succeed. Doesn't matter if it's a single nerdy 20 sided die or three standard 6 sided dice the basic mechanic is the same. It's good for fast rolls and for players to know the odds of success, especially if it's percentile and they're trying to roll lower than some attribute generated. I called it the basic roll as a lot of systems love this D&D, d20 systems, Basic role play, and Dark Heresy come to mind. There is one that tweaks this idea but still follows the basic mechanics and that is Legend of the 5 rings and possibly 7 seas. They use a system of Roll and Keep where you roll a number of dice like everyone else but then you pick a few from that. Typically the dice kept are the highest amount but allows an interesting function with a variable number of dice rolled.  There is a lot of probability things I could get into about the difference in amount of dice rolled and the horrible results when there is a differnce between two but I think I'll save that for another day as I have a story with that.

The Dice Pool
Dice pools are different than the basic roll for a two reasons. One the amount of dice rolled can greatly vary between players. Two each die rolled in the pool is counted as it's own roll, the dice are not added up like in the basic roll. Typically when you roll a dice pool you are given a target number, this number being lower than the number of sides of the dice used. If you have 10 sided dice you can't have a target number of 11 as it is impossible. From there you tally up the number of dice rolled that meet or beat that number and that is your amount of "successes" you tell that to the person running the game and they will tell you if you succeeded or not. Typically this is a little less insane than rolling numbers and adding them together thus letting the guy rolling 2 for fighting keep up with the guy rolling 4 for fighting though the 4 dice pool is still doing more. I used to love dice pool systems mostly for the mystery behind them. I can do some basic probability and get the odds behind the basic roll systems (besides Roll and keep) and have no idea what is happening in a dice pool. This quickly turned to crap when I started running my own games and realized I have little clue behind the monster I'd make up or the what amount of successes needed for a challenge would be too easy or too hard for my group. It's still usable I just like having a little more knowledge of my gaming mechanics now. For the most part White Wolf games all use some for of dice pool, I also know of Burning Wheel using one too.

Match Systems
Frankly I have no good name for these systems. They're usually some weird combination of the first 2 but have mechanics that separate them. There are only two I know of for this, Frame work (of Cthulhutech) and One Roll Engine. They both have a variable amount of dice rolled but instead of looking for a target number or adding them all together they look for a pattern of some sort in the dice. Both use matching as one combination, Frame Work will take straights of 3 or more dice or the highest one giving it the nick name of dice poker. From there they differ Framework just adds what it finds together as it's output number and O.R.E. uses the number rolled and how many that were found for it's various aspects. These are the most difficult systems to use, there is no quick glance at them to get a number or amount of successes and there can be a lot of "missing" in these systems if you don't get matches which leads to frustration. Now O.R.E. does a lot for it's single roll; it tries to get hit location, damage, and initiative all from one roll which is interesting but takes a lot of explanation to even get people used to it.

And that's the lowdown of how funny looking dice work in pen and paper games. Partway through this I realized that maybe I should have given a rundown of how pen and paper games work but this subject is more interesting to me at least.

Table top gaming and the internet.

Alright it seems my Keeper for the night is too depressed to run his game from what evidence can tell. So I'll make a legitimate topic now. Topic being internet table top gaming.

First of I'm not too experienced of a roleplayer for in face interaction. I did some in highschool which were a lot of making a character and playing for a few hours as it's too late then forgetting we ever did it. I can think of 4 separate times this has happened even in some systems we just made up. What it did teach me though is that getting ground rules and figuring out what you were doing was important.

So here comes the internet. Wonderful tool that allows you to contact people at nearly half the speed of light depending on your connection material. Play with people all over the world in many different walks of life and all that, wonderful right? Not really, it seems there is many features in real life games that help alot. One is you don't get as much creepiness in real life, being in slapping distance probably influences this along with the fact you actually know the person. While I am a creepy bastard at times I know some games do not need that sort of horrible twisted or perverse things in it and thus hold back, it seems other people don't so you have genetically altered little boys posing as girls and wondering why no one loves them in military magic themed games. Another part related to this disconnect with people is turnover rate. You know how there is an empty chair that could use filling in tables for D&D, in online games you could have only one person left playing after a week with no notice from the rest and that is the norm. Email is easily ignored, calling someone up or bumping into them at the store is not.

