Federation Commander

A game that evokes Star Fleet Battles while being way simpler. [Link]

On the whole, I am rather impressed with theFederation Commander rules. It actually took me years to get the hang of Star Fleet Battles. (I would read the rules and make notes on everything. I’d have pages and pages of notes, and when I did finally play, my cheat sheets were always several pages long.) The one overriding principle of Federation Commander’s design is to maintain the overall thrust of Star Fleet Battles while eliminating anything related to record keeping or plotting. I think they succeeded admirably.
They realized during development that they could not improve the game by reducing the number of impulses in a turn. Car Wars, for instance went from having 10 phase turns to 5 phases and on down to 3 phases in the last edition. Three phase movement sacrificed a great way too much granularity it’s clear that the designers could not accept that here. On the other hand, iterating through the byzantine impulse sequence 32 times in a turn is downright unworkable in game designed for today’s market. Their solution was to reduce the number of fire opportunities down to a quarter of that. Each “impulse” now has four sub-pulses that consist of just movement. The sub-pulses play out quickly; the overall tempo and feel of the combats are maintained while a lot of extraneous decision making is quietly let go. It works.
It’s the little things that clinch the deal, though. Like not having to strain my eyes finding the ship’s turn mode given a current speed. (With the ship limited to three different “gears”, it’s a lot easier to reference your turn mode on the fly.) Stupid stuff like the Kauffman Retrograde are not possible in this system due to backwards movement being changed to cost twice as much. Mid-turn speed changes (which were a huge headache in Star Fleet Battles and were essential to mastering tournament style play) are now so drop-dead simple to implement that you’ll be teaching the rule for it in your first game. (All you do is pay a point of energy on any impulse to temporarily speed up or slow down.) Anything I had to look up often in the old game is either eliminated or simplified– for instance, if a direct fire weapon cuts directly across a shield boundary, the defender chooses which one is hit.
Some aspects of the classic simulation are gone. You don’t energize phasers anymore. The various weapons status levels seem to be gone. The difference between warp and impulse power is gone. The plethora of refits available on each hull are gone. (Okay, I do miss those… but I will not miss explaining them to new players. The first games of Star Fleet Battles almost always have something go wrong because reviewing which shaded boxes are in play inevitably lead to confusion.) Even the old “impulse of decision” and “impulse of truth” bits are gone.
I admit, I still have this dream to someday play epic games of Star Fleet Battles with scads of fighters, seeking weapons, and PF’s on the board. I actually want to try it as the fleet game it is so obviously intended to be. (The ISC ship designs only really make sense in the context of fleet battles, after all.) Nevertheless, I am gobsmacked when I peruse the Federation Commander rules and see that stuff like Stingers, Cloaks, and ESG’s only take a page or two to explain. Star Fleet Battles still defines the setting for me, but this newer variant is far more likely to see actual play at the table top. It almost makes me sad….

Awesome Gaming Prop

A very awesome D&D spellbook. [Link to gallery, Link to reddit post]

Neat solution for RPG battlemaps

Projecting the map onto a table. [Link]

This is a shot from one of the players of the first combat scene of the second session. The iPad software (Battle Map) takes care of line of sight, lighting, and hidden items, giving combat a new perspective for the players.

I'm running Combat Manager (Windows) in a virtual Machine (which is running on it's own virtual desktop) on my Macbook. The OS X side handles GM notes via Growly and PDF/PRD access.

The projector being used is a Optoma PK301 (50 lumens). It is mounted on a modified Mainstay lamp with a flexible end.

Pacifism in Video Games

Gamers seeking a challenge go non-violent because violence is too easy. There's a moral there somewhere. [Link]

Killing is easy in the moral vacuum of videogames. So when Daniel Mullins needed a challenge, he gave peace a chance.

Mr. Mullins, 19, is the creator of "Felix the Peaceful Monk"—his character in a videogame called "The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim." The game gives players wide latitude over their on-screen characters' appearance and actions. Felix, who is half man, half cat, has become a small-time Internet celebrity for his steadfast refusal to kill.

In videogame excerpts Mr. Mullins has posted on YouTube, Felix roams an icy fantasy world doing things like soothing angry wolves with magic. In one video, he explains how to turn away threatening skeletons, noting Felix won't even harm the undead. And when an assassin tried to gut Felix with a knife? While most players have swords and arrows for would-be hit men, Mr. Mullins hit his with a calm spell.

"Apparently someone wants me dead. But that doesn't mean [the assassin] deserves to die," Mr. Mullins explains.

