april fool’s

I haven’t been playing a lot recently. I’ve hopped on for FFXIV raids which have been a blast as always, but I haven’t been on much other than that to work on my character. A lot of that is I’m throttling back in preparation for Heavensward, which I plan to greedily consume as soon as it’s out. Normally, I play other games in the interim, but nothing is jumping out at me.

This probably has a lot to do with what I call “the pendulum”. I like a really wide swathe of genre fiction, from high fantasy to hard sci-fi and everything in between. My interests tend to swing back and forth– for a while I’ll be really, REALLY into swords and sorcery, and later on I’ll find fantasy boring and want to delve deep into cyberpunk or spaceflight. The pendulum is slow, and the right thing can keep me somewhere or another for months or more.

When a game comes out at “the wrong time” for me, it’s often because the pendulum hasn’t swung the right way yet. As of this writing, I’m fairly deep into a sci-fi arc. I want cyberpunk games, fancy technology, and exciting futures in my entertainment. I spent several minutes this evening holding the most recent expansion pack for Android: Netrunner, despite knowing that no one I know plays it and I don’t even love it myself, just because it scratched that cyberpunk itch. I’ve been doing a lot of work with my Infinity stuff lately, rebasing an entire faction and fiddling with colour schemes in photoshop to see what I like.

This part of the pendulum swing has lasted for a while. I started playing Elite: Dangerous in January, played all the way through Deus Ex: Human Revolution in February, have played around a lot with Dreamfall, and all the while have been hip deep in Infinity. In the meantime, I’ve tried multiple times to get into Pillars of Eternity, Warmachine Tactics, and my second playthrough of Dragon Age: Inquisition, all without much luck.

Last year, I was playing a ton of Dragon Age: Inquisition, Shadows of Mordor, Assassin’s Creed IV, and even some Divinity: Original Sin (when Ash and I remembered to sync up schedules). Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel dropped at a point where I really wanted to swing swords around and be a wizard, and it kind of passed me by.

There’s a bunch of stuff that sits neatly in the middle of the pendulum, though, and I can usually get into it no matter how I’m feeling. The biggest one of these is Star Wars, which blends sci-fi and fantasy well enough that I can be interested no matter how I feel. Loading up KOTOR is something I’ll do frequently, though I’ve been a little starved for good Star Wars games lately. Final Fantasy is often another that fits the bill, leaning a little more on the fantasy side but still pretty techy and satisfying. Even further towards fantasy are steampunk games like Arcanum or Dishonored or Thief. Modern Supernatural settings (Vampire: the Masquerade, The Secret World) are on the other side of middle, and Shadowrun is a little closer to sci-fi but still has that touch of fantasy (I’m convinced it’s the only reason I can talk some of the people I know into playing it).

What happens with me is that I’ll need to complete the swing, get all the way to one side of the spectrum before coming back. Right now, I really, REALLY want to play something in a nice chrome-and-holographics world and I’m frustrated by my inability to find anything. I could fly spaceships if I wanted, but I really want, essentially, Cloud Atlas the game. Fantasy is a lot easier for me– I can hop into Diablo or Guild Wars 2 or anything LOTR to get my fantasy fix, but sci-fi is a lot harder.

I’m still trawling for something that might give me the sci-fi fix I’m looking for, or, failing that, get the pendulum swinging back towards something else. In the meantime, time to reroll my Shadowrun: Dragonfall character for the tenth time or so.

Source: Digital Initiative
Gaming Ennui and The Pendulum

In games, there’s a balance to be struck between realism and heroism. If the setting is too realistic, too much like the players don’t play a significant enough role, the game will feel pointless, with a lack of agency on the part of the players. If the setting is too unrealistic and caters to the players too much, it will feel contrived, like the world is just a set of facades without anything real behind them.

