Developer’s Diary: Game Principles

When I started looking at my fourth edition of my classic role-playing game, I wanted to make some interesting decisions when it came to the game principles.  During the various iterations of the game, I have always struggled with the concept of making the game more or less a derivative of Dungeons & Dragons.  It its first inception, I wanted the game to feel familiar to those that played the famous title but also contain rules never seen before.  In my second printing I moved grossly away from Phantasm Adventures being anything like Dungeons & Dragons, in the hopes that people wanted something fresh.  On my third attempt, I moved closer to adopting more D&D game mechanics but also made the rules overtly complicated, with dozens if not hundreds, of intricate rule expansions for each rule.

In the third edition of Phantasm Adventures, for example, I used very familiar statistics to represent the qualities of a character. Taking the familiarity of D&D, I then turned the generation of the scores upside down with a highly complicated set of rules starting with rolling two ten-sided dice, then adjusting the generated scores with innumerable modifications and ultimately converting the value back into a number very close to 3 through 18.

In the fourth edition, I removed much of the complexity leaving the basic roll of three, six-sided dice.  The values are not converted, but simple adjustments are made. Because of the tried and true mechanics of the game, I do take the three values and apply some rule changes on to how they are added together and the final score generated.  This is just one example of how I am moving back towards a more familiar concept of game mechanics, yet still offering unique rules for play.

I made an early decision not to use the open 4E rule system offered by Wizards of the Coast.  First, I find the acceptance of such to be horribly constraining, both intellectually and creatively.  Each role-playing game must have its own set of core rules accentuating specific aspects of the game that differentiates it from other rules.  

In the future,  I will be showcasing a new role playing game that I wrote fifteen years ago called Troy’s Enhanced Dungeons & Death, with the acronym TED&D – pronounced Teddy (like the bear).  Even with this tongue and cheek naming convention, the game will not use the 4E rule system but will have its own set of unique rules (though they will be more familiar with old school players, drawing upon their memories of the first edition Dungeon & Dragon rules).

In Phantasm Adventures, there will be many concepts that will be familiar to players of Dungeons & Dragons, but the rules will be unique.  For a system to stand on its own legs, it will need to garner its own unique following among players.  Some may find the rules complicated, while others will want to add their own “house” variants. Hopefully there will be enough room within the set of rules to allow people to play the game and feel comfortable enough to experiment with the game. I can attest that people that have tried the game, all find it fun and enjoyable, and they find it no more difficult as a whole than Dungeons & Dragons.

The true test of the game is ultimately time and the number of players that consistently play it.  I know from those that still play games and who have had the opportunity to play the game, they still have active campaigns in the world of Monokon.

Phantasm Adventures Returns!

Over the weekend I made the decision to release my greatest role-playing game I have ever designed. It is the quintessential game of high fantasy with more than fifty-five player races, thirty factions, two hundred skills, a magical spell system unmatched in any game ever published. It also comes with the world of Monokon: a rich and delicious world full of mystery, discovery, and unbounded adventure.

I am also very excited to have some top notch artwork finally gracing its pages. As I look at the project, I foresee five books each about 100 pages long. I will release them in various quality from the basic pdf (containing just the rules), a grand edition (containing rules, art and simply page flashings), to the premium pdf (all the pages in color).

Best of all, I have decided to release them series of books all free.

My plan is to release each book every couple of months, with the first one being ready in early June. If you wish to receive the game, simply drop me an email at: tchristensen616@gmail.com and mention Phantasm Adventures in the subject.

Troy

Looking for Artists

After years of being out of the business, I have decided to pull from the archives all of my old role-playing games, adventures, and accessories and print them via pdf and lulu (www.lulu.com). Although I consider myself adept at writing instruction manuals, I have one flaw that has kept me from becoming the next printing mogul: I am not an artist.

I am looking for all sorts of artists. I would like to add drawings, paintings, computer renderings, and maps to my games.

I cannot offer much in the way of payment, simple because it will cost more to make these rules than no doubt I will ever receive in compensation. I am doing it for the love my designs and the genre. But it is a good way to get your art into a professionally looking PDF and perhaps book (from lulu you can make physical copies of the manuals).

