Last week I wrote an entry in my Epiphanies blog (it’s a place for posting writers’ exercises and such for people to play with) that explored my grandfather’s history just a tiny bit. He’s one of those people who has a naturally story-inspiring life, and I happen to have very vivid memories of visiting him and my grandmother as a child.

I don’t tend to think of technology in connection with my family. Which is odd, because my mother has been a programmer, and became a programmer at a time when that wasn’t a common field for women to go into. My grandfather was a chemist. I guess it’s just that when I think of that side of the family mostly what I think of is visiting my grandparents at their old rural house in the seventies and eighties, strolling through the apple orchard and swimming in the pond. My grandfather was born in 1900 and died in 1994; he wasn’t exactly around for the height of the internet age. So it was with some amazement that I heard from relatives we’d fallen out of touch with after my grandfather’s funeral, thanks to their having found that post that I made. Emails and addresses were exchanged all over the place, all because of a spur-of-the-moment blog post.

That feels kind of surreal, but very cool.

This morning’s review is of Val McDermid’s The Grave Tattoo. Also, I’ve posted a new T-shirt design at Caffeinated Chicanery and another at Gamers’ Heaven. The monthly newsletters with their subscribers-only sales go out tonight barring a hiccup in Cafepress’s software, so if you aren’t subscribed already, this is a good time to do so (there’s a form at the bottom-left of the front page of the storefronts). Since I’ve been reading & reviewing so many mysteries lately it seemed appropriate to do a mystery addict shirt:

Mystery Addict
Where’s the body?

I also couldn’t help adding to our alignment series. Don’t worry, we have plenty of stored-up design ideas to present to you this year:

chaotic brilliant!

Yesterday was a D&D day. We visited friends in Virginia, brought rice pudding, ate yummy spaghetti (I think when you have kids with narrow tastes and you make lots of spaghetti, you must get awfully good at making great spaghetti), and played D&D all day.

You could tell a lot of folks had had a rough, long, or stressful week. People were unusually cranky. But rather than taking that out on their friends as I’ve seen so many people do, they let it out through their characters. Our characters yelled, pulled weapons on each other, and yes, I think we had to roll initiative several times when there was no one but the party members in the room. The group even got kicked out of a part member’s aunt’s home for a couple of days.

And then we adjourned for dinner and chatted happily around the dinner table. Or adjourned for the night and had hugs and “when are we getting together next?!” all around.

That’s when you know you have great friends—when you all can let your stresses out together through your hobbies and activities, and at the end of the night you all still love each other just as much as when you arrived in the morning.

I found the new Massively MMO news rag via Plaguelands. It’s kind of like a news rag on too much coffee, but that’s okay. Drop by often, check out their news posts on your favorite games, and enter all the spiffy giveaways they’re launching with (okay, so if you haven’t been there yet you’ve already missed a bunch of them, but not all!). I still have my fingers crossed on the ones I’ve entered.

Today’s new book review is of Bill James’s Wolves of Memory, a fantastic Harpur & Iles mystery which I highly recommend. Also this week I’ll be reviewing a hot drinks cookbook (yum!), so stay tuned for that. This is the latest list of upcoming reviews, and I’ll post a new one soon so it won’t have so many crossed-off items on it. You might notice a sudden increase in the number of cookbooks we’re working with; this is, of course, due to Thanksgiving upcoming! Our usual guests can’t make it (a standard hazard when some work odd schedules and others are a number of states away), but that won’t stop us from cooking too much food!

We posted our first new “Adventurers’ Last Words” design in a while: “Awww, How Cute!” It seems particularly appropriate to baby clothing, don’t you think?! Somehow cute things always turn out to be so darn deadly in roleplaying games. And we wouldn’t have it any other way.

The second article in Jervis Pax’s world-building series is up: Something is Amiss. (In case you missed it, you should read An Interesting Nexus first.) This is aimed at roleplayers, but of equal interest to genre writers, IMO.

I should be posting a review of “The EatingWell Diet” over at Errant Dreams Reviews later today (part diet book, part cookbook), and I’m close to finishing up James Rollins’s “Sandstorm,” so consider that added to the list of upcoming reviews.

Okay, I just want to make it clear that the following design is the doing of our business partner, and NOT MY FAULT:

He also sent me a whole list of alignment variation ideas to play around with this morning, so I have enough new designs to keep me busy for months. I’m thinking that you know someone’s been in the military too long when they start using PowerPoint as a means to send you T-shirt ideas!