In a similar vein, agency is important. If your players have too much agency, they can run roughshod over anything you present, wandering the world and acting to their whims like callous, self-absorbed gods. If the world punishes them too harshly for any transgressions, the game can feel like a prison, where they must walk certain paths at certain times or get the lash.

I’m going to talk a bit more explicitly about tabletop games, but the kinds of things I’m describing can apply to other kinds of games as well.

Despite not ever running punishing, punitive games, I have a reputation among my players of setting up extremely worrying campaigns with a low margin for error. I chalk this up to me leaving a lot to my players’ imaginations, rather than being explicit about what’s going on. It’s the difference between saying “there aren’t any traps here” and “you detect no traps”. I take very detailed notes on the actions of my players in any given session, so that I know what information to present in later sessions. I drop a variety of vague hints as we play, but I like to leave it to my players to ask the right questions to accomplish their goals. This leaves me open to answer questions I didn’t anticipate and open up new paths, rather than proscriptively deciding how a puzzle or problem is to be solved before starting.

Much like improv theatre, it’s best to think of things in terms of “yes, and” rather than “no, but”. To use an example from a recent game session: the (Shadowrun) party is presented with a place to break into in order to spy on a pair of corporate executives who have been making their lives difficult. It’s a private casino that’s surprisingly inaccessible. The very first question I’m asked is “how do we get invitations?” This leads down an interesting path, where instead of a stealthy break-in, the team is looking at waltzing in like they belong. It’s a perfectly legitimate option, and there’s no reason they can’t make this sort of plan. What happens once they’re inside is going to be interesting, but it’s not an inherently flawed idea. The mission has just changed from a stealthy break-in to an elaborate masquerade.

I’ve had people comment to me that I’m extremely flexible when running games and never seem to be caught off-guard when my players take a random turn towards something bizarre. There’s a trick to this that I’ve used for years, that’s also how I keep my worlds feeling like worlds and not facades.

Behind the scenes, there are events that are playing out, based on a script. Mostly these aren’t things the players can influence, because they’re too detached from what the players are doing. Each session, every quest, mission, dungeon, and break-in yields more information about these events that are occurring out of sight. These aren’t the plans of the main villain of the campaign (if there even is one), they’re what’s going on in the broader world. There’s (rarely) any direct, earthshattering consequence to ignoring them, but they serve as my adventure hooks. Many are ignored, and the wheels continue turning in the background. Sometimes one comes to the fore, and the players can get ahead of it and start influencing the events either as they’re happening or before they occur.

The important thing here is that they don’t necessarily relate to the players. A lot of the loops resolve themselves without the players getting involved, and the world changes, and they may or may not notice. Sometimes they decide they have opinions about the world changing and do something to either hasten or stop the change.

It’s a trick I learned from reading Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series, which I still consider to be some of the finest longform worldbuilding out there. Over the course of the series, the Discworld changes significantly, and a lot of the changes have enormous repercussions, but aren’t necessarily traumatic. A lot of times, a game will only have one or two single, major events affecting the status quo, and those are the only things making any noticeable impact on the world. I prefer my games to feel like worlds in which the players are a part, but not the center of things (until they force themselves into center stage). Events and changes constantly occur, but aren’t necessarily directly threatening to the players. It lets my NPCs have lives and motivations outside of how they interact with the players that are more than just a prewritten text block, and can change over the course of the game without breaking things.

Above all, keep the world changing. Most of the games I’ve had that have petered out have done so largely because I finish a story arc and don’t have anything to follow it up with, and I haven’t made enough rolling changes to the world to introduce something new without it feeling contrived.

Source: Digital Initiative
Believable Settings

I really, really loved The Secret World for a long time. My close group and I blasted through that game together, loving every second as we worked our way up through the areas and got new, better skills. I’m still of the opinion that some of the best atmosphere and best storytelling (covering the entire spectrum of ways to tell a story) can be found in TSW.

I stopped playing in an abject, frothing ragequit. Today I’d like to talk about degenerative strategy.

