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theoutcastrogue · 3 years

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Locks in Dungeons and Dragons

[article by Joseph Mohr]

“My recent article on Thieves’ Tools was widely popular and this led me to think outside the box a bit about what might else might interest people that are building dungeons for their players. A few of the comments were from people with far more expertise about locks and lock picking than I have. But I did some research into Medieval locks and this article will discuss these locks in the context that Dungeons and Dragons locks would likely be similar.

A warded lock example

What did people use locks for in medieval times?

Locks were used for a lot of purpose. Dungeons, of course, were one of them. A medieval dungeon and a fantasy dungeon are, of course, different things. A medieval dungeon was used for housing prisoners (criminals, political prisoners, enemies of the state, etc). And fantasy dungeons tend to house monsters and villains and, yes, sometimes criminals too.

Some known uses for locks in the medieval world are:

Dungeons (of course!)

Manacles

Houses

Shops

Chastity belts

Balls and chains

Treasure chests

Cages

Torture devices (iron maidens, etc)

Cell doors

City gates

Coffins (You won’t want the dead leaving their grave)

And probably dozens of things that I have never really considered

What is left of a medieval lock

How long have locks been around?

Locks were mentioned in the Old Testament. They have been around at least that long. The book of Nehemiah mentions that the gates of Jerusalem were locked at barred. The Romans were also known to have used locks. They made padlocks of iron. But even those locks may not have been the first. The Khorsabad palace in Nineveh was found to have a wooden lock. This lock is believed to be nearly 4000 years old. But even that lock may not be the first. It is believed that the ancient Egyptians were creating wooden locks as early as early as 6000 years ago.

Middle age door lock

Types of locks used in medieval times

There were a few types of locks that were widely used during the middle ages. Some of these locks include:

Warded locks – This type of lock uses a series of “Wards” or obstructions to prevent the lock from opening until the correct key is inserted. The correct key will have notches or slots that correspond to these wards and allow the key to turn in the lock. These types of locks were used widely in monasteries during the middle ages. The weakness of this type of lock is that a well designed skeleton key can bypass many of these wards and still turn. This type of lock has been around since ancient China and the Roman Empire.

Level Tumbler Locks – This type of lock was not available during the middle ages but was designed to improve upon the design and to make skeleton keys unable to open them. These locks use a set of levers to prevent the bolt from moving in the lock. They were not available until 1778 but I mention them here to show the evolution in lock design.

Padlocks – are portable locks that have a shackle that can be placed through an opening in order to prevent access to it. These locks have been around since as early as the Roman era. It is believed that they date back to between 500 BC and 300 AD.

Dead bolts – Norman castle doors in the middle ages were known to have this type of lock. This type of lock required the key to be turned a full turn as the key was directly sliding the bolt.

Custom locks – By the late medieval years locks became more sophisticated. Locks were cleverly hidden as were the keyholes. The owner of the lock would know where to press in order to reveal the keyhole. A spring would slide a piece of metal away to reveal the keyhole. Sometimes carvings or painting would also conceal the keyhole. These locks would come with only one key that could open it. Sometimes they even placed fake keyholes to confuse lock pickers.

A medieval padlock with keys

What were locks made out of?

Different materials were used over the years to make locks. Obviously the need for security had a lot to do with the development of different metals used in them. Some of these materials used to make locks included:

Brass

Bronze

Silver

Wood

Iron

Even as early as Roman times iron was being used for some locks. Often they had bronze keys. At first Blacksmiths were the usual maker of locks. Later specialized locksmiths began plying their trade.

A castle door with deadbolt

So how does all of this relate to Dungeons and Dragons?

There are many places in a Dungeons and Dragons campaign where locks are likely to be employed. Most likely the Dungeon Master would want to use iron for the lock to make it the most difficult material to break. Places where such locks would be found might include:

If you are going to use a device like this on your prisoners you do not want them getting out easily

Treasure chests – of course this is the number one place. Some chests might be found open or unlocked but most people who own treasure are going to want to keep it safe. Chests are heavy. Sometimes they are banded to protect from cutting into the chest. By the middle ages locks were often stronger than the chests or doors that they protected.

Doors – most average people could not have afforded to have a lock put in. Nobles and wealthy people could have and probably would have put locks in. Anyone who owns treasure is likely to lock more than just the chest it is in. They are going to lock the room where it is found. And they are likely to lock the front door to the castle or home.

City gates – gates were often locked at night or after curfew. They were opened in the morning. They often contained postings of announcements about new taxes, toll schedules, new laws, etc.

Shackles – dungeons often have prisoners. Sometimes they are allowed to roam free in their cells and other times they are chained to a wall or to each other. Or they might be chained to a heavy iron ball to prevent them from moving quickly but allowing them some ability to move.

Spell books – why let others pry into your spells? And if the mage is killed…no need for anyone else to be able to read it.

Traps – if you want to set a trap or temporarily disarm it a lock is an easy way to do it quickly.

Dungeon cells – locks would be used to keep prisoners in their cells or cages.

Wanna really piss off the prisoners in your dungeon? Lock their heads in these. Apparently the man in the iron mask was not the only guy to get his head locked up

Lock use in Dungeons and Dragons have nearly infinite applications

But the types of locks themselves are pretty limited. There could be, of course, magical locks created for your campaign. Or perhaps some king might commission someone to create a new one. Placing locks is intended to prevent, or slow down, would be thieves and protect valuables or to keep access (or freedom) restricted.”

A medieval chastity belt. A number of authorities claim that chastity belts were just a myth but some actual examples of the device are still known to exist. [N.B. Gah, no. All the extant examples are 19th century or later curiosities (at best) or deliberate shams (at worst). Either way, they came out of a fascination with the Middle Ages, and an eagerness to imagine it as much more exciting and brutal than it actual was. Neither chastity belts nor iron maidens were really a thing.]

