All posts by Gregory Avery-Weir

Alternatives to Failure

Blogs, Digital Games, Roleplaying, , ,

Scott Martin over at Gnome Stew posted yesterday about failure in tabletop roleplaying games. Or rather, the alternatives to simple failure. There’s any number of reasons why players of an RPG might fail: bad die rolls, bad choices, or simple failure to turn the right direction at an intersection. But often, failure is a bad thing for everyone.

Character failure isn’t always a bad thing– if you step back from your character’s eyes and think of the game as a story, you might even root for your character’s failure at times. Failure can show adversity…, create sympathy…, feel right…, provide material for character introspection, and more. But when you get to the climax of the story, it sucks when the dice come up ones and you’re just a sidekick and someone else laps up the glory.

This is a problem in tabletop RPGs and in digital games. Does the game master or developer/game engine just allow the Total Party Kill, even if the fate of the world is at stake? If the player misses her chance to find a vital clue, is she out of luck? Martin lists an array of possibilities, and they’re equally applicable to digital games as to tabletop RPGs. I’ll discuss how digital games can deal with failure after the break.

Continue reading Alternatives to Failure →

Love Transcending Death: Challenge Versus Story in Calamity Annie

Blogs, Digital Games, News, , ,

My first column for GameSetWatch was just posted at their site. It’s called “Love Transcending Death: Challenge Versus Story in Calamity Annie,” and it’s about how that game does something very interesting to help bridge the gap between players who play for challenge, and those who play for story.

The plan is for me to write every two weeks on GameSetWatch. I’m quite excited about being able to contribute to their great site.

The Interactive Fiction Genre

Blogs, Interactive Fiction, ,

In my last podcast, I didn’t even bring up interactive fiction, which suffers from genre staleness as much or more than other types of games. If you have a text game, you’re almost guaranteed that you’ve got a nonviolent, turn-based game where you solve puzzles in a game with a specific sort of world model. Sure, there are a few exceptions: C.E.J. Pacian‘s Gun Mute, Robb Sherwin‘s Necrotic Drift, and Adam Cadre‘s Lock & Key, to name a few. But by and large, interactive fiction is cerebral and derivative of the seminal works: Colossal Cave Adventure, Zork, and Graham Nelson’s Curses.

Where is the interactive fiction that simulates colonizing space? Where are the text games that have the same playful feeling as Katamari Damacy? Why are text adventures always either puzzle-filled exploration games or highbrow, slow-paced stories?

I’m being a bit cruel, I think. But I still can’t think of a single piece of interactive fiction that I’d pick up and play for fun after finishing it once. There’s no gameplay to most IF except puzzle solving and figuring out what happens next. A good friend of mine once pointed out that in interactive fiction, you never really do stuff.

I’d like to see that change.

Ludus Novus 012: Genre Fiction

Digital Games, Podcasts, ,
Ludus Novus
Ludus Novus
Ludus Novus 012: Genre Fiction
Loading
/

In this podcast, I discuss digital games genres and how I think they’re silly. They’re arbitrary niches based on a few popular games, and using them to describe games limits the way we think about making and playing games. I discuss the evolution of our genre system, from Crawford in 1984 to the modern overstuffed action adventure, and explain how Madden ’08 and Rainbow Six are in the same genre.

References:

The music for this episode is “Unforgiven” by spinmeister and featuring TheJoe & Kaer Trouz, and is available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 license.

Morbus 1 – The Attack on Furrowcross

Adventures, Blogs, Morbus, Roleplaying, , , ,

I’m currently running a campaign of Dungeons & Dragons Fourth Edition that I have dubbed Morbus, for reasons not yet disclosed to the players. I’ve decided to share my campaign planning with the readers of this blog, for those who are curious to see how Fourth Edition encounters work, or for GMs who are interested in an adventure to run.

I intend to make each adventure “episode” wrap up a little story as well as being part of the larger campaign plot. For the players in my campaign, each adventure will take their characters up a single experience level, but I’m doubling experience point rewards in my game. Normally, it takes ten encounters of the party’s level to level up, but I’m aiming for just five. Because of that, if any GMs are following along with my campaign, they will need to add more encounters to keep the PCs at an appropriate level for these adventures. On this blog, I will report the normal, non-doubled experience rewards for encounters. The adventures will, however, dispense all of the appropriate treasure parcels for a four-person party, so you may want to change that.

I’ll try to present each adventure independently of the larger plot. I’ll tie them together periodically with summary posts explaining their larger context. This particular adventure, The Attack on Furrowcross, is appropriate for four first-level characters who have not yet formed a party with each other. It features a goblin raid on a market town. The details, with full spoilers, are after the break.