When playing a game, especially a complex one, you make decisions. Broadly speaking, the decisions you make in the moment– where and when to move, when to attack, what spells to cast and when– those are tactics. The decisions you make in the planning phase– what movement abilities you’re using, what weapons you have equipped, what spells you have prepared– those are strategy. This is something of a simplification, but it’s not terribly inaccurate, either.

When I played TSW, I focused heavily on the Blood Magic healing tree, and was my party’s healer. Through most of the dungeons, I used blood magic to keep the group alive and continued investing in the tree. Thematically, it was a great choice, and one I enjoyed a lot. As we reached more and more difficult content, notably the hard-mode dungeons at the endgame, I found myself brutally struggling to keep up and keep everyone alive. It became stressful, and I started to get burned out.

At the same time, some of my group was starting to feel like their choices (particularly: to play melee) were getting unduly punished in the higher-end content. At one point, Kodra, having saved up some unused skill points, dumped a handful into the Claws healing tree, a different healing tree that I previously hadn’t touched, because it wasn’t really the theme I wanted.

Instantly, he was a better healer than I was. With less than a tenth of the investment I’d put into my strategy and no practice, he’d exceeded the capabilities I’d honed over my character’s entire progression. The choice for me became clear: play a Claws-based healer, or don’t heal. Blood Magic was simply not good enough. I took a third path: quit the game in disgust. I had invested a lot into the theme of the character, putting together a specific look and an entire concept based around being a blood mage. The endgame for TSW wasn’t worth sacrificing that to use a strategy I didn’t enjoy.

I refer to that as an example of a degenerative strategy. A degenerative strategy is a strategy that, for one reason or another, limits the effective choices you can make. You are either playing that strategy, a strategy that can directly counter that strategy, or you are losing. It’s degenerative if other choices exist, but are so far behind in effectiveness that they are no longer competitive options. As players discover the strategy, the viable options for the playerbase as a whole diminish; the strategic playing field degenerates into a small number of “correct” choices and a rather larger number of bad choices.

World of Warcraft’s old talent tree system created degenerative strategies. There was at least one “correct” build for every class, and even when there were multiple build options in a given class, the actual distribution of talent points in that build had an incredibly small amount of variance. If you were playing optimally, and had a build that allowed you to choose which set of talents you wanted, it was because you only needed to spend points in that tier and the actual distribution didn’t matter, generally because none of the talents were any good.

If there is a “right” way to play that excessively limits other options that appear on the surface to be viable, that is a sign of a degenerative strategy. If there is only one correct choice, there shouldn’t be a choice. It’s really important to note that this doesn’t mean that every choice you can make in a game has to be viable, if the game design itself isn’t trying to support that choice. As an example, in FFXIV, you cannot functionally form a group that lacks a tank, a healer, and some DPS in content that is relevant to you (if you far exceed the intended power level of the content, you can largely do whatever you like). This is a design choice, and it’s reinforced at every stage of the game. It’s not a degenerative strategy because the game doesn’t suggest that any other choices are intended or supported.

On the other hand, claw-based healing in TSW was a degenerative strategy, because it was so much better than the other healing trees that (at the time) there was no other viable option. As your understanding and skill at the game increased, and you sought to play as best you possibly could, you would have to move away from options like blood magic in order to play the more powerful, more effective, and thus more optimal claws build. Blood magic still *appeared* to be a supported option, but in practice it wasn’t effective and was, in essence, a “trap” build.

Game balance is a touchy thing, and is honestly not as relevant as people might expect. It’s less important that everything be equally balanced against one another and more important that degenerative strategies don’t exist. Certain games offer options that are very high-risk, high-reward, where a high degree of skill lets you outperform other options, but low-skill players will lag significantly behind less risky options. Perfectly optimal play would suggest that everyone should play the high-risk high-reward options, but in reality this isn’t that necessary, because balance is achieved through the demands of player skill.