I would very much like to discuss this with anyone who would like to contribute. Please write me at: tchristensen616@gmail.com

I am truly excited about working on all my games again, and I hope to start sending out the word of their completion soon enough.

I am also looking into areas of web design to exemplify my games, designs, and worlds that I create and will give you more information when I know about it.

Troy

Returning to EQ2

It was inevitable, someday, but it was sooner rather than later that I have returned to Everquest II. I spent a month in Everquest, and enjoyed their new mercenary option, then another 6 weeks in Warhammer and discovered what all the excitement was — and all the let down as well.

All during my hiatus, my cousin has been plugging away at his Everquest II characters, many higher level than mine. I started back up this morning and got straight into the groove of things. I am enjoying my Templar immensely as well as my evil necromancer. I have so many great characters in this game, it is hard to decide which one I should play.

Next, I need to get back into podcasting and release a new Travel’s with Troy and EQual Perspectives — something I have let slip. There is so much to talk about on EQ and of course all my other games I have been playing.

Troy

Senselessness of Warhammer

Here is a funny thing that occurred to me while I waited for an RvR warband to form. I asked myself what sense was there in my impending battle? What is at stake and what are the spoils of victory?

If I engage in battle only for personal acquisition of wealth, loot, and experience, why not play in a Player vs. Environment setting, but if it is for the glory of my realm then what growth is there?

I am unsure if there is anything to the development of the realm, because what is taken is soon lost. What long term benefit can there be — it isn’t like in real world battles where one side eventually concedes and sues for peace. Without that knowledge tucked away in the back of your brain, the senseless battles become tiring knowing you are forever locked in struggle.

Many Warhammer players concede that they do it for personal glory, but then is there a need to play RvR — wouldn’t scenarios be just as good? Furthermore, isn’t the caring for only oneself detracting from the overall glory of a particular side you are on.

I find it hard to rationalize PvP unless you are on a team or realm, and if you play only for yourself, then what is the point? Is it really nothing more than an Arena of mob warfare?

It is a strange feeling because to some extent I should have the same attitude in other MMOs as well — dungeons reset and monsters respawn, so why don’t I have the same feeling in Everquest or City of Heroes. That I cannot fathom, but for some strange reason I feel a melancholy of boredom in Warhammer with all the PvP content — knowing it just repeats itself over and over. I cannot get over the unsettling feeling that there should be more to PvP than this reckless mob warfare that there should be a set time period in which determines the winner or perhaps the total decimation of the other side leaving them in utter despair and ruin.

More needs to be developed for a long term PvP game — something with intrinsic long term benefits and goals. Until then, Warhammer is simply one group of thugs fighting another group of thugs with the pretension of nationalism.

Warhammer: Low Pop, Low Fun

I have never found a MMO more tied to the number of people playing and the amount of fun you have in the game,  than Warhammer. Lately I have been finding my server to be a bit under populated, which translates into pitifull RvR, long waits in Scenarios, and absolutely no help in Public Quests. The fun quickly dissolves in Warhammer when populations are low, or worse lopsided.

Pure soloing in the game is an absolute drek of boredom, killing one mob after the next the creatures spawn so quickly that you rarely need to move.  The creatures themselves, as long as they are not Champions, can be mowed threw like cutting grass.  Xp is quick and furious in the game, but lacks any real tangible feeling of success.

Groups are hard to come by unless doing PvP or RvR, and when the servers are low it can be a long wait.  I often find it hard, even jumping to different maps, to find groups of players.

The game seems to rock from 8 PM to Midnight, which for the most part is the majority of my playing time — but the mornings I get up early or on vacations — Warhammer is not the game to play.

Fearless In Warhammer

What would happen if you could stick your hand in a fire and feel no pain? It wouldn’t take long before you would be bathing in gasoline, while smoking a cigarette. That is the feeling I have in Warhammer.

Death is so meaningless that I would rather just die than to log out of the game. Never before have I felt such a lack of fear, loathing, or apprehension towards having my character perish than in Warhammer. I am sure there must be a penalty because I see NPC healers in each town, but at level 18 I cannot truly see an effect yet. I can see limiting death penalties for newbies, but at a certain point you have to impose some penalty or the players will do the most foolish things.

