Enemy design : No one wants to design the newest kobold

And you would feel bad but he's carrying a poisoned blow gun and poisoned darts.

Work has been interesting the past week so little progress has been gotten. Hopefully today I'll change that though it's not the focus of this little post. Today I'll rant a bit about enemy design and more specifically enemy variation. Why this has kobolds in the tittle that will get to in a bit. For now I've been playing a bit of other roguelikes and just thinking about enemy design in general and noticing two types of trends.

One the linear variety where you have Some roles are always filled out on each new level with the exception of bosses. Older games used this a lot with color or sprite swaps like the enemy that runs at you, the enemy that fires a ball of energy and the jumping enemy. Maybe they get more health and damage between levels and maybe a gimmick enemy to change the pace and earlier enemies just to have more variety but more often than not different levels have different enemies which is a good thing.

The other is more of a growing amount of enemies. In the beginning you see a few then as you go along a few more types are added, than latter even more types are added, till the end of the game you have a lot of unique enemies and possibly bosses that just show up in the last area or even just rooms of the game. This isn't a bad thing either, it's a save the best for last approach that only fails if the player doesn't get here which seemingly is a common occurrence.

Now for what I bring up. Roguelikes are somewhat unique that it's rare for people to finish the game, or even to get to mid game. Playing a roguelike people want a somewhat new experience and to see what the game generates as a level and what items they pick up along with what they encounter along the way. With both the previous design patterns the player isn't really seeing much variety. Under the linear enemy addition they see a percentage of the game and may see all the enemy movements but they wouldn't even know that. The constantly growing about of new enemies added shows roguelike players even less of the game. Some players can get frustrated only seeing the first three enemy types and dieing to the first or second goblin or kobold they see as they haven't figured out how the game works yet which can be very frustrating to a player.

Now I can think of a few reasons why this sort of design happens. Linear is basic requirement meeting for a level that came from a time where the technology was limited and wanted to avoid repetition in the players minds even if the mechanics were minimally modified. There was even an article on 1UP I saw a long time ago that reminded just how little variation there was in early games. I hate to say this isn't a bad thing again but it isn't at times. Some predictably allows for game mastery. I digress though, the tradition holds over for seemingly no reason other than it is legitimately hard to to not follow a formula that guarantees the levels will be filled out with enemies that the player will at the very least think are brand new for a few minutes if they actually think about how they work, a more frantic game may increase the period it takes to realize what it is.

The growing type is a bit of a different problem that actually may come from someone with too much thought into it. When creating a game the first few levels are more or less introductions and you want to build from there. So a natural trap to fall into is to keep piling on all the great ideas you have for enemies as the game goes on, leaving all the good bizarre stuff at the end under the assumption the players can take anything or at least put up with it. The other reason being that people would rather make interesting things than just another kobold. Interesting often goes to favoritism which often equates to "this thing will kill you!" design wise. MMOs commonly suffer this  for another reason. This is because they want to keep older players who reach level cap around. Low level zones are rarely upgraded with new interesting content while increasingly complex or gimmicky areas are added to end game. Design wise MMOs are striving for something different but I figured I should note it.

Now a seaway to kobolds. Kobolds have a long standing in D&D as the low level creature new adventures cut their teeth on and generally their traps are more to be feared than an actual room full of kobolds. Now as I said before people don't want to design kobolds, as people don't want to put much work into things they'll be stomped repeatedly. This is also true of D&D where you have entire books devoted to levels most people will rarely reach in normally gameplay unless they started there.

Playing a few roguelikes recently I've been beat over the head a few times with it. Seeing giant rats and various low level kobolds and dieing to them annoys me a bit. Playing crawl, which is the only general roguelike I've gotten far on , I know late game has a lot of enemies. While the start has bats, giant roaches, the first real threat of goblins, and everyone favorite dog to kick kobolds. This is fine except you'll have to go through these same enemies quite  a few times with no real variety (beyond a killer kobold who's picked up a wand of death/blowgun with poison needles) . A thing I have come to appreciate is enemies picking up gear and using it as it's a natural way to add variety when you can see it happening.