– article by Joseph Mohr, in Old School Role Playing (Jan 2020)

#long post #thieves' tools #how to rogue #d&d #fluff #how to steal

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inventors-fair · 3 years

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Tri, Tri, Tri Again

What makes a common? Usually the little black and/or white symbol on the card, but that’s not the point right now. What makes a common different than an uncommon? The thing is, we know the difference between a common and a rare, even when sometimes those lines are a little weird on older cards like Scion of the Wild and Sinkhole in their own ways. The line is there these days, and we’re designing for the modern era whether we like it or not. I’d hope that after over twenty years of tinkering we’re at a place where we do like it, so there’s that.

What stops a common from being an uncommon, though, is a little harder to quantify. We have to talk about recursion, multiples, finishing, the role in the draft, the complexity for new players, etc. There are so many factors that can make pushing commons hard in ways that we don’t touch that often. I wanted to do this contest because it’s both a restriction and a challenge. Making a common card isn’t easy unless you know your slot. Making a common with the three lines of text, well, that’s something else entirely. And for the most part, I think people did amazing work. There are a couple obvious cases where I feel people should have looked at prior examples, but in terms of general work, we’re on the ball here.

We’re only doing two bullet points this week: “Things I like” and “Where to improve.” I feel that that’s the most constructive, yes? Gimmicks can be fun, but let’s be real, we are here to get as much positive feedback as we can and to improve what we like to do, which is making custom cards. Easy enough. Let’s pick some cards and some brains.

@deg99 — Emberwild Inferno

Things I like: On its surface, this is mechanically just fine. It’s a three-mana bolt, but with a distinct upside, and you know, nobody’s going to be upset when playing this in a draft. Red removal is perfectly fine and anti-prevention, while a corner case most days… Well, kind of. There are actually ten current standard cards that prevent damage, which is kind of surprising to me! Still, ten ain’t as much as it could be for relevance, BUT, it’s still perfectly reasonable to see that it would be in this set.

Where to improve: Firstly, “Emberwild” is spelled with an “e” at the end in every iteration of MTG cards printed thus far, and it’s kind of throwing me off. Also, it’s a term from Dominaria; what city is doing the blessing? What city are they in? There needs to be a comma after damage, “cannot” should be “can’t,” and I feel that we have to tell at least one person almost every contest: Damage needs a source. “Emberwild Inferno deals 3 damage to any target.” No spells after 1999 use that kind of wording. Please, please proofread your cards.

@dim3trodon — Reassembling Sentinel

Things I like: Totally fine to be using Ward here, and I like where it’s going. This is an interesting cost-to-PT ratio, definitely more aggressive, and I don’t hate it. Flying and first strike later in the game are also totally valid. I’m personally not the biggest fan of ability counters, but in this instance, there’s absolutely nothing wrong here. Permanent additions like this are important for modern Magic.

Where to improve: But why add the ability counters only if they don’t have them? Is there some ruling corner case that I’m missing? Why not just four mana for a flying counter, three for a first strike counter? It doesn’t feel intuitive to me. Yes, multiple counters are waylaid on cards like Crystalline Giant, but that’s because it wants as many as possible. Here, where you can choose, I feel you could have just had it add the counters. Regarding flavor, I don’t see how this card is “reassembling” anything. Assembling, yes, but REassembling? Not clicking for me.

@dimestoretajic — Mob Beast

Things I like: Gruul rules! Well, there’s no ruling, but—anyway, this card works in interesting ways and I think it’s pretty serviceable. Raging Kronch comes to mind, and the beasts of Ravnica are definitely up there. It’s an interesting name for sure, and it’s making me think more than it is making me feel critical. Is this beast part of the mob, or belonging to the mob, like it’s being wrangled? It could be either, and that’s fair. This card would make a good finisher.

Where to improve: I’m worried about multiples in draft for sure. I mean, chances are you aren’t going to get too many of them, but having a bunch of hasty finishers can be a bit of a pickle especially when you can also slot these into other multicolor strategies. Maybe it’d need to be tested to be believed, but, y’know, how many one-mana 3/3s are there, right? For the flavor text, emdash your quoter and put them on a separate line. If it’s too cramped, time to revise.

@dumbellsndragons — Fledgling Nightblade

Things I like: Renown is fantastic here. I don’t necessarily know how renowned an assassin wants to be, but in their own circles, heck yes. It encourages blocking in its own way, and it’s certainly powerful on that front with the deathtouch. I think for me the flavor is one of the stronger points here, and I want to see a little bit more of a “professionally getting better in all colors and competing” world, so thumbs-up there.

Where to improve: The last time we saw deathtouch and menace at common was Kederekt Creeper from Alara, and, well, I don’t think that’s precedent; deathtouch and menace is strong. Really strong. Like, at common, I think it might be a bit too strong. It shows up printed so little because of that, even at higher rarities. Honestly, a 3-mana 1/2 or 2/1 might be better, but that’s also my worrywart tendencies. I’d have to play. This design as it stands would be fine in a Modern Horizons power level set more than a standard one.

@gollumni — Sovereign’s Duty

Things I like: I’m a big fan of “can block any number of creatures” for someone who isn’t super defensive when playing the game. I think it’s neat, and represents cool stuff, and I like this card a lot! The name is generic, but I don’t mean that as an insult. I could see this in a core set, on Dominaria, on Theros, on Eldraine, any number of planes, and for a common, that’s a good thing. That’s some success right there.

Where to improve: That last ability made me worried about layers until I checked with some rules people. It’s not the layers so much as it is the wording. “As long as enchanted creature’s toughness is 5 or greater, it can block any number of creatures.” Continuous effects. Argh, that really threw me for a second! It was also kind of frustrating because there wasn’t any great precedent, but you know, nothing wrong with new territory.

