Tabletop Games I Have Played - Dungeons and Dragons (4th ed)

I really said I shouldn't be writing, but it is hard to keep me away completely.  Today I'm wearing my Half-Elf scented oil, I'm being asked about drumming up a new campaign, and late summer is about to give way to early fall.  So let's talk about Dee and Dee; let's talk about you and me.  Dungeons and Dragons, even as I talk about tabletop games, is a topic I may have to touch on more than once, because Dungeons and Dragons is really multiple different games, depending on various editions and sub-editions.

So, now my confession: I love Dungeons and Dragons, Fourth Edition.

We roll half-elves, haters

But so many people didn't like it, especially when it first came out, that I feel the need to explain why. I have fond experiences with 3.5 and other editions as well, which I'll discuss in future installments, but I thought it might be best discuss the version of the game I was currently playing. In this case, I'm not editorializing for the uninitiated, and I'm going to assume you at least have some passing experience with how D&D works. If not, you really should give it a try, and the new edition is a pretty solid entry point in to the hobby.

I almost wanted to preface this with an Epic Meal Time Video, just to announce "This one goes out to all the haters."  And Fourth Edition D&D really is kind of the "Fast Food Pizza" of D&D editions, isn't it?  Like you've got your Crunchwrap layer there, and your Underdark layer here, and maybe you baked the pizza at home but it's still got all fast food parts and toppings.

Actually, now that I think about it, the D-and-D-as-pizza metaphor works pretty well in general. You can have it with as many or as few toppings as you like; you can use old standbys or go for more exotic flavors.  You can make all the components yourself, hand-toss the dough and mix the sauces, or you can order the whole thing for delivery and still get a great pie. And having done that, you can eat the pie while playing Dungeons and Dragons, as is tradition.

Fourth Edition is also the most "video game like" of Dungeons and Dragons editions. This is an odd ancestry for such an elder game: a game-design snake eating its own tank-and-spank tail. Dungeons and Dragons begat dnd5. dnd5 begat MUD and MUD begat Diku.  Diku begat EQ; EQ begat WoW, and WoW begat... Dungeons and Dragons.

The "videogameyness" is a common complaint for people who don't like the feel of Fourth Edition. But in many ways, D&D4 is also D&D returning more to its old wargaming roots: a tactical miniatures game about dungeon exploration, as in contrast to a storytelling engine. You can have both tactical combat and a solid story, though you'll always have a bias. D&D4 leans tactical, but is also more organized toward pre-ordained stories than "0th edition" was. It has quite linear modules, rather than exploration-based ones, and hero characters are extremely resilient compared to virtually all older editions, meaning you're far more likely to compose a lengthy personal arc. This makes it ideal for simple heroic stories about derring-do, adventures that might be violent or lighthearted, but are some way related to killing creatures, and taking their stuff.

One thing I like about Fourth Edition Dungeons and Dragons is the simplified skill system.  The skill system of 3.5 became a little cumbersome, and it was almost necessary to play it as a sub-game: to take that first level of Rogue just to be sure you had enough skill points to go around, to have that point of Craft: Silversmithing just in case your GM needed you to make a Craft: Silversmithing check.  By contrast, D&D4 does away with flavor skills, focusing on a stripped-down list of skills that are almost assured to come up in a game sooner or later. Some people believe this limits their freedom in character creation, by boiling down only a simple list of things that characters can do, but, there's a simple solution for this. If you believe your character should craft silver or weave baskets or cook porridge, there's really no need for a skill roll to do those things.  Just include that as flavor text about the character, and then, should it come up, offer to cook breakfast for the party in a casual sort of way.

One thing that's a shame about Fourth Edition Dungeons and Dragons, however, is the simplified skill system. Drat. It does depend a lot on the Dungeon Master, after all, to decide which "fluff" skills are correct to allow, and designing a Skill Challenge that works with the system but still feels as interesting as a combat encounter has always proved challenging for me.  To help out, a few hacks are floating around for this, such as this one from D&D designers Mike Mearls and Monte Cook that suggests a different system of handling basic checks. However, when the game first came out, some people insisted skill challenges were just broken, and early-release Fourth Edition errata related to this system didn't help matters much.