I couldn’t help extrapolating a weird combination of the recent world-building articles and some of my most recent book reviews into Artisans in World-Building—today’s writers’ exercise.

Anyway, off to read more review bookage with me. I’m a little behind where I’d like to be on my current book.

This morning we debut the first article in a new series: An Interesting Nexus, a peek inside the head of our dear friend and business partner (under the pen name of Jervis Pax) as he pieces together bits of his own long-time campaign world. The flavor text is hardly just flavor—he truly is off in Afghanistan emailing us these things as a distraction from very real worries about getting shot out of the sky, so please keep a few well-wishes in mind for him and his family. This is a bit different from our usual style, which is very cool, and I found it really drew me in; I look forward to seeing the rest of what he sends us.

I’m also delighted to find that Photoshop is a far better tool for t-shirt designs than GIMP, particularly running on my new laptop, which is much faster than the old one. I started a new series of designs as a means of playing around with Photoshop: alignments and variations. The first three are up, but there are definitely more to come.

Lawful Neutral

I have a feeling everyone else has already seen this. But just in case, here’s a link for you today: A Gamers’ Manifesto. It’s the most hysterical AND accurate screed I’ve ever seen about the state of computer gaming. I have a lot of favorite quotes from it, so it’s hard to choose just one, but here you go:

And this is years after analysts told developers that women would happily play games if they didn’t feel so objectified by them, and several decades past the point where they should have even needed to be told that. Have you guys ever met a woman? Then why don’t you try making just a few games that don’t play off of a 14 year-old male’s idea of womanhood on the apparent hope that he’ll play the game one-handed?

Anyway, that’s pretty much it for today. I need to do some straightening up so my mother doesn’t drop dead of horror (I almost said shock, but that would be the result if the place were spotless) when she visits for the weekend, and I have some more review-book-reading to do.

Edit: Whoops! I almost forgot to proudly pimp my husband’s new article: Case Study in Stealing from History, an article on world-building for roleplaying games. Go read it! I may be biased, but it’s hands-down the best starting-from-scratch world-building article I’ve ever read.

Welcome to my ignore list

I’ve been wanting to post about the D&D 3.5 skill system ever since I posted about its use in the Sorcerer class. It’s probably a mistake to try to post about it at 5:30 am after discovering that Medrol dose packs now give me near-total insomnia (I’ve been lying in bed for 8 hours petting the cats, pretty much), but hey, at least that gives me a convenient excuse should I say anything idiotic! So, you know, go easy, okay?

There are a couple of things about the skill system that bug me. For one, it seems overly (and unnecessarily) complex. It seems as though the designers are using multiple different means to try to compensate for things that they see as unbalancing, when it might have been easier (and more effective, since it would be easier to evaluate the results) to use one means.

Basically, there are two ways of limiting how far a class’s skill points can go: by designating class vs. cross-class skills (you spend skill points for C skills on a 1-for-1 basis, and cc on a 2-for-1), and by limiting the number of skill points a class starts with and acquires at each level. The skill system in 3.5 was used as a substitute for many of the specialized class abilities that used to exist in much older versions of D&D (for example, the old table of thief abilities), and it seems as though the designers have tried to write it up such that this is all it can do, in terms of what people are likely to have the points to buy. Yet at the same time they’ve put in a bunch of interesting skills that can lend great flavor to a game—yet that most people will feel they can’t buy, because their skill points have been strictly calculated to copy the old class abilities.

The other thing I have a problem with is the use of the Intelligence modifier as a determining factor in handing out all skill points. Why on earth would Int determine how good a fighter can be at jumping and swimming, or how good a burglar can be at moving silently and hiding in shadows? It just doesn’t track at all.

The following ideas come with the caveat that I’m no game designer; I’ve written for roleplaying games, sure, but usually not system stuff. This mostly came out of a chat with my husband about the skill system and what we’d probably do with it given the chance. We haven’t gone so far as to write it up, play with it, and test it out, although I admit I’m tempted and we might do so at some point. Anyway, there were a couple of ideas we had as starting points:

1. Bare-bones simplify it. Give all classes the same number of starting and leveling skill points, and use the designation of C and cc skills as the sole means of shaping how they might be spent.

