Blog Posts from Ashgar on Ash’s Adventures website.
Assembling these is kind of fun, so the screenshot posts will continue for a while. Here’s more of Evoland. This is going up later than planned because reasons.
Looks like it’ll take one more to finish this one. See you next time.
If you’re aware of Monster Hunter, you’re probably also aware of Dauntless, a very similar PC game that’s coming “soon”. Dauntless was on display at PAX South, where I got a chance to try it.
Unfortunately, my first chance was pretty short. Like Monster Hunter, too many defeats for your team means your hunt can come to a premature end. This number seems to be 5, which sounds less punishing than Monster Hunter’s 3, but came extremely quickly. When you lose all of your health in Monster Hunter, you get a nice long while to think about your mistakes as you get sent back to base camp (in a cart, hence, “carting”) and have to run back to the party. Dauntless allows you to revive teammates on the spot, which leads to two problems: you can go down while attempting this revive, and the newly-revived, not-at-full-health teammate can go down again almost immediately. It sounds like getting back into the action faster is an improvement, but it doesn’t go well with the game as currently structured.
It’s not all bad. Areas seem to be a lot more open than Monster Hunter, the hunt area is contiguous instead of divided into subzones. Weapon selection is very limited right now (the demo only had 3 options), but more are on the way. The dodge roll has a lot more invulnerability, so it’s easier to use aggressively. Monster design is excellent, which is probably one of the most important parts.
I think Dauntless has the potential to be a good game, but in a demo setting with absolute beginners it didn’t feel great. I’m curious to see if they stick with this format, or adopt something like Monster Hunter Online, where downs only count against you personally (you get kicked out of the hunt if you go down 3 times). We’ll see what develops.
This is me expanding on a podcast comment, so if you’ve already listened, this might be old news.
Recently I started playing the DS release of Mega Man Battle Network 5, which was thoughtful enough to contain both of the Game Boy Advance games released as Battle Network 5 (they started splitting them with 3). As I mentioned on the podcast, Battle Network 5 is pretty good. The Double Soul system returns from 4, and the Navi Customizer returns from the previous two games. Liberation Missions are kind of a drag, but it does kind of break up the Internet -> Dungeon -> Boss -> Repeat cycle of 2 and 3. (4 did something else, but 4 is not a good game.) The DS release also made a few changes to the game, and they aren’t all for the better.
For starters, they added voice acting. The Mega Man series has a bit of a history with the subject, and it’s not much better here. My #1 Objection is the “Jack-in! MegaMan! Execute!” every time you jack into something. It’s not just because it;’s a bit annoying, but because you have to wait for the line to finish, it’s slower than it used to be in the GBA version. It’s an action you do frequently, so this feels like it adds up. Also annoying is MegaMan’s tendency to shout when using chips in battle, especially if you are somewhat good at getting counterattacks in. One place that I actually mind less is the voice acting added to the standard boss battle intro. This is something that happens at climactic moments and not “every time I want to go to the internet” or “Every time I hit the L button by mistake”.
It’s not all bad. Battle Network 5 is primarily about assembling a team, and Double Team allows you to actually switch between members of the team while on most of the internet. (It doesn’t work in Liberation Missions or in dungeons.) If you’re in Full Sync when you switch, you also get a special attack to go along with it (but this means you don’t get the double damage that Full Sync would normally give you). In addition, during Liberation missions, you have a limited ability to swap a character out for the one filling the same role in the other version of the game. For example: Team Colonel uses KnightMan for defense, so you can switch him with MagnetMan, the defensive option in Team Protoman.
Battle Network 5 wasn’t exactly the most balanced game to start with, and this feels like it’s even farther out of line. The chip pictured above is new to the DS version, is accessible before you even have half of your team, and instantly ends random battles for a decent portion of the game. The Party Battle System features a Support program, that when installed will make party members show up in battle for specific effects. Instead of dropping the standard 40 damage “Cannon” chip expected near the start of the game, the familiar enemies drop the auto-targeting, 70 damage MarkCannon instead. If you’re playing Team Colonel, this will even be in S code, so you can use it with the Sword and WideSword chips you start with. (LongSword is available in the second dungeon, so you can have the 400 damage LifeSword PA extremely early.) I’m hoping for Battle Network 6 to show up at my doorstep at some point in the near future, but until it does, I’m finding this version of 5 pretty enjoyable.
Screenshot and video taken from the Let’s Play Archive.
Generally speaking, I’d like to know what my chances of success are for things I might do in a tabletop RPG, because I like making informed decisions. (That’s not to say I won’t do something off-the-wall with a small chance of success if it would be either awesome or funny.) I also like interesting dice mechanics. D&D 5e’s Advantage/Disadvantage system is actually one of my favorite things that was introduced in that edition. I have, several times, made use of anydice to either figure something out or compare options.
Dice pool systems obscure this somewhat by usually not having a fixed threshold, or not revealing the threshold if it is fixed. Even then, you will usually still know what an “average roll” looks like. Shadowrun 5 doesn’t use exploding dice for normal rolls and only counts 1s as special if you roll a lot of them, so generally speaking an average result is that 1/3 of your dice roll successfully. (Interestingly, the glitch rules make rolling small dice pools somewhat more risky than you might expect. Be aware of this if you have cause to roll a dice pool smaller than about 5.) Fate dice are even simpler, as no matter how many you have your average roll is going to be zero. (This is why Fate Points and aspects are so important in that system.)
The new star wars RPG seems specifically designed to mess with my sense of chances of success. As we examined before, you’re slightly more likely to roll a success on a green die than you are a failure on a purple die, but the addition of advantage, threat, and the ability to upgrade/downgrade dice types all interfere with this. It’s also not a big enough difference to matter: 2 green dice vs. 2 purple dice is a little worse than a coin flip, since you need more successes than failures for a roll to succeed. 2 purple dice is a nice benchmark, since it’s the difficulty of a melee attack or a ranged attack from medium range against a target with no defense, which isn’t an uncommon situation.
In order to figure this out, I stuck some idealized SW dice into anydice. I made the assumption that as a starting character, you have a single point in the skill you’re attacking with, and a value of either 2, 3, or 4 in the relevant attribute. It’s possible for these numbers to be different on either side, but this should cover most starting characters. The results surprised me a little: With an attribute of 2 and a skill of 1, your odds of success are about 50%, and you don’t break a 75% chance to hit (a reasonable goal for D&D starting characters vs. AC 10) until you have 4 points in a stat (or enough skill investment to hit this dice pool from the other side). That last part is actually kind of important, because enough skill investment can do a lot for you. It starts earning you extra dice (instead of just better dice) once you pass the relevant stat value. Since you can raise skills easily with XP, it’s pretty important to do that with anything you’d like to use that you might not be naturally inclined to. Going from 1 point to 4 points in a career skill costs 45 XP, and that 4th stat point (at creation) costs 40 by itself, so this is a perfectly valid way to get good at something.
The framework I set up can be used for other rolls, but they tend to be a little less predictable, and you’re always subject to the GM’s whims (via Destiny Points) anyway. It also doesn’t take into account advantage/threat at all, especially considering that die faces with successes tend not to have advantages. It’s still an interesting bit of information, and it’s really hard to accurately guess. I hope your dice treat you well.