New player races can be cool, though, too

Errata (or "updates," as they are now-called) in fact has been problematic for my groups in general, since many books have undergone major and in some cases quite recent changes.  Sure, RPG books often get edited over time, but since D&D4 is trying more than ever to provide a persistent RPG world in which to play (with frequent D&D Worldwide Gamedays, and continuation of Living campaigns), the edits are almost like the patch notes for your favorite MMO, including the occasional sweeping change to how a power like Magic Missile should work.

D&D4 also doesn't provide much in the way of a default setting.  Since I use DMing as a creative outlet, and enjoy the process of setting design, this doesn't bother me too much.  If you're the sort of person that would rather use a boxed setting I agree that "Points of Light" doesn't give you a lot to go on, and the Forgotten Realms for Fourth Ed doesn't feel great.  In addition, Fourth Edition simply doesn't offer many rules for for things in the described setting, if they are not combat. In one case, my players wanted to know how hard it would be to train a baby hippogriff to be a mount, and I simply didn't have that information without resorting to the 3.5 handbooks or making it up myself. I suppose I could've designed a skill challenge around it, but sometimes that feels less satisfying than just playing it out (and knowing how much time that's likely to take).  If you're running a module, though, you don't have to worry about this, since basically everything is figured out for you. The modules do favor combat encounters over peaceful solutions in some cases, but that's another game design topic altogether.

So it has some downsides.  But just for a home campaign, Fourth Edition pushes some good buttons for me. It's very flexible, allowing easy custom monster generation without much fuss, and many classes and skills can be reskinned easily just by moving around color and flavor text.  On the other hand, each class has a job, and is playable right out of the box, which minimizes the need to fuss with a lot of character optimization. During a combat encounter, the different types of combat skills provide good options, meaning that everyone can be doing something different every round, and everyone gets a chance to shine in a particular kind of situation. Designing tactical encounters is fun for the Dungeon Master, too.

So that's why I'm running another Fourth Edition campaign this fall.  How about you?

And since someone always asks: no, I haven't tried Pathfinder yet.  I hear great things, and I love the people who are working on it. I just haven't managed to fit it in.

I Shouldn't Be Writing

I shouldn't be writing because I'm doing and following the ComicCon Challenge on GameArtisans. You should check it out.

I also am not playing Deus Ex, because my husband is playing it right now and I don't wanna step on his toes, and any time I do anything else I think "I should be working on that challenge."  However, I'm kinda looking forward to it. This just goes along with the general thrust where sometimes I'm slow to pick up a new game.

My "currently playing" is actually Twilight Princess, which finally dropped to a reasonable price.  My thoughts: it's basically Ocarina only more extreeme, at least from what I can tell so far.

Educational Games: Don't Make Me Log In

Channel 4 UK does awesome things and one of the things that they occasionally do is fund an educational game. They're usually browser-based games or quick downloadable games like the sex-ed game Privates.

They have a recent game, The End, which is a game about life and philosophy and big questions.  The concept is interesting, but the platforming is so dodgy that I didn't get very far in to it the first time I played.  I was pleasantly surprised today to boot the game up again, and discover that, even though I didn't make an account, a tracking cookie had stored all my information in a usable fashion and I could continue playing where I left off.

I'm mentioning this to contrast my short experience with Caduceus, a learning game out of Children's Hospital, Boston, that talks about disease.  I was immediately taken in by the graphics, the steampunk-style design, and the voiceovers. The game offers me a chance to log in, or just play. Like I always do, I choose the option to just play. I watch several cut-scenes, and complete a more-difficult-than-average matching exercise. Then the game tells me "click here to sign up," and doesn't seem to give me an option to go any further unless I do this.  I tried starting over, only to discover that the cut-scenes in the beginning are unskippable, and, no, I do have to sign up after the first activity.  I really can't get very far in the game without making an account.

Baby, I'm just not sure I'm ready for that level of commitment.