2. Make it more class- and ability-appropriate. For example, say that every time a character levels, they can spend two skill points (or other appropriate number) any way they choose, and then use their charisma modifier as skill points that can be spent on Cha-based skills, Dex modifier as skill points that can be spent on Dex-based skills, and so forth on down the line (obviously negative modifiers wouldn’t apply—they’d be rounded to zero). That way each character ends up with more skill points to spend in areas that are appropriate to how he designed his character from the ground up, starting with his ability scores. Again, you could still use the designation of C and cc skills to shape how far these points could go.

The first option is the easiest, and if you like a simple game perhaps the best. It’s also the easiest to test for balance. The latter I think has more appeal for the D&D milieu, because it allows your character design and abilities to have some effect on your skills.

I seem to recall that one of the not-quite-main rulebooks (DM’s guide II maybe?) says in detailing how to create prestige classes, in fact, that certain classes simply should get fewer skill points because they don’t need them. I think that’s the wrong way to approach it. There are a ton of interesting skills available that NO class “needs,” and if you design the classes to only be able to buy what they need, then no one will take them. Instead, I think some of those skills could make fantastic ways to customize and individualize your character, if the skill system were given some minor tweaks to allow it more readily.

“I’m not misunderstood.
I’m just chaotic evil!”

The sorcerer class in D&D 3.5 is fairly interesting. Unlike wizards, sorcerers get fewer spells on the whole, but they don’t have to decide at the beginning of the day which ones to memorize—they choose at the time of casting. Instead of basing their abilities on intelligence (unlike wizards, they don’t rely on book-study), they base them on charisma (because they rely on force of personality). Often a sorcerer’s selection of spells tends to match her personality.

I prefer playing a sorcerer to playing a wizard, despite the loss of versatility. I hate bookkeeping when I play a game. I don’t want to keep track of how much it will cost to inscribe each spell, how many pages I have left in my spellbook, whether I have the right spellbook on me, and so on. I don’t want to keep track of which spells I’ve memorized each day, and have the success of an adventure (or my own helpfulness in it) hinge on whether I’ve chosen the right spell to memorize without any advance warning as to what might be useful. I know it’s the sort of thing that’s perfect for some folks, but it just isn’t my cup of tea. I adore the intuitive approach that sorcerers use.

That said, I’ve noticed one thing about the sorcerer class that seems a tad broken to me: the skill point system. Sorcerers are charisma-based, so that’s likely to be your high stat. The class description says of the sorcerer, “he makes an excellent spy or diplomat for an adventuring group,” which implies abilities such as Gather Information, Diplomacy, and so on. Yet the construction of the class makes it virtually impossible to actually create the kind of character they imply.

Sorcerers get the same number of skill points that wizards do—(2 + Int modifier) x 4 at first level, and 2 + Int modifier thereafter, despite the fact that, unlike wizards, they’re unlikely to have a high Intelligence. They have fewer class skills than wizards do, which means fewer skills that they can buy on a one-for-one point basis, meaning those skill points won’t go very far unless they want to buy up a very limited set of skills. Finally, only one of those class skills is actually charisma-based—Bluff—which means it would cost so much to buy up those skills that are supposedly so appropriate to the sorcerer that you might as well not even bother.

It’s as though the designer used the wizard as a numerical template for the sorcerer, and then forgot to finish adjusting it as necessary to account for the actual class differences.

My DM solved this by turning three abilities he felt were appropriate to the class description into class skills for the sorcerer: Diplomacy, Gather Information, and Sense Motive. This has worked out quite well; I still have to spend my points very carefully, but I can create the kind of character that the class description implies and that I’d been hoping to create.

I do have to add that if you really want to play around with the whole “spells match your character’s personality” thing, it does help to have some books on hand other than the main player’s handbook, and to have a DM who doesn’t mind your picking spells from odd books. It can be tough to find enough spells of a given level that fit together—although there’s no reason you can’t also toss in a few utility spells that your character would find useful.

“Of course I have 100 feet of rope.
Doesn’t everyone?”

I’ve been off reading Chessack’s great game design rants on Enigmatic Diversions lately. I ended up mailing one of them, Fun and Anger are Incompatible, off to my husband because I thought it was so well-done. Some of the points he makes in his articles remind me of one of my old writing-related hobby-horses from years ago: readability. It goes something like this:

If you are writing for publication, and thus an audience, the major concern you should have is whether your work is readable. What do I mean? Well, take your average writing class for a moment. Say one of your fellow classmates brings a memoir piece to class, and one of the criticisms leveled at it is that some of the details just aren’t believable. The author immediately pipes up with, “but that’s the way it really happened!”

