Bugs and addition

After losing cords, buying new ones, and getting caught in the rain I decided to get some coding done. Just simple addition of the defensive side of dice manipulation. The things I found made my mind spin a bit.

sums it up in bad mspaint

Found some serious bugs and some serious basic mistakes that I could chalk up to flipping my variable check format between abilities but still was inexcusable. It's a bug that the code runs but it doesn't crash the program when  encounters it but still produces wrong results. Like accidentally forgetting to convert from metric to imperial for one step the instruction sorta "work" until you look at the whole.

Never claimed to be the best programer but when I'm flatly disallowing my design decisions not to work is kind of disheartening. Well it was caught and hopefully fixed, I believed I had tested out but work now, though I'm going to debug this much harder later to be sure. That aside I did make a new feature with the place holder name of "spirited defense".

Spirited defense removes the highest die in a pool up to the max face*2 you paid for out of edge. Currently do not have this or it's defense pool wrecking sibling Spirited attack having multiple versions of itself but it should prove trival beyond whatever bugs I can make as I put in due to working on it. Along with this I decided to reduct the amount "armor" can provide. Previously it was gainable through using block defense which is a free and lasting effect in combat and it deducted 1d10 + 1d10 per 3 successes in the pool. With attacking being the same type of formula for damage this meant a lot of soak and even the possiblity of a great attack where you roll three 3d10 dice being absorbed because the armor rolled a 10. I'm not quite a fan of percentile reduction at the moment so I decided to let the armor roll be 1d5, at least half the time when the dice are rolled it's a guaranteed amoutn of damage on a die by die basis. I may crunch the numbers later but for now this works.

So with that out of the way have you guys ever come across your own work at a later time and found it quite lacking? Especially if you swore it worked and was quite good.

Knowing your Lim f(x) = L

Wow, MSPaint really has changed. I usually just use pencile tool in photoshop but I thought for today I'd really do it in that. Terribad mspaint aside I've had some amusing GMing the other day.

I run a very silly game in Mutants and Masterminds 2nd edition. Ran it starting at PL 6 and it's about PL8 now. It runs on the premise of any bad yet funny idea I can throw at a party of "Adventures guild" members that take contracts and do stuff. Nothing too deep but I usually have thinly veiled refrences the players can laugh at while they roll virutal dice. That aside I'll get to the meat of all this.

Knowing your limits. And a GM's limits is the groups fun. A GM can do anything they want as long as the players stay at the table and take it. It doesn't mean that they should. Personally I try to have different parts in my sessions, I don't quite like having entire sessions be consistent of one thing. Often I want the situation to always be on the change, they do something something new gets to be chewed on by them. Doing this hopefully keeps it fun and allows them to fill up most of the session with in character talk instead of me dictating what is going on.

This latest bad idea didn't quite have that. As I have possibly 3 members who occasionally look here I won't get into deeper reasons but effectively they had ideas about this entire situation which made the plans for the session seem a little short. So I threw a wrinkle in it, a minor boss fight that could prove entertaining and possibly scare them through some of the dirty tricks I threw on it. Nothing too major though but outcomes of the fight would have extended this session in interesting ways. As the image shows, that fight didn't take long (and they did strip both of them and time them up so they could check to see what was causing some of the complications). I did have ideas on the spot how to extend the fight and make it seem like a boss fight. But with some thought didn't take them. Time was almost up and while I did plan this to be a drag out fight I thought actually dragging it out would not accomplish much. I do lean more towards lengthening plot fights through villain points

While knowing this it always seems a cop out to let players just smash and grab something that I designed to put up a bit of a challenge to them. Overall it did accomplish what I wanted though, it gave some more conflict and added a complication to what seemed to be a mission that was involving "go here talk to them, make a decision and come back" with how they went about things. One fault was I had one of the duo be a lower PL than the main guy as it seemed to make sense, another was some misunderstanding on just how effective some of the players effects were. Other than that I did get to show off a few of the tricks though not all of them which makes it feel like a waste. Though it is food for thought on better design later.

The five room campaign

I actually have a minor in art. Not that any of this shows it.

Bad MSPaint diagrams aside I'm going to rant on a bit about Game Mastering table top games. I've been running one campaign online for a very long time under a very simple scheme of typing up a paragraph for each session then supplementing it with everything I planed going wrong. More often than not it does.

Game Mastering is practiced failure, you learn to fail in more amusing ways for your players to enjoy. Mostly because of your character actions. That spy you planted and were going to have talk to the PCs just to have a reveal later? The spy going to be punched by one of them and told to get out of the Players sight because he was upset over something the Spy said or other things that completely destroy that scheme. On top of that your players will notice your plots a mile away or otherwise not even notice them when you try to hint leading to frustration later. Player may or may not be intentionally wrecking the game, more than a fair share hate the dreaded "railroading" where a Game Master forces them to do a certain action. What qualifies for railroading widely varies for some it's having to listen through the BBEG's rant unable to do anything before he vanishes mysteriously for others it's the local law enforcement actually putting them in jail for breaking into someones house, smashing their pots, and taking their gold. It's always a challenge to meet a happy medium of your plans working and your players being allowed to do after all everyone should have fun.