So a solution to this? No real solution truth be told. This is a hard problem to tackle if we don't want to overwhelm a player with things to understand in the first few minutes. Desktop dungeon which I have talked about in the past had an interesting approach. It had a relatively easy and simple enemy pool at the start and every class you beat the game with unlocked new types of enemies to be added to the pool. This keeps it interesting every time you play while not overwhelming you. It is somewhat artificial though which leaves me a bit annoyed about it but in practice it's good. For me it would just be more honest to have a larger pool at the start and let only a few of each type be used in the first few floors. Just something to keep it a bit interesting enemy wise would be worth it. For legend I haven't even started working on enemies so I should keep this in mind as I develop things.

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?

Old games, new fun.

Today is going to be a little different. I've been a bit pressed for time and playing a lot of games with my friends. With a recent steam sale the idea came up to get a game we can all just mess around with and have fun.

The game we ended up getting was Titan quest. One of the people in the group has a physical copy and played it a few times and said good things about it. We all get it downloaded and installed and we run into some trouble with user privileges on our various computers, vista and win 7 seemingly requires you to have the game running as admin even if win 7 makes your account by default not admin, and me being a moron and thinking custom games was the multiplayer mode and we get in. After a few dozen crashes as for some reason connecting to a game likes to crash it.

After that comedy of errors and swearing we get on our merry whole sale Greek slaughter. The game plays like Diablo 2 in a lot of ways. Use potions, use skills, kill things, get randomized loot, and do a few quests. Though this game takes out the need for buying town portals by giving you what is effectively an infinite one. This is fine as this is something we're looking for. Nothing deep, just run around and play a game that's semi auto control while making horrible comments over steam.

Things we discover is that a few glitches exist in the game for whatever reason. I talked about the crashes on joining game but there were quite a few more. For whatever reason at some point our day night cycles desynched which was pointless but caused a bit of confusion. More fun things include some player models turning invisible but their effects still happening. Cue random ripples of psionic energy randomly appearing all over the place and wreaking everything. Though the best one so far has been one of the players having a glitch on summoning pets, they are sometimes erroneously flaged as hostile to other players so more often than not we end up hitting it in the flurry of battle instead of the enemy until the glitch fixes itself. This is much to the players dismay and he's considering not healing us anymore.

In the non glitch department we've taken looting to odd extremes. Partially because of one of our players supposed OCD about keeping things tightly tucked away or sold but we loot everything. Gear that gets us only 1 gold gets picked up and sold. Thus turning the games interesting feature of mobs having the gear they drop into a horrible thing. Only generic monsters have nothing, every satyr, centaur, skeleton, and even some zombies I think have something on them. And a few have full sets of armor. So clearing one group leaves an area covered with not only corpses but inventory screens worth of items to be sorted through and ferried back to the local sales person. Even the person who insisted on this said he would not be able to do it like this if he were soloing the game, he'd give up. Yet with 4 people we can take a few minutes to clear out an entire stage worth of equipment.

Speaking of equipment this game uses a lot of Prefix item name suffix effect generation.  I actually like this, it makes each run of the game unique and proposes a lot more decisions on what you want your character to be as you go through. Not quite required as you can seemingly stick with some gear for a very long time but I do like weighing my options when it comes to my weapons. Personally this multilayer game trying to go for high spike damage as it is recorded in a stats screen.

So far it's been a fun game, well worth someone else's money as I couldn't pony up the money at the moment, I'll catch him next steam sale. I really haven't done LAN things as a kid, usually my shared gaming experiences has been around someone playing a single player game and talking about things. Sometimes the game, sometimes not. So far it's been a fun change of pace that I hope we don't burn out.

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.

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.