@hiygamer — Guider of Souls

Things I like: Exploit would make a very cool mechanic in Orzhov, and I think that if we ever do a “mechanic/faction mixup” contest then you get precedent on that front. Totally flavorful and totally awesome. I think that Orzhov tokens was one of my favorite draft archetypes from RNA and this card continuing that tradition with death triggers is definitely up there in terms of capturing that feeling.

Where to improve: This card feels busy for some reason. Unfortunately, for this contest, you had to have the three lines, but were this printed, I don’t think it would have vigilance. Two flying bodies would be enough. If you wanted to keep vigilance, I’d definitely knock it down to one body. Two fliers… I feel that that’s too much. But, what do I know. Also why aren’t they white and black like the other Spirits? Regardless, that flavor text is also pretty dry. Not bad, but dry. What if it was the guider talking to the spirits instead? “Come, let me lead you to the light of Orzhova.” Little simpler, shorter, more personal.

@hyenagirldick — Poisoned Gookeeper

Things I like: I think despite this being kind of a placeholder, everyone liked this card’s name. I’m up there. This one, wow, this is giving me a lot of whiplash. The typeline is making me think Simic, but the “horror” is making me think Innistrad, but the Scavenge is making me think Ravnica again, but—and so on and so forth. I want context! Mechanically, using “scavenge onto” as a verb here is interesting and I don’t hate it. A good twist on this mechanic.

Where to improve: Despite that drive for context, I think ultimately the mashup is making me more confused than intrigued. It’s just over the line, to be fair, but it needs consolidation of ideas. You’re asking a lot of us here, to interpret the world, a new use for the mechanic (that seems considerably cheaper than the average common scavenge-r), to have a deathtouch blocker like this with the high toughness, etc. It’s not bad! But it’s a lot.

@hypexion — Blade of the Blessed

Things I like: I feel that the trend of having cool explorations of auras and equipment is 100% the right way to go and this card feels like it slots right in. Let’s talk about flavor, because without flavor text, this card still tells an amazing story. As long as you’re able, pick up the sword and fight. But, if you’re blessed by XYZ deity, then the blade becomes easier to wield. Fantastic. That much I like.

Where to improve: I believe that the last ability is too complex for common. It’s not that it doesn’t make sense or that it’s too powerful, but I believe that it’s asking stuff from players that they wouldn’t necessarily understand at common; it’s not immediately grokable. I like the space and I like what it’s doing. I think if you drop the cost to 1W it would be a fine uncommon. And you know what, I think I’m in the minority. I think that there will be disagreement, and I understand where that’s coming from.

@i-am-the-one-who-wololoes — Mummification

Things I like: I’m always a fan of cycling abilities for sure. Can’t be countered, instant-speed, powerful effects, heck yeah. I’m also a fan of finisher abilities like this. Black’s triggers for life-loss were definitely fun with those big enchantments. There aren’t a heck of a lot of common noncreature non-aura enchantments out there as precedent, but regardless, they exist.

Where to improve: Looking up precedents for this effect, I’m definitely skeptical about this at common. For one, it’s any player. For two, it’s whenever a spell is cast. For three, it’s harder to remove. All that together combined with a potential common cycling shell where you can draft a bunch of these and then make all black spells have extort? Actually, this card is almost strictly better than a two-mana enchantment with “Black spells you cast have extort.” Almost. I think this might have had to go back to the drawing board. As for the flavor, I don’t grok what the name, text, and abilities have to do with one another.

@koth-of-the-hammerpants — Coffin Devourer

Things I like: I just read the flavor text, and, uh. I love it but wow. That’s some nasty, funny, funky stuff. So! Let’s talk about the card. Perfectly serviceable in terms of getting things out of graveyards then making creatures big. There aren’t too many cards with tap abilities and vigilance at common, but they’re definitely there, so that’s okay. Man, I can’t get over that name and flavor combo. That’s really something special.

Where to improve: This card doesn’t really fit the prompt, and I think next time I’d have to reach out about something like this. Vigilance and trample go on the same line; yes, even in standard-legal sets where sometimes abilities don’t go together, because that’s mostly for starters and core sets and the like. Technically it fits the prompt, but for all practical purposes it’s a workaround that shouldn’t have been submitted as-is. Now, that’s Fair meta. The card’s totally fine on every other front, I think. You’re gonna have to decide, though, if you wanna stick with the sort of Scavenging Ooze wording or the Tome Shredder wording. I think you should go with the second, with the exile as a cost.

@mardu-lesbian — Rifleman Trio (JUDGE PICK)

Things I like: Huh, another card with vigilance and a tap ability. Well there we go! This card’s also got a lot going on, but it doesn’t feel like anything is at odds with itself, and is also on the upper side of being pushed without going into strictly uncommon territory. It’s got reach (“Stay on the defense, fellas!”) for blocking as it comes down, it’s got conditional vigilance (“Learn from those organized chaps!”) which encourages multicolor play but doesn’t force it, and it’s got that cool damage that is both a finisher, a pinger, and teaches a little about the combat advantage (“FIRE!”). So yeah!

Where to improve: I guess the only question would be where the rifles come from. Is this Ixalan-ian? I don’t think it super matters. This is a great commendable card.

@masternexeon — Bloodstarved Beast

Things I like: “Vampire beast” is one heck of a typeline. I like that part a lot, and honesty, I like weird echo costs a lot to. I’m surprised this isn’t a name already, actually! This card feels like its basis is in a lot of neat love letters to old-school Magic and high fantasy, even outside of the choice to submit with old-border.