You are shedding users with this methodology. Trust me.  I wish I could find the article that listed the numbers; it's out there somewhere in the list of things I've read about web usability, but searching the internet for things like "increased customers" and "user retention" is just folly.

I have more than a passing interest in games like this, having worked on educational stuff, so I know the reason that this is done is probably because they want to track user behavior and prove people are playing the game. But I also know that an educational game is pretty down low on the list of priorities for most people to actually play, even people who generally look at this sort of thing.  So if this is the kind of thing you want to design, you've got to do whatever it takes to keep the friction low, even if that means a nice unobtrusive tracking cookie.

"This Does It For Me" - The Female Shepard Controversy

This post is about the female Shepard Mass Effect votes, with maybe a little of my comments about video game womens' depiction in general.  I almost left a comment on the Rock, Paper, Shotgun thread, then I realized it was getting long, so I'm posting it here.

The story so far: Bioware has decided to give players (like me) who play a female Commander Shepard some voice in the marketing for the upcoming Mass Effect game, by including a female Shepard in some of the marketing materials.  There is a "default" female Shepard, but since this is the first time female Shepard has actually been in any marketing materials, they've decided to allow the fans to choose the actual look that she will have.  Except, by "fans," they mean, specifically people on Facebook.

I really wasn't going to write about this the first time the vote happened. Plenty of people were saying plenty of things, since the original vote was a bit controversial. I mean it kinda rubbed me the wrong way, but I had a hard time putting my finger on why exactly.  It wasn't because the blonde won.  I'm actually a blonde (from a bottle, anyway), and I really like the Samus Aran look, so that's fine by me. She doesn't look like my Shepard, who looks older and tougher and has auburn hair, but she'll do for the packaging.  It doesn't change the character I get to play in the game.

This Shep looked the most like mine.

So why did I feel weird about the vote anyway?  I think it was because, when I was browsing the comments underneath the votes, I kept seeing lines like this:

"I'm voting for this one. 'Cause she looks so cute!"
"Best and HOTTEST one."
"This does it for me."

and of course

"FSILF - Fem Shep I'd Like to F*$&"

Female Shepard is only played by around 20% of the Mass Effect players.  It's not possible to tell from the votes alone who actually played as female Shepard.  Some of the people voting in the contest clearly played female, but given the stated statistics it's likely that some people voted for a preferred look, but will continue to play a male Shepard. I've taken the names off of the quotes up there, but, if you want to see who said certain things you can just click on FemShep Number Five and see for yourself.

Other blogs have said things like "beauty pageant" and that's a bit too kind.  I think stronger wording is needed.  For a significant percent of the people who are voting on this, it isn't a "what female Shepard do you want to be" contest.  It's a "what female Shepard do you want to fuck" contest.

And... I get that.  On some level, I'm with you.  Outrage about womens' depiction in video games in feminist circles has often left me kind of exhausted lately.  I think complaining about "chainmail bikinis" is really beating a dead horse, and whenever I read an article that's a general "women in games are too sexy" viewpoint it burns me out.  There's so many complaints out there about sexy, confident characters whose appearances I actually enjoy.  I play a lot of fighting games, and it's not a problem to me that women in fighting games are sexy. Sometimes men in fighting games are also sexy, and playing as a sexy girl can be pretty fun.

This is not even the most egregious of the egregious sexpots I've designed for City of Villains.

On the other hand, sexing up -- or, really, softening up -- Shepard doesn't work for a lot of people, particularly people who play as her. A lot of her default animations in ME1 and 2 are ported over directly from the male Shepard.  She sits like a guy, ogles female strippers like a guy, and looks really uncomfortable in a dress.  I've heard that they've patched that last part and that there's going to be slightly more attention paid to "feminine" animations for Shepard in the final installment, but I for one am pretty used to pushy, butch Shepard and don't really need her girled up.  Her attitude just seems to be part of her character, and it makes her unique.

