Game vs Metagame

Tam's recent post about solved games really crystallized something for me with regards to why I do and don't like certain games.  In particular why I will sometimes really like the concept of a game and yet end up absolutely loathing it in practice.  In a word, metagame.

...game

I've come to realize that the existence of a codified metagame for something is a pretty good sign that I won't want anything to do with it. If there's a way of doing things that is the way, the truth, and the light, then I get to choose between following the crowd or trying to go my own way knowing that I'm actively not playing optimally. The former tends to lead to me getting bored quickly, particularly since the one right way rarely ever syncs up with the way I want to play, and often relies on degenerate strategies. The latter puts me in a spot where I don't get to take joy in improving, since I'm aware that I'm actively not playing 'the best way'.

Beyond that, I'm being forced to spend time figuring out how to play the game 'properly' rather than actually playing the game.  Part of the problem with metagame for me is that it is, by definition, external to the game.  So I end up having to look for FAQs, wikis, or even *shudder* official forums to even begin to figure out what I'm 'supposed' to be doing.  And then, without fail, I learn that I chose the wrong class, hero, skill set, or whatever and I can either start over completely or bull on with the knowledge that I'm 'doing it wrong'.  At least if it's a single-player game I can take comfort in playing the character I want to play even if it isn't optimal.  In a multi-player game there's the added joy of other players more than happy to tell you that you're stupid and wrong if you dare to step outside of the accepted orthodoxy.

My roots in tabletop role-playing, where metagaming has long been viewed negatively, may also enter into this. For me playing a game is about working within the bounds of the assumptions that are made by the system. Avoiding use of out-of-game knowledge as much as possible is part of this. If a game is well designed and things are messaged properly, I should be able to figure out everything I need to know to play well without having to resort to outside information.

Ultimately, the more time I'm having to spend playing the metagame instead of the actual game, the less I tend to enjoy myself. I want to do my learning as a part of playing, rather than as a prerequisite to even getting started.

Bel Propaganda

Guild Infrastructure

greysky It has been an insane ride with our free company.  It is like the floodgates have opened and folks are now recruiting themselves.  More truthfully it seems that when someone gets a foothold in our free company, they tend to recruit their friends to join it as well.  As a result some strange stuff is happening, like last night it was pointed out that apparently we are now ranked 15th on our realm and climbing as far as activity goes.  That is apparently up from 70th on our realm…  which is absolutely insane, needless to say we are a guild on the move apparently.  What is awesome about this is just how damned friendly everyone is.  Each time a new infusion of people join the guild there is so much happiness in guild chat, with everyone welcoming the new players.  My biggest hope is that we can keep this general sense of joy going forward.  What is even more awesome is just how many of the new people are perfectly comfortable hanging out with us on voice chat each night.  We are now contemplating the very real possibility of being able to field multiple serious 8 man groups at the same time, which a few months ago would have seemed crazy.

As a result of all of this…  Tam and I had a discussion yesterday in which we released we were getting far too large to not have any guild infrastructure.  When it was just a handful of us that were in constant communication… it worked more or less to not have any semblance of a guild website.  However now that we have all of these new people we are having to create something resembling a modern guild.  When we came back in July I stubbed out a site on Anook but we never really populated it with anything.  As of yesterday this is changing, and I hope that we can get the rest of our guild to sign up and join in the fun there.  Largely I am choosing Anook, because a lot of people already have accounts there… and dealing with running a forum is a pain in the ass.  Forum software is often one of the largest attack vectors on any site, and if you do not keep a rigorous schedule of constant updates…  it is liable to get compromised.  I simply don’t want that sort of liability any more, and since Anook offers a fairly robust forum, shared image galleries, an event calendar, and a nifty way to link guild streams together…  it seemed like a really nice fit.  Not to mention that Lonrem is amazing and has been willing to support damned near any hair brained scheme I have come up with.  Folks have already started populating the shared image album, which is awesome.