Where to improve: The complexity of this one is definitely up there and past. Doing weird things with established mechanics that aren’t immediately grokable probably don’t belong at common. What happens when you blink it after previously paying an echo cost, a player might ask? Paying a cost for a continuous effect feels...weird, and I actually don’t know if that works within the rules. Nothing wrong with that specific echo cost, so that’s fine, but the second ability isn’t something I’d personally want at common. For the last ability, it should be “you draw a card and you lose 1 life,” see Phyrexian Rager.

@misterstingyjack — Flames of Anarchy

Things I like: Removal and cycling is perfectly serviceable. The cost suggests that the set has a stronger monocolor theme if the removal is costed like this, although it might just be for the slightly more powerful effect (sort of) and the ability to cycle if you don’t have the RR already. Name’s pretty darn awesome, too.

Where to improve: I know that you tried to balance it by making it only his creatures or planeswalkers, but this is still a recursive damage spell that’s asking weird things of you. What sort of set would have a sorcery-matters theme at common? What’s the as-fan? I think you had a cool idea that is indeed cool, but what you’re asking of your set and your rarity is too much than what can be provided. I don’t think this kind of recursion is what you want at common. In the shell that it’s intended to be in, I think it’s too powerful.

@morbidlyqueerious — Proven Sword (JUDGE PICK)

Things I like: Like I said earlier, new things with equipment and auras are totally awesome, and I fully support this kind of cost. Equipping to certain creature types for cheap makes sense to me because nine times out of ten it’s not something that’s going to be radically changing; either the creature is there or it’s not, and it’s either a Warrior or not. And that’s cool! First strike can be really powerful with that boost that you’re giving it, and if you have any other warrior or equipment strategies, then you better believe things are gonna get nasty on the field. I think this is a one-of in your pool, but it’s a fantastic one-of. Equipment can be undervalued at times!

Where to improve: I’m not 100% down with the flavor text. The blacksmith doesn’t “make” the metal, do they? They make the blade. I think that you had a good concept but it’s not exactly there yet.

@naban-dean-of-irritation — Physical Fluctuation

Things I like: Well, the art’s a big plus, and the flavor’s funny, so that’s pretty great. I think that common combat tricks in the GW sphere have always been a little funky, especially with Ravnica’s weird return to that again and again. There was even that green one, but searching for things that have multiple instances of “target creature” on Scryfall is such a pain.

Where to improve: Seeds of Strength is weird, but they’re all +1/+1 so at least that much makes sense, same buffing all around. Martial Glory is a little harder to grok sometimes, but it’s only up to two creatures, so that’s not the worst that can happen. If you have three creatures, then this card has a number of options that is legitimately making me worried about my ability to do simple math and statistics. The variance here in P/T distribution is off the charts. Yeah, it would make sense in-game, but just on principle, I don’t want that much at common. It’s—you know what, I’m gonna do some math. … There are at least 27 different variations if you have three creatures. I don’t think that that’s what people need at common.

@narkis24 — Unbound Devil

Things I like: Pushed P/T with drawback is totally valid. I like the fact that the “unbound” in the name refers to the fact that you can’t control it, literally, without someone holding the leash. That could make for some fun flavor things. If you’re on-curve, then you got some big beats that you can get in early.

Where to improve: I honestly wonder if it’s too much, actually. Yeah, it has to attack every time, but if you can get a one-drop then this then any removal on-curve and/or more Devils, then you’re in one crazy good spot. I think in terms of power level, this is uncommon for sure. In terms of abilities, I did a little searching, and there isn’t any precedent for non-temporary control switching at common. That’s for a good reason, IMO. Again, this is a great card, but definitely uncommon. And a good draft uncommon, too!

@nicolbolas96 — Lost to Memory (JUDGE PICK)

Things I like: This is a really funky pauper card that also happens to have great draft function. The destruction is conditional, but on-curve you’re going to be fine with it. If there are no good targets, you can at least get a card out of their hand and deck. I think that the versatility there is awesome and that this card is definitely up there in terms of playability. And, well, it’s not that powerful. That’s a good thing! It stays at the common line while having great effects and not pushing anywhere it doesn’t need to be. Yeah, maybe the Pauper-rack meta doesn’t want it at sorcery speed, but heck, I think it’s great. Good with Chittering Rats

Where to improve: The flavor text lacks something for me. I know sometimes he asks questions, but unless they’re directed at someone specific, they tend to be either contextual to another statement or answered. I don’t know, it just doesn’t feel as...suave as Bolas usually is. It seems small but it’s a hangup for me. Feel free to up his grandiosity.

@partlycloudy-partlyfuckoff — Idyllic Falchion

Things I like: Heh, back to equipment. You know how I feel about that. Interesting sacrifice trigger. I think that that’s the strongest part of the card in terms of—well, maybe not power, but in terms of the “cool” factor and “push” factor. It’s fine for common, and it’s strong, and you need the color to cast it, so that’s awesome. And bonus points for making me look up the word “falchion” too; it helped to envision the weapon and scenario you had in mind.

Where to improve: The second ability doesn’t work. The equipment would need to be on the battlefield for the equip cost to be activated. Instead, it would read: “{cost}: Return ~ from your graveyard to the battlefield attached to target creature. Activate only as a sorcery.” And that would honestly be kick-ass for like...six mana? Get that in your archives, ‘cause I like the idea a lot. As it stands, doesn’t work rules-wise.

@rasputin-gold — Copse Fiend

Things I like: “Copse” got me, and I like the vocab check there, very nice. I think that your typing and the general mood is really fantastic, and holy crap, look: that flavor text literally gave me a touch of ASMR. It’s not the next great American novel, but it fits so well, and it feels great and creepy, and it tells me so much, and that, that’s awesome.