Complaints about the contest seemed to focus a lot on Shepard's blond hair, where, really, blond hair wasn't exactly the problem. You can see from the comments on "Shepard Five" however that the hair color seems to be a focal point that somehow emphasizes what people didn't like about the contest.  Bioware addressed this by having a second vote for hair color.  That split is just as predictable as the first was.  Male majority voters liked that the soft hair made the blonde Shepard more fuckable.  But now that they get to vote on hair color too, they're voting red, with black in second.  Nerd guys love redheads.  They've been trained to by comic books and cartoons and even without a huge popular vote on Facebook you would know this if, just for example, you ever sat in a car with three men (one of whom is your husband) while en route to a game con and all of them were talking about how blondes really don't work for them and redheads (or maybe black-haired girls) are definitely the prettiest, and blondes just look sort of trashy or dumb and, hello, I'm right here, listening to you!!

Oops, I'm sorry, that got a little personal for a second.

Please vote in the poll for whether I should change my hair color.

Okay, that's a joke, but I am seriously considering it, just because I moved recently so why not?  In the mean time, I won't be upset that Bioware puts the Shepard on the package that the male voters think is the hottest, but a little disappointed that a majority vote makes that into the only criteria that mattered.

My Advice to Students

Today is Monday, and I'm done for a while with teaching classes.  This gives me the opportunity to say something I might have been shy about saying when I was still in the middle of teaching.  I feel however like it's important to say, and I think there are a lot of teachers out there that would agree with me about it.  It's not as game-related as my other entries and is more general, but I feel safe enough putting it here.

This is advice I wish someone had given me when I was in college.  I might not have listened. You might not either.  But from the perspective of someone who now has two degrees, looking back at what I was best at and what I was worst at, and what I ended up doing with what I learned, my advice to college students is this:

Don't worry too much about your grade.

You're at school to learn to do something.  You're at school to have access to equipment and facilities that you normally wouldn't have access to at home.  You're at school to meet up with people who can help you to do that and who can create connections for you.  Your priority should be to concentrate on that stuff.  Your priority should not be to concentrate a lot on a series of letters and numbers assigned to you.

If you do well at what you've chosen to attempt in college, the marks will follow.  Or sometimes they won't... sometimes you'll realize that you made a good project, but it doesn't actually follow the rules of the project as set out for you by the teacher. Or maybe you'll realize that you missed an assignment you weren't aware of because you were concentrating on one that interested you.  Maybe the instructor will be momentarily frustrated with you, but then life would move on.

If you fail a class, ask yourself why. Is it because you didn't actually learn the material that the class presented, and you'd benefit from taking the class again? Is it because the class honestly didn't interest you, because it's the wrong class for you?  Sometimes you have to take a class you don't want to take just because it's on your degree chain. Just suffer through it, do your best, and don't sweat it if your marks are mediocre, if it's not something that you're really interested in.  On the other hand, if your entire major is made up of classes you're suffering through, then maybe it's the wrong field for you, or the wrong time for you to be in college.

Remember that no one is making you go to college.  I know that bit is hard to swallow, because you might think that, for example, your parents are making you go.  But as an adult student, you now have the choice to go or not go.  You are, in fact, paying to go.  This does not entitle you to a particular mark, but, as we just went over, marks are the least of your worries anyway.  This does give you access to the facilities and the people and the opportunity to learn.  I've seen a lot of students who realize suddenly that college isn't high school, and therefore they don't "have to" go.  The problem is that they should want to go.  If you realize that you really, bone-deep, don't want to go, then you should ask yourself who is "making" you go.

Connect with your peers. Other students may be able to help you even more than instructors can.  They may mentor you or explain a concept to you that you previously needed help with.  And take advantage of everything that the school offers you.  If you do genuinely want to go, and succeed, but there is an obstacle preventing you from going, see how your school can help.

And -- and -- don't worry so much about your grade.  If you get a bad grade it really isn't the end of the world. It's something you can shrug off and move on from, or, perhaps even a teaching moment that you will remember.  On the other hand, if you're also not learning anything, not showing up, and don't particularly care, then please figure out what does motivate you and do that instead.

New Post - Generation Gap

I wrote something, but it's not posted here. It's an article about some of my observations about how gaming has changed between Gen X and Gen Y.

It's posted at Tap-repeatedly.com!  Which is an excellent gaming blog full of smart people that you should check out.