Videogames have long been assailed for their violent themes and gruesome imagery. But a small slice of players has embraced a new strategy: not killing. They are imparting real-world morals on their virtual-world characters and completing entire games on a "pacifist run"—the term for beating a blood-and-guts adventure without drawing any blood.

The cool restraint of pacifism can bring bragging rights and even a taste of online fame. Videogame enthusiasts routinely post videos of their accomplishments on YouTube.

Kotaku, a videogame blog, has done posts on a handful of pacifists, including one who conquered the post-apocalyptic world of "Fallout: New Vegas" without taking a single virtual life. A number of violent videogames award virtual "trophies" to anyone who can complete the game without killing.

Stephen Totilo, Kotaku's editor in chief, says videogame pacifism isn't usually a moral decision but rather "an urge to break the rules"—and dial up the difficulty of the game. "One of the most interesting challenges is to get through the game without killing," he says.

I think the best part of today's more sophisticated games is the option to not kill. The idea that all problems do not have to have violent solutions is a good one.

Achievement Unlocked!

Video game style achievements for developers. [Link]

Visual Studio Achievements, a Visual Studio plug-in, enables developers to unlock badges and compete against one another for a place on a leader board based on the code they write, its level of sophistication, and the Visual Studio capabilities they use to do so. Developers finally have the ability to actually show their friends, colleagues, project managers, spouses and customers how good they are at what they do all day and sometimes into the night.

Visual Studio Achievements is both playful and pragmatic. Built on ideas from the developers themselves, it is intended to be a humorous community-building game as well as a path to the many, and, to some, unknown features offered in Visual Studio. This is one of several initiatives Microsoft is undertaking to recognize developers for their tireless and indispensable work.

The three dominant factors shaping development in the industry today are how developers build apps, how they make money, and how they uniquely solve hard problems with new scenarios. The development environments, as well as the tools, need to be geared around how to make it easier and more enjoyable for Microsoft developers to do these three things. When you add in the prediction that by 2015, more than 50 percent of organizations will gamify their innovation processes, Achievements is a small but important element in delivering on that commitment.

The Visual Studio Achievements plug-in analyzes a background thread each time code is compiled, as well as listens for particular events and actions from Visual Studio. When certain criteria or actions are detected, the plug-in triggers a pop-up alert and awards a new badge, which is then displayed on the public leaderboard and the developer’s Channel 9 profile.

How Wizards of the Coast is dropping the ball in engagement

Press releases do not a community make. [Link]

I think you have accepted that you have made some mistakes. So I am not going to rake you over the coals. I'm not going to make demands of you that are in my self-interest or that seek to bolster some position I have. I am not going to pretend to help you, but really not care about your situation. I am going to take you at your word and give you my honest opinion.

You want to unite the clans. UNITE THEM! I can appreciate that. I can get behind that. So this advice that I give you is truly from the heart. You are an old friend that has, in my view, lost their way. I want to help you. You seem open to it. So here it is...

Live the D&D life

I don't mean that flippantly. Live the D&D life. Stop marketing. Stop pushing your product on people, start caring about people, and they will buy your product without the push. Care about D&D. Advocate for D&D. Be everywhere, talking about D&D. Know the community, know the people. Feel their pain, know their problems, give them help, and care.

I know you might think you are doing that now. You aren't. You are trapped in the past. The future is digital and it is passing you by.

Your website is poorly designed and hard to navigate. I don't want to spend time there. I'm looking at it today, you know what I don't see? A headline that tells me 5th edition is announced. Just a link to SIGN UP and be a part of gamer history. You know what my first thought is reading that? "Sign Up" is a code word for: Let me market to you . Sign up for my newsletter. It doesn't scream out that you are making a new edition. It doesn't make me care and it doesn't make me click. Your "D&D next" group page is bland and boring. I could go on, but I have no desire to ridicule you about your web design.

You have a twitter feed and a Facebook page. Both are boring. It looks like you are trying to sell me something.

You are talking in marketing speak. You need to stop. Now.

Let me give you some hard advice on how to do that, not just impressions and vague directives.

And a comment by Fred Hicks.

The problem is not people not wanting to be marketed to. Generally they do, but they want the marketing to dress up as (better: be ) a buddy, a peer, a fellow fanboy, a gamer who's "in the life". Why? Because people want to be marketed to by someone who is one of them. Someone who shares their enthusiasm, and can communicate that enthusiasm -- infectiously -- to them in a way that gets them buying in. Because that's an invitation to an awesome party by a cool guy, right? Folks like being invited. What they don't like is that being a big put-on, a phony sales pitch by some slickster who wouldn't know a d4 if he got it stuck caltrop-like in his foot. And it doesn't matter if the person is actually a fan -- if they're coming off as a slickster, that perception check rules the day.