So with this in mind, back to the whole premise of this article. The five room campaign. Earlier I stated that I put down a paragraph and other outcomes, keeping each session as modular as possible. This limits the amount of damage that happens the basic idea of the campaign, if a bad guy dies and the party though they were the main bad guy it just turns out he was one of the lieutenants, that sort of cheap trick most GMs do to keep the very frail plot from falling apart. The one problem with my set up was while it gave me an idea to dance with, it didn't give me the best stage to use it. I may have had a few scattered ideas for what I could do during that session. While I may have a plot for that time, I do not have as many things for the players to do as I like, and with out proper prodding or things they could do players get bored quickly which is not fun.

Some time later I discovered something called the "5 room dungeon". You can find a lot about it with Google or the one I have bookmarked to relearn the gist of it, there's a few places to look into it but it boils down to this.

Room 1 The Entrance:
Self explanatory it's how you get to the meat of the session. Be it defeating guards, talking to townsfolk about events, opening a magic seal on an artifact they found, or anything that takes the players doing something to start this chain of events.

Room 2 The Challenge:
Not as informative as the first.  The challenge can be quite a few things. It could be a set of skill challenges or logic puzzles to figure out how to progress, or it could be convincing someone or something to help them get further in the place. If really pressed for ideas it could be a minor fight to introduce what foes in this area could be like.

Room 3 The Delay:
This segment is meant to throw your players for a loop.It could be some red hering they spend their time on trying to figure things out, something that gives them missinformation about the whole over arching plot, or simply an obstacle that will give them the choice of dealing with or finding a differnt longer way to proceed. This choice should have some effect on the rest of the "dungeon" or even the overall game to a degree. It can also easily pad your time if it's something like a giant heavy locked chess that the players get to argue about and decide on having the fighter carry it the rest of the way.

Room 4 The Climax:
Here it is, the big encounter. The boss of the dungeon. Or if you're not into that, the situation that is possibly dooming a village and needs to be figured out. Anything that would effectively be before a "goal" or the "goal" itself could be the climax. Finding the lost treasure could be a climax with the delay just being a giant fire breathing lizard baring the path to it.

Room 5 The Twist:
The anticlimax, the part after the most exciting event. This is generally where plot is revealed or you get your things, though maybe not as you expect them. Personally I don't like calling it the Twist but more often than not it turns out that way when designing just to keep it from being a pure plot dump. This is where it ties into the rest of your game, something got accomplished, learned, or gained through all this. It's the reward of the entire session for better or worse.

While this is a "5 room dungeon" it doesn't necessarily have to be underground. It could be a loosely connected series of events that may not require brute strength to get through. For example the 5 non room dungeon.

The non room Dungeon.

Room 1: The Rumor
For sake of simplicity this game is about modern investigators who try to stop horrible things from coming into this world. One of their contacts informs them that something has been shiped leaving everyone coming in contact with it mysteriously dead in their wake.

Room 2: The Investigation
After this the players are left to follow up on this or possibly go about other things, but with such a juicy lead they go about collecting information. One player starts hitting up contacts to see where this package came from, another looks through old books to see what this could be, and the last tracks down the most recent person with intent to look through his house when the other two are done.

Room 3: The House
After breaking through police tape the players are free to wander the house. However it does not do much, everything is mundane except for the mysteriously exploding boiler where the owner died. Nothing is directly mystic or supernatural in any way and lots of time could be wasted here. The only thing that might lead them to the next place is a few letters (Are in the trash, or some other way of finding them) hinting at a disagreement with a man about not releasing names of a family line.

Room 4:Security Box
The players come up with the plan of breaking into the security box. This presents a lot of challenges for the PCs as they could likely get caught and put in jail if they set off alarms. 

Room 5:Inside the Box.
After gaining access to the box the players are presented with some lists and a strange black yet light metal bar. The bar at the moment does not bring up any information though looking at the names gives a line of accidents, more on the list showing people not yet killed but somehow related to the others. On the end of the List is one of the Player charcters. Both these could be plot hooks for later sessions.

Not a dungeon in sight yet the idea stays the same. One problem though is what happens if the player can't find anything in the house? Or if they fail to find the latest victim. A bit of leeway is going to have to be get given. In fact it's simpler to call room 3 "place where they can find things" and room 4 "hard to get to place where they find the list" just so you can easily shuffle it to a logical location or if you are not into that shuffling in a generic delay event to get their attention. Such as another mysterious death happening or one of the previous plots picking up so they don't have to sit around doing nothing all session.

Running a game can be hard, but it is quite fun if you enjoy constantly building things and testing yourself against player actions.

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.