Bel Propaganda

ponyparade

Another thing to come out of yesterday is something of a recruitment piece.  Over the last several weeks I have been giving essentially the same talk to everyone that joins the free company.  Not that I mind having this conversations, but I felt like I was spending a lot of time repeating myself just getting the most basic information out there.  I got to thinking… if I could condense this talk into a single page I could create something easy to link to new people.  It is by no way an attempt to stop questions, but more to give players that are new to our group a quick info dump about who we are and what we are like.  After creating this I realized… that I also created a tool to let people entice their friends.  So as such I thought I would offer up the link here this morning for any of my Free Company mates that might be reading.  You can now go to belghast.com/grey101 and get a quick dump of a bunch of information about our free company and our basic guidelines.  So when your buddies ask you about your free company, you now have a quick thing you can link them to explain further.  I used it yesterday afternoon and so far people seem to dig it.

While on the topic of propaganda… I had to include the above photo that Rae sent me.  She was feeling out of sorts on Monday night, and while the bulk of us were raiding Turn 9… it seems she was up to shenanigans in our housing zone.  I am really not sure how this happened but apparently an impromptu pony parade occurred where everyone broke out their favorite pony mounts and rode around our housing zone.  I absolutely love that this sort of thing happens.  A large number of us idle in the housing zone when not doing anything, and we have developed this awesome community of players that do the same.  The night we bought our house, we were welcomed by a bunch of neighbors from the houses around us and over time we have gotten to know several of them.  It is awesome logging in and running to the market board, only to get /hugged several times along the way.  Cactuar is a truly amazing place, and I am so happy that we apparently chose correctly when we rolled there over a year ago.

Heroic Hans and Franz

WoWScrnShot_032415_202250 Trying to mix things up a bit, and get our folks upgrades… my Raid has been working on some of the Heroic encounters in Blackrock Foundry.  Last week we made significant progress on the Hans and Franz encounter, and had some lessons learned that we took into this week.  Namely two things really lead us to this victory.  Firstly better awareness of who was getting the body slam attack, and for them to move out of the raid making sure the tank did not take the debuff.  Secondly better self awareness in trying really hard not to get pinned down by the crushers as they came through.  Last night we had some of the worst possible luck as far as RNG goes and the patterns we could potentially get.  There is this one pattern that was killing me damned near every time because the boss would be in the center of the room… and the only free space on the far left edge.  On the last few tries, including the one when we managed to down them… I started prioritizing my own survival to damage time spent on the boss and I feel like the rest of the raid did essentially the same thing.

We managed to pull out a fairly narrow victory, but I have a feeling that since we now believe we can do this fight…  future attempts will be much smoother.  From there we moved to work on Beastlord Darmac, and had a few heartbreaking attempts getting him within 2% on our best.  That fight… is just madness on heroic with so much shit in the room being on fire during the later phases.  There are several things we need to work on, but I feel like we CAN improve and potentially down them next week.  Largely the spear maintenance needed to be better, both in folks moving so they do not get pinned and folks breaking out individuals who did get pinned.  The amount of time you have is really tight, and this needs to be an all raid effort when someone is gets stuck.  Secondly I feel like during the last phases we needed to move the boss more often, because the amount of flame surrounding him made it damned near impossible for melee to dps.  If nothing else we made solid progress and I feel like with a bit of polish we can knock this one out as well.



Source: Tales of the Aggronaut
Bel Propaganda

The Joys of Unsophisticated Play

I spoke yesterday about playing “solved” games, and how quickly it can make the fun of playing a game evaporate for all except the players at the top of the heap. Games tend to fall apart when there’s unequal skill and meta-level understanding between the players involved.

One of the places where this can become a huge problem is tabletop RPGs. I’ve heard countless stories of players who figure out an unstoppably powerful character in a game where the other players aren’t doing that, who dominates the game as the only relevant player– either the DM has to throw challenges appropriate to the super-player that would crush any of the others or the super-player just walks all over every encounter.

I’ve been running tabletop RPGs on and off for quite a number of years at this point, and I’ve had to figure out how to balance parties of players who absorb the rulebook and look for loopholes and players who throw together something fun and/or have never played a pen-and-paper RPG before, and figure out how to make it fun for everyone.