Now beyond the personal gap causing creepy or disappearing people (this may be more related than one thinks) is actual game play. A round of combat from what I've seen in real life after people understand which is a d12 and which is a d10 goes decently quick. Online, combat is a grind. Combat can take a few hours for a few rounds, though I have seen it sped up when people are fully at attention. Viewing youtube, checking mail, looking at images are pertaining to cats is the main cause of slowing down combat. I can understand this and do it myself, if there is some rolls going on I'll tab to something else. The secondary part is people typing up what they are doing because this is where irc gaming does shine. People do not like to plainly go  "I attack the orc". They want to "With a howl rush the orc with crazed eyes and swing the sword at it's head!". Which takes a bit more typing. Typically this enthusiasm wears out as time goes on in the battle but the first few rounds always look like they're trying to make the simple attacks as entertaining as possible. Now this is great, but somewhat time consuming especially if the person doing it is a slow at typing. With this and even being interested in the game more often than not gets me to look for a new youtube song to listen to even though I shouldn't.

After all those problems what are some pros? Information sharing. Using multiple irc rooms you can split the party every way and pass notes that other players can't even begin to meta on. It's wonderful to have a player off doing things that are effecting the main party and they don't even know it. Or even just mysterious visions or one of the players spot roll being higher then the rest so they notice a certain detail which they can easily choose to keep from the party, wonderful thing that I have seen work in game a few times.

Personally I find online games more enjoyable. Face to face is a bit intimidating to me and the fact you hear the other players voices doesn't get me into it. Seeing text and imagining the voices does a lot more for me. It's a personal taste and probably more influenced by never feeling comfortable in groups.

Games

I like table top games. Granted I never have people in real life to play them with so I mostly go through IRC channels. Played quite a few games over the years with some long lasting ones still going, even running one myself with plans for another but that may be for another post.

I've known qutie a few systems, even some poor homebrews back in the middle/early highschool school days when I wanted to get in but honestly thought that D&D was a bad thing and tried to skirt the issue by looking at online homebrews which were probably unplayable. Granted never played them till I got roped into some D&D group. 3.5 edition, with minmaxers who have played since advanced D&D that seemed to enjoy custom random tables than the bread and butter of D&D. Learned a lot of things back then, never actually played too much though. Years later I bought my own collection of 3.5 books and failed to start my own thing. Only in college did I actually playing online. Found a group for "magical girl" game and decided I could at least laugh while the ill conceived idea exploded into flames. Didn't turn out that bad, system was a bad choice but it's my main group to this day.

Pen and Paper gaming online is something a crap shoot. Lots of horrible things out there and horrible people, should know I'm one of them to a degree, but if you find the people that can put up with your idiosyncrasies just as much as you can put up with theirs while being open about what you actually can't stand in a game without instantly rage quiting you can do fine.

Anyways current systems I've been exposed to or played in rough order.
Horibad homebrews
Earthdawn (thought it was a board game)
D&D 3.5
Tristat
Mutants and masterminds 2nd edition
Cthulhu Tech
Chaosium Call of Cthulhu 6th
D&D 4th edition
Dark Heresy
Various Dark Heresy home brews.

I know I missed a few but it escapes me. I also actually have my foot in those home brews actually in some online channels, not sure if it's kosher to go about them here. I can say that no game really wins mechanically over the others, they all have their glaring faults and broken features in some places. Though if you focused on that you'd be missing fun of actually playing them.

The birth of yet another blog

Seeing as I have had far too much time on my hands in the job search busts I think I could try my hand at this blogging thing.

So for an introduction. I'm a programmer by trade, a scribbler by some fluke, and a gamer through free time. Don't have much to show for most of the things at the moment though I may bring them up as I get more comfortable with this whole concept. Though for the most part out of college with seemingly some credentials for the first two. The third though did take up a lot of the time at college. As of right now working on my own projects and more avidly others while looking for some way into the CS industry which seems dead in this area. Beyond that well, I'm sure I'll go on about it later.

Here's to the bloging experience.