I have stated my point in an earlier piece that I think the designers have imparted to the players the idea that its no big deal to die — simply respawn and run back into the fray. The problem is, as you cheapen death, you cheapen life. As I see it, you could altogether remove the health meter and no one would care — I have seen countless times where tanks with a sliver of health just runs straight back into the battle. Inevitably they die. But who cares? Just respawn and run right back in.

Why? Because the designers have told the players that death is meaningless. That dying is nothing, but a 30 second timer to a respawn.

Warhammer, wake up! Make dying significant — Make it cost the player experience, time, gold, influence, and renown. Make it so that a healer has a reason to heal; and their resurrection a must for survival on the battlefield. Do you know that it is more advisable to respawn than to have a player resurrect you?

As I see it, grab the biggest weapon and charge into the fray like a headless chicken — that’s what the designers want from the players.

Where Did Warhammer Go Wrong

I must admit that after three weeks of playing hard on Warhammer, I have begun to see some chinks in the armor that I thought was once impenetrable. I think there is enough blame to go around, both to the designers, the testers, and the players on some growing faults in the game.

The first real problem that I see, and one that could also be taken as a positive aspect of MMOs is how truly easy it is to play. The kernel of Warhammer is the PvP and ORvR combat, but the PVE aspect is so mind numbingly simple that it it becomes boring very quickly. I found I could solo equal to 2 level higher mobs with ease, grinding and questing 25% of a level per hour — at my play rate I was going up 1 level every other night or 2 levels easily on a weekend.

Trade skills falls in the same boat, with little to offer than get the ingredients and click to make items — boring!

I am also very disillusioned by the lack of creative art aspects in the game concerning player characters. Line up 10 War Priest or 10 Witch Hunters and they will inevitably look exactly the same, barring a few off color choices. Where is the unique aspects of my character? When I play a character, I want it to look different than others. To me the aesthetic differences are very palatable and something I look forward to in a MMO. In their defense, perhaps they made everyone look like everyone else, to save on video memory when fighting in hordes of a hundred or more characters in PvP/RVR.

In the same vein of the lack of unique armor sets in the game, is also the hard lined approach they have towards class equipment. I have never seen a game that is so anal about if you are class X, you will only use weapon X — the same for armor. Worse, their convoluted Auction system makes looking for gear usable only by specific classes, useless. If I am playing a Witch Hunter, can’t I please use something other than a gun in one hand and a sword in another? Is it possible to have a helmet that does not look like every other helmet in the game?

Finally, and the deal breaker for the game, is the designers and players have gone off in two opposite directions when it comes to healing. The designers have made the healer rather ineffectual and what tends to happen is the healer only heals himself; the players finding that the game plays like an arcade, would rather spend the 40 seconds to run back to battle than to protect and care for the healer. It is a vicious circle that ends with every man for himself and the feeling that I should have a stack of quarters next to my computer to feed the arcade game I am playing.

First characters do not have enough hit points, or the damage is too severe to allow any sort of tactics in the game — you die constantly in the game. There is no significant death penalty so players really don’t care if they die over and over and over again. Why heal or why worry about wounds when I can just die and come back full strength — Ressurection by a healer brings you back at 20 percent health only to be quickly killed again. Why not reverse that, so you are ressurected at 100 percent health but if you revive you come back at 20 percent: healers would become significant again. As it stands, non-healers complain that healers do nothing, and healers tend to rather heal themselves because their is no advantage to healing another character. Make it so that a healer cannot heal himself, and that would change the dynamics of the game considerably.

Could it be possible to give healers experience for healing rather than for killing — If they got experience only for damage healed on another character, would it not push players to actively heal other characters?  I would think it would steamroll the whole idea of what healers were meant to be in the game.

So many of these odd game elements should have been easily seen in the beta and corrected over the last several months, but instead of fixing the obvious flaw in the healing system the designers introduced two new out of control dps classes, further complicating and embroiling the lack of healing going on.

My suggestion is make the healers more usable, but have them only be able to heal others and not themselves. Let them have better resurrection spells and larger spot heals — but dissuade them from using the spells on themselves (take a look at who is doing the most kills in a scenario — it isn’t the dps classes but the Rune Priests and other high end healers).

Just my thoughts — I would very much like to hear comments.

Troy