This right here is why word of mouth is the most effective. Because it's authentic and genuine. Any marketing or sales effort that isn't word of mouth has to figure out how to make up the authenticity gap. It is not easy.

The wizards site could continue to suck navigationally, etc, if it just managed to be authentic and genuine more than not. But that's not a signal that's shouting out over the noise these days.

Dungeons and Dragons Fifth Edition

Save vs. GURPS. New edition to be a "universal rule set". [Link]

“We’re focusing on what gets people excited about D&D, and making sure we have a game that encompasses all different styles,” says Mike Mearls, group manager for the D&D research and development team. “Even if you haven’t played in 20 years, we want you to be able to sit down and say, ‘this is D&D.’”

In its current form, Dungeons & Dragons isn’t a single game that everyone plays the same way; it’s more like several different games descended from a common ancestor. Over its four decade history, the game’s designers frequently changed the rules and republished them; sometimes they did so to fix problems, sometimes just to sell new rule books.

As a result, the fanbase is fractured to the point of making it difficult to play the game, isolating players that don’t know or enjoy particular versions. More worrying, if you’re Wizards of the Coast: A devoted player of 1977′s “Advanced Dungeons & Dragons” rules might play your game every single week —even though they haven’t spent any money on it in 35 years.

To solve this problem, Wizards has been looking back at each edition of the game going back to 1974, and identifying core rules that make the game work best. They’re also soliciting suggestions from players via weekly columns on their web site, and through community discussion threads. And in coming months, they’ll host several rounds of playtesting, allowing fans to try out new rules before they’re finalized, and identify what does and doesn’t work.

When completed, that collective wisdom will be used to craft a new engine that will serve as as a sort of “best of” edition —and which should be familiar and fun whether you’re green or a grayhair.

Of course, bringing all kinds of players under one tent isn’t easy when they want different things. To address that, Mearls says the new edition is being conceived of as a modular, flexible system, easily customized to individual preferences.

“Just like a player makes his character, the Dungeon Master can make his ruleset,” says Mearls. “He might say ‘I’m going to run a military campaign, it’s going to be a lot of fighting’… so he’d use the combat chapter, drop in miniatures rules, and include the martial arts optional rules.”

“You can have as little or as much customization as you want,” he says. “It’s about letting people find their own way to play.”

I am more than a little worried this will be less than the sum of it's parts.

Computer learns language by playing Civilization

No, really. [Link]

The extraordinary thing about Barzilay and Branavan’s system is that it begins with virtually no prior knowledge about the task it’s intended to perform or the language in which the instructions are written. It has a list of actions it can take, like right-clicks or left-clicks, or moving the cursor; it has access to the information displayed on-screen; and it has some way of gauging its success, like whether the software has been installed or whether it wins the game. But it doesn’t know what actions correspond to what words in the instruction set, and it doesn’t know what the objects in the game world represent.

So initially, its behavior is almost totally random. But as it takes various actions, different words appear on screen, and it can look for instances of those words in the instruction set. It can also search the surrounding text for associated words, and develop hypotheses about what actions those words correspond to. Hypotheses that consistently lead to good results are given greater credence, while those that consistently lead to bad results are discarded.

Proof of concept 

In the case of software installation, the system was able to reproduce 80 percent of the steps that a human reading the same instructions would execute. In the case of the computer game, it won 79 percent of the games it played, while a version that didn't rely on the written instructions won only 46 percent. The researchers also tested a more-sophisticated machine-learning algorithm that eschewed textual input but used additional techniques to improve its performance. Even that algorithm won only 62 percent of its games.

“If you’d asked me beforehand if I thought we could do this yet, I’d have said no,” says Eugene Charniak, University Professor of Computer Science at Brown University. “You are building something where you have very little information about the domain, but you get clues from the domain itself.” 

Conquest of Nerath

D&D large scale strategy wargame. [Link]

Conquest of Nerath pits four realms against one another: an undead empire, a goblin/orc empire, an elf empire and a human league. You can play with two to four players. In the two-player game, each player plays an alliance, controlling each of two realms separately, but using them to assist each other. With three players, one player plays the elf/human alliance against the other two. A four player game can use the alliances or play it out as a four-way free-for-all of shifting allegiances and shady deals.