Does that matter? Not really. After all, if the work got published it would be read by plenty of people who, when they decided something was unbelievable, wouldn’t have the author there to tell them “that’s the way it really happened.” This means that the piece must be altered such that it’s believable. This is why there’s a difference between memoir and autobiography—memoir is meant to be read more for entertainment’s sake, and thus it’s expected that authors will fudge details, such as combining several “real” characters into one semi-fictional one for readability’s sake.

Imagine that another classmate brings in a fantasy story filled with dragons, epic heroes and sword-fights. The problem is, he’s detailed the sword-fights blow-by-blow and they’re boring as all hell. His response? It’s a story set in his favorite roleplaying game universe, and that’s how the system works. Well, that doesn’t matter either if he wants the story to appeal to anyone other than himself and a few friends. He’s better off trying to retain the feel of the universe—and, sure, stay within the nuts and bolts of the mechanics—but gloss over those things that aren’t as entertaining in print as they are around a gaming table.

Of course it’s still possible for something that isn’t 100% “readable” by this definition to be an enjoyable read, because it’s a continuum. If the rest of the piece is good enough then some or even most of your readers might ignore the not-so-good parts. Still, by improving on those parts you can improve your craft and the size of your audience, and I can’t think of a down-side to that. You just have to be willing to set aside the defensive part of you that wants to think your writing is great as it is.

Ultimately this is an audience concern. If you’re writing a poem just for your own enjoyment, then you only have to worry about whether it’s good enough to make you happy. But if you’re writing something for others to read then you need to take them into account.

This relates perfectly to tabletop roleplaying; the only difference is that the game master’s (GM’s) “audience” consists of his players while a company publishing RPG material obviously has a much wider public audience. The GM must tailor things to his players’ tastes and desires, and a company must make things usable by a variety of players. Games must be playable.

One of my favorite examples of a module that looked impressive but lacked playability was Troll Lord Games’s The Malady of Kings. The concepts were lovely and the storyline quite magical, but the player characters (PCs) essentially ended up being passive observers who were handed from major character to major character. The adventure included a number of invisible choices where if the PCs happened to do the wrong thing they were totally screwed. The author forgot to take the free will and enjoyment of his wider audience into account. He forgot to consider that other GMs’ players might not make the choices or play the types of characters he assumed. He didn’t remember that he was writing for a particular audience, and in so doing, he drastically undercut his adventure’s playability.

Finally, this also applies to MMORPGs, as Chessack so eloquently argues. As long as a company is designing a game for the enjoyment of a paying audience, they have to try to please that audience. Note that this does not mean pleasing each individual member of that audience, since often individuals want things that won’t make the larger whole happy. However, to quote Chessack,

Because people play games to have fun, it is necessary to design games to be fun. And therefore, designers must absolutely make certain that they do not implement anything in a game that is not fun. If something accidentally makes it into the game that isn’t fun, it must be excised as soon as it is discovered. Most particularly, here, I refer to game elements that are the antithesis of fun. In general, again unless you are some sort of an abnormal person, you won’t be having fun if you are angry, or annoyed. Annoyance is not fun for anyone (sane). When you are angry, you are not having fun — you are pissed off, furious, aggravated, not enjoying yourself. No game that is well designed ought to incorporate anything into itself that is designed to make you angry. That would be poor game design.

Lest someone take this too directly and literally (because someone always does), let me say now that this does not mean that each and every thing in a game has to right that second make everyone happy. Sometimes a frustrating obstacle or two makes victory all the sweeter, and something that frustrates one person might make another happy. Again, it’s the larger audience that the designers must concern themselves with, not individuals.

Therefore, when something irritates the larger portion of your audience, you need to choke down the defensive reaction and change it. When something irritates a smaller portion of your audience, you need to see if there’s an alternate design choice you can make that makes that portion of your audience happy without losing those folks who like the original design decision or derive some benefit from it. Often there are multiple possible ways to accomplish a design goal, and sometimes it takes trial and error, tweaking, or an out-and-out overhaul to do something in a way that makes as many people as possible have fun. You don’t have to make every element of your game appeal to everyone—in fact, you can’t—but you do have to make as many elements as possible appeal to as many players as possible.

People want to enjoy themselves not just when playing an MMORPG, but also when playing a tabletop game or reading a book. They aren’t enjoying themselves if they’re frustrated, bored, and so on. Your ultimate goal when writing a book, a game, or anything else is readability and/or playability, which ultimately means keeping your audience in mind at every step of the way. Not just your ideal reader or player, but the rest of your audience as well.

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