The tack I’ve taken is to enforce unsophisticated play. I tend not to give my players the resources to become unstoppably powerful, offering “interesting” rather than “good” rewards. Rather than giving powerful loot, I like to create powerful choices. The phrase that comes up in my group is “bad ideas treasure”. I use next to nothing from the standard magic items tables in D&D– no simple +1 swords of frost here. Instead, here’s a sword that casts a cone of flame out from your target when you kill it or roll an even number on the attack roll. The direction of the cone of flame is random. 25% of the time, it’s going to blow up in your face, but the other 75% of the time it’s going to deal a bunch of extra damage, possibly hit some extra targets, and hey, magic sword!

This item was hugely effective in mixing up the combat strategies of the group. The alternative being a stock, non-magical sword, the fancy-but-potentially-dangerous fire cone sword was quite good. The player wielding it started prioritizing things that would protect him from fire, and turned into more of a flanker than a frontline warrior, since staying close to his allies was a liability. There were some tense moments when something REALLY needed to get smacked with a magic sword but there were nearby wounded allies, and that fire cone might’ve been a disaster.

If that had been a regular +1 sword, it would’ve been boring, and combat would’ve been the same “walk up and hit things” that it frequently was before. The trick is to keep it simple but add a slight twist. Without being able to rely on particular powerful items, the ability for play to quickly turn into a game of “who’s figured the system out the best” goes down dramatically, particularly if players are trying to play around the weird items they’ve gotten rather than mark their stat boosts down and forget about them.

I’d be interested in seeing this kind of thing adapted to other sorts of games, where the level of play is maintained at a relatively unsophisticated level, offering more exploration into the low- and mid-tier play experiences and preventing a rise to the higher tiers of play. Minis games are often very good at this, with supported alternate gametypes and game sizes that significantly change the way the game is played and what strategies arise, and tend to keep things at that nice, everyone-is-still-learning tier of play.



Source: Digital Initiative
The Joys of Unsophisticated Play

Game vs Metagame

Tam’s recent post about solved games really crystallized something for me with regards to why I do and don’t like certain games. In particular why I will sometimes really like the concept of a game and yet end up absolutely loathing it in practice. In a word, metagame.

…game
I’ve come to realize that the existence of a codified metagame for something is a pretty good sign that I won’t want anything to do with it. If there’s a way of doing things that is the way, the truth, and the light, then I get to choose between following the crowd or trying to go my own way knowing that I’m actively not playing optimally. The former tends to lead to me getting bored quickly, particularly since the one right way rarely ever syncs up with the way I want to play, and often relies on degenerate strategies. The latter puts me in a spot where I don’t get to take joy in improving, since I’m aware that I’m actively not playing ‘the best way’.

Beyond that, I’m being forced to spend time figuring out how to play the game ‘properly’ rather than actually playing the game. Part of the problem with metagame for me is that it is, by definition, external to the game. So I end up having to look for FAQs, wikis, or even *shudder* official forums to even begin to figure out what I’m ‘supposed’ to be doing. And then, without fail, I learn that I chose the wrong class, hero, skill set, or whatever and I can either start over completely or bull on with the knowledge that I’m ‘doing it wrong’. At least if it’s a single-player game I can take comfort in playing the character I want to play even if it isn’t optimal. In a multi-player game there’s the added joy of other players more than happy to tell you that you’re stupid and wrong if you dare to step outside of the accepted orthodoxy.

My roots in tabletop role-playing, where metagaming has long been viewed negatively, may also enter into this. For me playing a game is about working within the bounds of the assumptions that are made by the system. Avoiding use of out-of-game knowledge as much as possible is part of this. If a game is well designed and things are messaged properly, I should be able to figure out everything I need to know to play well without having to resort to outside information.

Ultimately, the more time I’m having to spend playing the metagame instead of the actual game, the less I tend to enjoy myself. I want to do my learning as a part of playing, rather than as a prerequisite to even getting started.