When players get upset about game balance, it’s often paired with a claim that “everyone should just play X”, which is an implied suggestion that X is a degenerative strategy. Most of the time, this isn’t the case, but it’s very important that a game designer keep an eye out to see if a particular strategy is degenerative or not. It’s usually important to leave the strategy in place for a certain amount of time to see if it actually *is* degenerative– it takes time for the strategic geography of the game to degenerate, and a strategy with a functional, accessible counter is not degenerative.

In general, a good way to determine if a game is struggling with degenerative strategies is to look at how the game is played at the highest tiers of play– the most competitive, most optimal players– and see if there is a downward spread of those players’ choices to lower tiers of play over time; essentially, is the strategy causing degeneration in the game? If the highest tiers of players are making the same (small number) of choices out of a (much larger) selection, it’s a good indicator of a degenerative strategy.

Fixing this problem is difficult. A direct nerf (reduction in power/effectiveness) of the degenerative strategy isn’t necessarily the way to go. If Claws had been nerfed to the functional level of Blood Magic, it would have been impossibly punishing to heal at the higher tiers of content in TSW. Sometimes, bringing the noncompetitive options up to par with the degenerative strategy evens the playing field and stabilizes the available strategies. Sometimes, introducing a new element to the game that shakes up the geography simply by existing can shake loose degenerative strategies and stabilize things.

One of the places I’ve seen this done very elegantly is in League of Legends. Oftentimes, a new champion will also bring other, older and less-used champions to the fore. The new champion may work very well with the older champions, or the older champions may be a strong counter to the new champion that is otherwise very powerful. The new champion may simply be very good at shutting down the existing dominant strategies, forcing new ones to be formed. It’s not a perfect process by any means, but it’s a very elegant one.

The main thing to remember is that fixing degenerative strategies is EXTREMELY difficult, and is a slow process. Discovering and refining a degenerative strategy takes time, and allowing it to take root and then watching to see if acceptable counter-strategies arise takes even more time. Since the changes required to fix the issue are generally not subtle, it’s important to be sure to collect enough information to correct it properly. Sometimes this is easy. Sometimes it is very, very hard. Games have rewritten their entire ruleset, sometimes multiple times, just to hammer out degenerative strategies.

Source: Digital Initiative
Degenerative Strategy

I normally write these entries relatively late at night, as a way of processing my thoughts about each day, then schedule them to post early in the morning the following day.

Today, as a bit of a departure, I wanted to try writing a post in the afternoon, to see how it changed my outlook.

I’m a big fan of breaking from habit and trying different approaches to things, because I feel like it’s very easy to get into a rut and just do the same thing over and over again. I like to think that continually breaking the habits I fall into lets me reform them in ways that work better for me, and keeps me aware of the various mental loops I sometimes get stuck in.

It’s been suggested to me that my anti-habit mindset is indicative of discontent– that I try to change things because I’m not happy with how they are. I don’t necessarily think that’s wrong, and I think that analyzing my own habits as well as how and why they form lets me find out what I’m unhappy about and why.

I read the above book recently, and found the first section of it extremely interesting. It talks about how we form habits and how we can change them.

This blog itself is me attempting to rewire my own habits– I’m notoriously bad about doing anything on a daily basis (see above, about me being anti-habit), and I used the book’s concepts and suggestions to flip around my own habits so that I could start blogging five days a week.

It’s been an interesting ride thus far; I’ve blogged every day for about a month and I’ve found it relatively easy to do. I have missed some days, but I generally find I have something to say each day.

I will say that I don’t think I’ll be writing and posting at this time in the afternoon in future– my thoughts are scattered and I’m a little too distracted by the lovely day outside. Something about it being dark outside focuses me and helps me hone in on a topic, whereas I feel like this post is a little all over the place (certainly my mind is).

Source: Digital Initiative
A Wednesday Afternoon Post