Where to improve: Let’s take all that mood and make a different card with it, because there’s...a lot going on. A four-mana 4/3 with wither would be totally fine by itself at common. GG activation for a lure? Okay, makes sense, but combined with the wither, that’s something that’s far too powerful at common, assuming a set with the mana alignment to make that happen. The assumption that you have a Forest (capital F!) to give it first strike (tertiary in black and NOT in green) and potential recursion is way too far gone. If this card were presented without rarity I would assume it was rare. So, yeah, this is one of those times where it’s not a bad card but for this contest it’s just too much. Keep it appropriate for rarity.

@reaperfromtheabyss — Dwarf Forge Scrapheap (JUDGE PICK)

Things I like: Well, I already talked about the clues from the winners’ post, so I’ll go out on a limb and say that yes, I like this one too. A combination of the “shifting animated pile of knobs and gears and junk that when animated can come to life and hit you in the face” with “forget this I’m gonna make mana” is pretty funny to me, in that dry card way, and this card in general is pretty cool. In terms of gameplay, yeah, you can have a beater on turn four if you really need the boost, or late in the game as a colorless source, but it’s also mana-fixing, a three-mana buttwall, and just a cool card all around. I think that this is one of those that could have great art flavored on a cool world, and the name could be changed to fit just about anything.

Where to improve: “Add ONE mana of any color.” ONE. I’m unreasonably curmudgeonly about that error, somewhat jokingly, a little rib-nudgingly. Easy oversight, but don’t let it happen again! (Kidding, kidding, I know I need to up my editing skills too.)

@snugz — Sidestep

Things I like: this card. I like this card, dangit. I don’t care that it wouldn’t be very playable in a whole lot of decks or archetypes as a weird combat trick, but I like it. It’s simple and funny and plays into the “I’m gonna right myself while tripping you up” gag and that’s great. The simplicity speaks to some Rookie Mistake vibes that I’m down with.

Where to improve: Again, I don’t think it’s playable. I could see them printing this card and having it be basically draft chaff, but maybe not, maybe it’s something in a combat-trick heavy set with some radical payoff. Maybe it’s a pauper Heroic card that could make the deck tier-1. But it’s so simple that it’s hard to talk about! I’m sorry I can’t give more feedback than that, honestly. The card’s too well-made. So, with that in mind, you need to season this steak. Any flavor text for any context would be awesome.

@starch255 — Scab-Clan Brawler

Things I like: 100%, this feels Gruul. It’s a big fighter that’s on-curve with some brutal flavor despite no flavor-text. The notion of the Gruul tribespeople fighting among themselves comes across here fantastically, and having a 3/3 trampler is definitely something that a RG drafter will want on turn three.

Where to improve: [Foreword: This is a lot of text and I swear it’s mostly not criticism; you made me think.] Brawl needs work. A lot of work. As it stands, either you lose a small creature, you lose this one and put a +1/+1 counter on your bigger creature, or you happen to have a 2/4 that can survive. I am… I’m working this out as I’m writing, and I want to like it, and I want to improve it, but the more I think about it, the more I think that the mechanic isn’t the problem. I think it’s actually surprisingly complex, almost more complex than a Gruul player would want immediately. The choice of payoffs is so hard to think about—and at this point, I’m not so much criticizing as I am ruminating. I really want to play with this mechanic just to see if my knee-jerk “fighting your own creatures is bad, ugh” is lizard brain and if there’s galaxy brain behind it. You’ve put me in a conundrum here. Hold onto this one.

@thedirtside — River Delta

Things I like: Great name, makes sense. I can picture the landscape where you would want this place to appear. Nonbasic lands are pretty interesting to design at common, and breaking away from the Guildgate/Life-gain lands was an ambitious move.

Where to improve: I know fetchlands are weird on the scale, but in terms of probability, the ability to (1) get your colorless mana if need be OR (2) tutor for the land you need while thinning your deck and furthermore (3) getting a 3/3 body once you’ve sacrificed it later in the game… This is borderline rare and might even be pushed for an uncommon. Yes, it’s basic, but in limited that’s a non-issue and in constructed there’s nothing wrong with getting your basic lands just to make this card work for you. The part about it being tapped really isn’t that much of a massive drawback. I like this card a lot. It’s not common power level. Small notes: “shuffle your library” can just be “shuffle” IIRC, and your comma between the 3UG and Exile seems wonky.

@wilsonosgoodmcman — Ruthless Vigilante

Things I like: Gotta love a vampire rogue. This particular card doesn’t seem to have a home, but it doesn’t seem to be sending any mixed-messages either. Ixalan doesn’t really want the roguishness, Dominaria could have it but where’s the vigilantism, Innistrad has different colors, Ravnica has different flavors, etc. etc. So does it belong? Yes! But “were” is yet to be determined. That’s totally okay.

Where to improve: IMO, your abilities are too strong together. Vigilance and deathtouch is a pretty powerful combo once you get yourself in a position where you can attack, because, well, then you still have a murderous blocker. There’s a reason it hasn’t appeared at common yet. The lifelink feels a bit odd, honestly, and the toughness boosting feels out of place. Why is an aggressive vigilante boosting its toughness? Actually, why does a rogue have vigilance? There’s no precedent or flavor connection there. I’m just not feeling what this card is offering me. It might play, like, fine, but it doesn’t feel good and it doesn’t feel like it has a place that couldn’t be replaced by a more cohesive card.

@wolkemesser — Dry Sands Summoning

Things I like: We haven’t had a real good desert world since the Abzan from KTK, and I miss that. Having a sandy feel and aesthetic could be really cool here, and I think that what you were going for what the flavor of turning the desert into, like, part of the warrior tribe. That much I like a lot.

Where to improve: I find myself a little frustrated trying to write commentary, because there’s a lot to go on here and I don’t want to be too harsh. I’m going to address the individual parts, but in general, please, please run these cards by people before submitting.