Play is pretty straightforward - you're goal is to gain victory points by conquering territories. Territory control also gives you more gold each turn, which you spend to purchase units. There's a nice range of units, from basic foot soldiers to heroes, wizards, monsters, warships and even elementals and dragons. The units have varying costs and different sets of special abilities. Wizards, for instance, have first strike, so they deal any damage before opposing units can hit back. Monsters have a Blitzkrieg ability (called Run Amok) that lets them conquer an unprotected enemy territory after you've won a battle. All attacks hit on a roll of 6 or higher, but different units roll different dice. Foot soldiers have a tough time hitting on their D6s, while monsters hit well with their D12s. Dragons and castles roll D20s.

All About the Glasses

Clark Kent can't be Superman, Clark Kent wears glasses. [Link]

If you haven't yet, it's pretty interesting to check out people's answers to Friday's question, where I asked: If you were to play a game set in the DC comics universe, how quickly would you figure out that Clark Kent is Superman?

When I initially asked the question, I was just thinking of it as a simple example of how to apply narrative logic to play (not recognizing them is, in most circumstances, narrative appropriate) without needing to stress yourself out. However, the answers I've gotten to this question have really suggested to me that this may be an incredibly informative question to ask at the beginning of a campaign. It's a question with no wrong answer, but each right answer reveals a very different relationship with the fiction of the game.

Some of the big groupings I saw break down like this.

Interesting points for role playing games and genre conventions. I have seen games where there was a disconnect between players and game master over what things are 'realistic' or in genre.

RPG Monetary Economy

This is an interesting idea for dealing with large amounts of money in RPGs like D&D. [Link]

So here’s a modification I’ve been considering: Money found does not equal experience, but money spent does. You don’t have to spend it on anything functional in-game, but doing so gets you a double reward of the XP at issue and whatever the money buys. So it makes for cool situations like:

• I spend my money drinking and whoring, like Conan, Fafhrd, and the Grey Mouser.
• I tithe my money to the Church of [Womble or Whomever], like a good cleric or paladin should be doing anyway.
• I invest my money in magical research, and create magic items as a result (particularly in terms of the D&D 3.5 ruleset, even though it doesn’t decree that found money is experience).
• I sock it away in preparation to buy my stronghold (an investment that then provides event opportunities, whether in terms of the stronghold, or in terms of the scoundrels with whom I banked it skimming off my deposits).

Very nice.

Game Development Death March

One reason I don't want to work as a game developer. [Link]

Horror stories are constantly surfacing about the lengths game developers sometimes have to go in order to ship a game on time. The worst involve up to 85-hour work weeks—12 hours a day, seven days a week—which is more than double the century-old 40 hour per week standard. Extended periods of crunch can last up to a year, with sustained 60-hour weeks. This practice has earned a markedly less innocuous name than "crunch time." It's called "the death march."

In some cases it's nearly dehumanizing: the closure of All Points Bulletin developer Real Time Worlds in September of last year left more than 185 employees out of a job. They were welcomed to the end of a particularly long crunch period by pink slips rather than profit sharing and bonuses.

In an industry that is steadfastly focused on fun, it seems counter-intuitive that video gamers should be the ones who have to worry about the sagging quality of life of those who make the games. No kid should ever have to wonder if Santa Claus is cracking the whip too hard on his elves to make the Christmas Eve shipping deadline, but despite widespread outrage over revelations from ex-employees describing poor conditions, the status quo remains largely unchanged and unchallenged.

Bad Santa

On the surface it's simple. Studios push their employees harder to finish projects faster. Less time spent on development means less time employing a full team of artists, programmers, designers, testers etc.

This is one of the principle factors perpetuating the use of crunch by management. The vast majority of employees working in the development of video games are salaried employees and do not receive overtime for additional hours spent at the office. A recent poll of over 350 industry professionals taken by developer-focused website Develop, showed that 98 percent of those polled received no compensation for their overtime work.

Chinese prisoners forced to produce virtual gold

12 hours of physical labor, followed by virtual labor. [Link]

A former detainee at a prison in Heilongjiang province, China, has told the Guardian about how he was habitually forced into playing MMOs likeWorld of Warcraft for the collection of loot, which the prison guards would then resell online for as much as ¥6,000 ($924) per day. Such totals would be the product of up to 300 inmates working 12-hour daily shifts, though predictably they saw none of the profits themselves. The unnamed source was at a "re-education through labor" camp where the usual toil would involve actual, rather than virtual, mining. The profitability of the online market has seemingly inspired prison bosses to move with the times, however, with business being so brisk that the computers "were never turned off." 