Continue reading Morbus 1 – The Attack on Furrowcross →

The YoYo Games Slush Pile

Blogs, Digital Games, News,

And another Ludus Novus hiatus comes to an end. I left my previous job, and just a few days before my final work day, my computer was stolen. Everything’s straightened out now, and I’m working on some personal projects and living on savings while I figure out where to go next. I just need to figure out how to make my first million making and discussing video games.

Over at the YoYo Games “glog”, the creators of Game Maker put out a call to rate all unrated games. I’ve spent a few hours this afternoon combing through the chaff. A natural consequence of a system like Game Maker — where it’s so easy to make a video game with minimal programming experience — is that most of the games seem to be made by nine-year-olds. I’ve played games that were distributed as uncompiled .gmk files, games that crash on startup, games that do nothing on startup, racist games, and about 712 versions of Pong, Breakout, and Pac-Man.

When sifting through trash, you do sometimes find a treasure or two. I didn’t find any hidden masterpieces, but I did come across a handful of very solid games. You can check out my list after the fold.

Continue reading The YoYo Games Slush Pile →

Character Sheets: An RPG Primer

Blogs, Roleplaying, ,

A very old version of the Dungeons and Dragons character sheet.

I haven’t addressed roleplaying games directly on Ludus Novus much. At first glance, they don’t fit in with video games all that well, and several times I’ve used them as a contrast to video games. However, there’s a distinction that I can make that I think makes them seem less distant.

When people say “roleplaying game,” they are usually referring to a rules system, often combined with a setting. To be clear, I’m referring to “tabletop” or “LARP” roleplaying games here. Dungeons and Dragons. Cthulhu Live. Traveller. Each of these seems so much broader than, say, Half-Life 2. While HL2 only offers one storyline, D&D is limited only by the Game Master and players’ imaginations. However, I think that a better analogue for a video game would be a roleplaying campaign.

I’ve run my short “one-shot” campaign, “The Dead of Apartment 4C,” three times. Each time, a different set of players has run through roughly the same plotline, just like each person who plays Half-Life 2 experiences the same potential narrative. The campaign uses the Fudge system for its rules, and I as Game Master have been the referee. For Half-Life 2, the Source engine is its rule system, and the player’s computer or console is the referee. Roleplaying games and video games look a lot more similar when we match a video game title to a roleplaying campaign rather than a system.

After the break, I’ll do a quick runthrough of some of the RPG theory I’ve picked up.

Continue reading Character Sheets: An RPG Primer →

Freedom Done Wrong

Blogs, Digital Games, ,

Jim Sterling over at Destructoid wrote a post the other day claiming that linear games provide pacing and structure that nonlinear “sandbox” games do not:

Indeed, if every game was a huge open world, you would soon find yourself growing bored, or at least overwhelmed as you struggle to find time in the day to explore sandbox after sandbox. After hours spent in the hustle and bustle of Liberty City or Tamriel, a game with clearer focus and a set beginning, middle and end can be just what the doctor ordered, providing some experiences that total freedom just can’t manage.

Sterling’s got a point: open games that allow for actual player agency over the path of the plot do tend to have inferior pacing and emotional impact when compared to games with a linear plot. However, Sterling falls into a common trap when it comes to game design: just because they tend to be inferior doesn’t mean they can’t manage to provide that pacing. Game designers just don’t pay enough attention to it. More after the jump.

Continue reading Freedom Done Wrong →

Phyta: Games As Poetry

Blogs, Digital Games, Interactive Fiction, , , ,

A dark vine climbs toward a dark sun, with a golden creature fleeing its approach.

In Episode 5, I discussed the difference between short form and long form video games and interactive fiction. I compared certain games to short stories and novels, but I didn’t discuss the third well-known form of artistic writing: poetry. A poem is a work of language where the properties of the language itself — rhythm, sound, and imagery — are as important (or more important) than the words’ literal meaning and the narrative content of the work.

When I think of “poetic” games, where the form is as important as the content, I think of Tetris. Tetris is a game with a very simple narrative: pieces are falling, and must be organized or else the game ends. The story isn’t very important. What stands out about Tetris is its feeling and gameplay: the imagery and form of the game. The excitement of the race against time, the satisfaction of clearing a row, and the imagery of building a wall and tearing one down, where any hole is a flaw.

“Phyta,” by Abraham Parangi, is a poetic game.

Continue reading Phyta: Games As Poetry →

TIGSource Procedural Generation Competition

Blogs, Digital Games, ,

The Independent Gaming Source recently finished the submission period for their Procedural Generation Competition. Contestants had about a month to begin and complete a game that created content on the fly, allowing players a different experience each time they played the game. Voting should start soon, but before then, I thought I’d highlight a few of the submissions (all free downloads or web games, of course). Click through to see a list of games I think you should check out, as well as a list of the awesomest game titles.

Continue reading TIGSource Procedural Generation Competition →