The hybrid cost is fine but that’s pushing it a little. Eventide was an exception I personally liked, but the color weight doesn’t always play well with others. That part is honestly fine.

Enchanting cards in graveyards should never currently appear at common. Spellweaver Volute is a rules nightmare/abomination.

It would be “Enchant land or land card in a graveyard.” “Warrior” needs to be capitalized. “Enchanted land is a 3/1 Sand Warrior creature with haste. It’s still a land.”

What is the purpose of having a land also be a creature in your graveyard? At common? I can’t envision any scenario in which that would be a reasonable theme. It can’t attack from your graveyard, it would be weird for type-changing in the graveyard with Conspiracy, and it wouldn’t move it to the battlefield either.

The retrace is a decision that’s almost designed to cause confusion. So it could enchant a card in a graveyard, but not be in a graveyard, until it’s in your graveyard, whereupon you can discard a land to cast it from your graveyard, but not target a land discarded this way.

@yourrightfulking — Mutilated Faerie

Things I like: This name and the intention of the flavor text is almost grimdark; I’m not averse to that. I actually really like the fact that it can’t block, because it lets you have deathtouch with a little more aggression. The fact that it’s an assassin almost makes me wonder about the story of this individual character, and you know what, that means that flavorfully you’re doing something really right.

Where to improve: The “human sacrificing” part feels important to your implied set, and I don’t know how to feel about that. You get a 2/1 deathtouch body and potentially take out another faction? I mean, if this was Eldraine, this card would probably be actually sought in drafts with the human as-fan. Might be a little too powerful on that front depending on the environment. But, uh, the flavor and name? I want to like it but it’s more confusing than not. “Pixie plucking” seems like either a poaching crime or a children's game, and the reason WHY pixies are plucked could be better specified. The second sentence is a fragment. Your story implies that a plucked pixie will 100% die, but then, how did this one get mutilated? To kill the culprit, the pixie would have had to escape mutilation, and this mutilated one apparently survived a 100% kill rate? Not sure where you’re going with this. Sort it out and you’ll be fine.

And there we have it. Again, I wanna stress, I’m using my best judgement and opinions here, but people are absolutely free to disagree. I hope that the constructive portion, even if it’s something you disagree with, helps see another perspective. Lots of cards here help me see other perspectives as well, and thank you for that. Tune in for something tomorrow. What will it be? The world may never know. Or maybe it will. Or will it?

— @abelzumi

#mtg #magic the gathering #custom magic card #commentary #entries #three ability common #inventor's fair

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xellandria · 3 years

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Zmija Yilan was a temporary character I played towards the end of our Tomb of Annihilation campaign after my boy Alexus got petrified by a beholder somewhere deep in the bowels of the tomb itself. We were able to “salvage” both him and Amara (who had also gotten petrified in the same fight) by shoving them into the Bag of Holding, but short of having the two of us sit on the bench while the remaining two party members waddled back to town, we had to roll some new characters.

I spent most of the week between the petrification and the new characters appearing being mad at myself for not remembering I had Inspiration I could have used to reroll either of my failed dex saves and not being able to do much beyond that, but with less than 72 hours left until she had to debut, I finally pulled an idea out of my butt, ran it by the DM because it involved Shenanigans™, got the OK and started designing her. Thus was born Zmija Yilan, whose appearance was based partly on an old photo that was semi-viral on Tumblr several years prior and partly on Xelloss from Slayers because when I’m in a pinch, that’s always who I fall back on, and have been doing so for like, 20+ years at this point lmao. Personality-wise, there was a post floating around Tumblr that week about proverbs in various languages that, when translated literally or without context, made very little sense so she got a lot of that (and associated misunderstandings based on language mix-ups) mixed in with—again—Xelloss from Slayers, because I am a hack. I would probably never play her again because she was so firmly entrenched in that campaign and also there’s some parts of how I designed/played her that I look back on and am like “ehhh I’m not sure I’m comfortable with the optics of this,” but I enjoyed playing her a lot more than I expected, and I look back on the end of our Tomb campaign very fondly because of it.

I haven’t been able to talk about her in public both for a lack of reason to do so and because I didn’t want to “spoil” my group in case they found my various social media posts, but as it’s nearly a year since she was introduced and nine months since the campaign ended, I’m gonna absolutely wall of text the shit outta this bitch, rofl (that said there’s baby’s first nekkid pin-up under here so assuming Tumblr lets me actually post it, fair warning for that under the cut)

Zmija Yilan - level 8-10 Human* Warlock (Great Old Ones/Pact of the Tome) (usually this is where my D&D character posts put stats but I don’t actually have access to her character sheet anymore, so let’s just pretend she had something ridiculous like maxed Charisma because I remember my spell DC being ridiculously high)

Zmija Yilan is a traveler from the far-off land of Zemlya, and a disciple of Matrymriy, one of the "family" of five gods in the pantheon of that region. Matrymriy came to Zmija in a dream one night and told her to travel across the seas because She had a task for her, and that she would learn more once she reached her destination. She's been traveling around Faerun for seven or so years—reaching one place, being given hints to go to a specific location, and upon reaching it, being told to travel on without seeming to do much more than just Be There. Upon reaching Chult sometime within the last few months, her patron's hints indicated that she should travel to a place called Shilku Bay; she hired a guide (named Salida) and a bodyguard (a Fort Belurian mook) with what little locally-acceptable currency she had; they got separated after being attacked by a band of undead, and after failing to reunite with them, she was wandering around lost, trusting that Matrymriy will guide her where She desires her to go.