Traveller RPG in Ancient Times

Neat. The sword skill finally makes sense. [Link]

This has been on my mind for several years, and I had chance to get all my notes together last week to write it up. The ancient world seen through the eyes of Traveller characters, they own a ship, travelling from port to port, trading and smuggling, picking up rumours, having adventures, taking jobs from shadowy patrons, dodging Roman patrol galleys...

The aim was to use as much as possible from the original rules. I didn't mention my preferred houserule, which is to ignore all armour DMs if they are positive, only using the negative DMs. Its my standard CT houserule that I've used for years. 

I never had chance to write up the last chapters, on patrons, encounters and equipment lists ... but the game is playable without those just using the relevant sections in Traveller Book 3. Of course stats for Terran creatures wopuld have been nice too  

http://www.geocities.com/zozergames/mercator1.pdf

Neat explanation for D&D spells

They're mind parasites. [Link]

The casting of magical rituals was once a lengthy and time-consuming process; one which often required the combined efforts of entire covens or wizard circles to complete. All of that changed, however, when wizards first discovered spells.

The earliest spells were dangerous and unstable — parasitic horrors from a primordial proto-plane of raw magical essence which feasted memetically upon the sanity of those they infected. But whether by accident or design, a small band of wizards managed to tame the spells to their own purposes. With proper training, they learned that these living parasites could hold complex rituals in a state of pressurized memetic potential. And then, by infecting themselves, they discovered that they could release the entrapped rituals upon command.

Magical rites that had once taken hours, days, or even months to cast could now be unleashed in minutes. (And later, as their arts improved, in mere moments.) The world was transformed.

The parasites, of course, were consumed in their casting. And so, every morning, wizards find themselves preparing fresh spells and then infecting their minds with them. It takes years of practice to perfect the finely honed balance required to sustain even a single spell-parasite in your mind without being driven mad by its thought-consuming proclivity. The ability to sustain multiple spells in that state of mind-rending follows more quickly, but it is always a delicate balance between power and madness for those who would follow such a path.

Something I'm working on in my spare time

A map editor/world generation utility for Traveller. Still very early yet, but I'm making good progress. Inspired by Heaven & Earth and the Traveller Map.

Awesome dice

Made from a 3D printer. [Link]

Fantasy World Map

This would be awesome to play in. [Link]

A hobbit, a Sleestak, a Who, and the Cheshire Cat walk into a dungeon...

Visual Studio Achievments

Awesome. [Link]

What if Visual Studio supported achievements, just like games on Steam, Xbox or PS3? Bragging to your coworkers about which one you’ve just unlocked, imagine that! Here’s a little proposed list for some of them. .NET / C# flavored, of course.

• Falling Down – Created a new SharePoint project
• Job Security – Written a LINQ query with over 30 lines of code
• The Sword Fighter – 5 Consecutive Solution Rebuilds with zero code changes
• Shotgun Debugging – 5 Consecutive Solution Rebuilds with a single character change
• The Mathematician – Defined 15 local variables with a single character name
• The Academic – Written 1000 lines of F#
• Spaghetti Monster – Written a single line with more than 300 characters
• Wild One – Mixed tabs and spaces for indentation more than 5 times in a single line
• The Organizer – Created a Solution with more than 50 projects
• The Portal – Created a circular project dependency
• The Multitasker – Have more than 50 source files open at the same time
• The Code Keeper – Uninstalled Resharper because it made you redundant
• Pasta Chef – Created a class with more than 100 fields, properties or methods
• Procedural Programmer – Created a method with more than 10 out parameters

More at the link.

How to select an RPG

Not bad, but misses Pulp (Adventure! or Spirit of the Century), and New World of Darkness or Dresden Files. [Link]

I threw this chart together just for fun.  Start in the red diamond which is roughly in the center.

Please excuse any slights that may be part of the chart.  Some may be my biases, but most are based on consensus opinions of various message boards. There are 44 games listed currently.

If you have suggestions of games to add, please suggest them in the comments!  But please also include one or two things that differentiate the game you’re suggestion.  Also feel free to mention more/better ways to differentiate the games already on the chart.

There are lots of games that could be added, but there will have to be some cutoff too avoid overload.  For example, I may add some D&D retro-clones, but I probably won’t do more than the 5-7 most popular clones.

To Rephrase: Don’t see something listed which should be?  Don’t get your rant on.  This was a first draft… post a comment and it will likely be added in a day or two.