Part of her wandering had her end up in the Tomb of the Nine Gods itself, where she encountered our adventuring party (down two player characters) desperately trying to find their way out of the tomb in the hopes of returning to Port Nyanzaru to depetrify their friends. Our barbarian’s player immediately distrusted her because I’d drawn her tabletop token with her back to the camera, which was an awkward feeling almost immediately returned in-game because both the barbarian and paladin aren’t hardcore RPers but they had to carry all the RP weight as they were introduced to this new character and explain that they were there to destroy a lich (both because it was the source of all the bad undead in the area, and because they’d been promised a reward—a motivation Zmija understood, as “a hungry bear will not dance.”) Beyond the usual RP awkwardness there was an additional layer of awkwardness between the characters IC as at the time, Thokk was barely wearing more than a breastplate and loincloth, while Zmija was covered neck-to-ankle despite the heat and humidity of the region. She claimed that in the culture of Zemlya, having strangers see your skin was a mark of great shame and that modesty was of paramount importance, so seeing so much of him was very off-putting and threw her off-balance for much of their initial interactions.

Getting off on the “wrong” foot with the party and pushing as hard as I could into Zmija’s quirks (the weird proverbs, sprinkling in her Zemlyan vocabulary and making a point of her being from Very Far Away with Very Different Customs) meant I went a little too hard on them at the beginning, which is partly what I’d do differently and partly why the whole thing ended up working, so it’s a weird retrospective balance. If my partymates had ever shoved (almost) any of the names or places Zmija mentioned into google, they probably would have twigged to the scheme pretty dang fast.

In reality, Zmija is not a human traveler from Zemlya, because surprise! she's actually Zsaksatyi, a Chultian Yuan-Ti Pureblood under the command of Fenthaza. She worked as a bit of a double agent/interrogator within the Fane prior to her current assignment (hence her spell list's focus on information gathering, silent communication, and manipulation); she's been fleshing out her alternate persona for years and would occasionally pretend to be a captive and be thrown in one of those cells the party was in to get relevant information from the other prisoners, or assist others that were interrogating prisoners by more direct means (via Detect Thoughts). In-universe, the language she pretends to speak is mostly made up, and something she's been working on for years at this point—it's not a fully-fleshed conlang and she only has a couple hundred words and phrases but it's enough to be consistent and believable when she sprinkles it into regular speech. Since there's no real risk of running into anyone else from Zemlya (because it doesn't actually exist), it mostly didn't matter, and since there's actual meaning behind the words she does have, in theory it would have held up to a spell like Comprehend Languages as well. Out of universe, the language she speaks is an amalgamation of my own conlang stuff (which, like the in-universe version, is very limited and not complete) and various words and phrases pulled mostly from real-world Slavic languages (russian, croatian, hungarian, etc) with a little bit of Turkish thrown in when my English-only ear felt that it fit or when I had already used a word and needed another word for the same thing. Zsaksatyi (pronounced dzahk sot-YEE) is the only name/word in the whole mess that doesn’t actually mean something somewhere, and was a combination of syllables from an online Yuan-Ti name generator that I kinda liked together. If she had ever been outed, I would probably have come up with something a little less cumbersome for me and my (almost certainly wholly monolingual) D&D group to say... but she didn’t, so Zsaksatyi it stays!

She very much looks up to Fenthaza and almost idolizes and worships her—if she ever had to choose between Fenthaza or Dendar, things might have gotten a little bit rough for her (possibly no matter which way she ultimately jumped, though I imagine Dendar's vengeance would be more immediate, if Dendar's a hands-on sort of patron). Thankfully (for her), there was very little risk of that given that the party had left Fenthaza on reasonably neutral terms (having already helped her oust Ras Nsi from his position of power in the Fane and the party having essentially marked that dungeon as “cleared”). Fenthaza had sent her to scout the Tomb of the Nine Gods and locate (or steal) an artifact known as the Black Opal Crown, which will allow the Night Mother to emerge into the world. The group actually came across the crown pretty soon after Zmija (and our other new character, a firbolg druid named Mei Ren who replaced our cleric, Amara) joined them, but the party couldn’t figure out how to get it out of the room it was in and Zsaksatyi was content that it would be safe from both our group and other adventurers there while she found her way back to the Fane (though she Sent the location to Fenthaza in case she wasn’t able to make it back). That was actually like, halfway through the session right after she’d been introduced so having her sneak off that fast would have been absolutely wild, so I kept playing her as Zmija and while there were myriad opportunities for her to be discovered—including a hallway where any non-magical non-living thing got evaporated, up to and including clothing—she never was. The fact that the only spells she ever used spell slots on were Hex, Counterspell, and Identify never really got commented upon, because prior to her joining the party we didn’t have a source for any sort of utility magic and we’d been feeling the lack for a while. She was a lot of fun to play just as Zmija once I got the hang of her, but the hidden agenda that only our DM & I knew about was an extra layer of fun, too. It would have been neat to see how the party reacted to a reveal, but unless Jim wants to take us back to Chult to actually deal with the Night Mother’s return (because without having to keep up appearances and alignments, I’m pretty sure I could have gotten that crown out of there even before the weird teleport-defying magic of the Tomb got turned off), her story is over for us—taking her outside of the setting she was designed for would be weird... plus we already have two warlocks (well, one and a half) in a party of four PCs; adding a third would be a little bit bizarre, I think.

Her more Yuan-ti features include scales down her spine and across her shoulderblades, on the backs of her hands, and on her hips and thighs—mostly in reds, oranges, and browns, but as she increases in power and connection with the Night Mother, more of them are darkening to Her blue-black; it started right at that spot between the shoulderblades where you always picture being stabbed in the back, and has expanded from there; I imagine by level 20 all of her scales would be that blue-black and may have encroached further on the more human-y leather bits, probably encroaching on her face at the last, which would make being a spy a lot more difficult (even moreso than wearing as much clothing as she already does) but I guess at level 20, do you really need to be sneaking around pretending to be human?

In direct sunlight or other very bright light, her pupils constrict to slits, which is the real reason for her heavy eye makeup—between the distraction of it and the (somewhat exaggerated) squinting that such light induces, it often goes unnoticed, as it did with her character portrait (although to be fair to my party, Alexus also has slit eyes because that’s one of the traits of elves and half elves in D&D, and also I’m not sure if they ever saw her portrait any larger than 150x150 or whatever Roll20 shows them at). Both her top and bottom canine teeth are sharper, longer, and narrower than is typical for humans, and she is careful not to grin too widely and will cover her mouth when she laughs or yawns, whether she is in disguise or not. That part I’ve never drawn though, so I can’t really point to that as something the party overlooked, heh. In hindsight, I wish I'd given her more/heavier snake features but even the official art for Yuan-Ti player characters are very light on them and getting around the differences between human and yuan-ti racials without tipping off the party was hard enough as it was—I took the 120 feet of magic-ignoring darkvision invocation to disguise the fact that she innately had darkvision, I never used my racial spells and abilities unless I was willing to “use” a spell slot on them and had another plausible way to have obtained them, the one time I got hit with a poison ability (which she was immune to) I spent a lot of time “figuring out the math” on how much HP I had to drop, etc. I also wish I’d given her darker skin, as she is supposed to be Chultian but she is significantly lighter than all the NPCs we came across. Then again, I’m as white as a sheet soaked in bleach so there’s something weird about me RPing folks of colour regardless (especially given her fake backstory, agh agh agh) so yeah. Really enjoyed her, don’t regret her, will not ever play her again rofl

In our very last session of Tomb of Annhiliation, the party—fresh off the victory over the big bad lich whose name I can never spell and his weird world-eating fetus—headed back to Port Nyanzaru via the Aarakocra village of Kir Sabal, which the previous variant of the party (of whom only Thokk remained alive and mobile enough to talk to them) had helped out significantly earlier in the campaign, unlocking a flying ritual that we were like “man we’re not coming back here if we’re gonna use it we gotta do it now” to get us the rest of the way to the port. En route, Zmija tried to leave the group and rolled a secret 15 Stealth roll... contested by 17 and 18 perception rolls from Mei Ren and Thokk, but as she wasn’t carrying much of the party’s stuff and it was the end of the campaign, they kinda just let her give some line about seeing them again in the future maybe, the Mother’s will is unknowable, etc etc. I think if Duf and Kattii didn’t know that I wanted Alexus back as badly as I did and that we were like twenty minutes (real time) away from actually getting him back, they might have considered that more suspicious than they did.

Pronunciations (and translations): (mostly C&Ped from her bio, which is the only part of her character sheet I can still access on Roll20)

Zmija Yilan: zMEE-ah yee-LAHN. Because I'm subtle as hell, that's Croatian/Russian/Ukranian (first name) and Turkish (last name) for "snake/serpent," according to the internet. What do you mean Remus Lupin is a werewolf?!

Matrymriy: mah-tRRuh mRREE (Rs are rolled). Matrymriy is Zmija's claimed patron—one of five major Zemlyashan dieties—but she'll state that she doesn't know the name that she goes by in the local dialect. That's only partly true, of course—мати мрій is Ukranian for "Mother of Dreams" (at least according to google translate), which is close enough to her patron's actual names and titles (Dendar, the Night Mother) that she can get away with it without actually raising suspicions about the true source of her powers. She'll also do that thing where if someone tries to say the name back to her she'll "correct" them by saying it exactly the same four or five times and then "give up" and accept whatever "butchered" version the speaker comes up with, except she'll do it even if they're actually saying it perfectly correctly. She may do this with her own name as well (sorry, Jim. And Duf. And Dustin. And Kattii. And Kattii's coworker, if he ever joins us and I'm still playing this character by then, lmao.) (2021 addition: and literally everyone who has a name that isn’t typically pronounced by us English-only plebians, I am so sorry I’m not better at your language)

Zsaksatyi: dzahk sot-YEE. Zmija's real name, when she isn't pretending to be a human. That doesn't mean anything as far as I know, it was just a combination of some of the syllables the random Yuan-Ti name generator was coming up with that I liked (which is also where "Itszella" was from), lol. I may end up changing it to be less cumbersome at some point, unless it comes up before then and ends up written in stone, but I'm on a bit of a time crunch for the moment.

Zemlya: zem-lyah. If pressed for more detail on where in Zemlya she's from (e.g. by someone pretending to know details about her country), her home town is Fal'shyva (fall-sheh-VAH), southeast of the capital of Hayali (HI-yah-LEE) and just north of the port city of Farazi (fah-ra-DZI), which is where she originally sailed from seven years ago. фальшива земля is Ukranian for "fake land," Hayali is Turkish for "imaginary," and Farazi is Turkish for "hypothetical," lol.

Proverbs & (approximate) Pronounciations: (if I recall correctly, asterisks indicate ones I had used, so I didn’t repeat myself too frequently)

Wziąć si�� w garść (zvun shih garsch): lit. take the self into the fist (polish), pull yourself together Галопом по Zemlya (gal-OH-pohm poe zem-lyah): lit. galloping across Zemlya (russian), to be hasty/haphazard. * У кого немає собаки, полює з котом (Ooh koe-hoe meh-MIGH-eh soe-BAH-kay, poe-LOO-yay koh-tome): lit. who does not have dog, hunts with cat (ukranian, original proverb is portugese), make do with what you have. Z choinki się urwałaś? (dzi hoink-E she urr-vahl-wash): lit. did you fall from a Candlenights(aka Christmas) tree? (polish), you are obviously not well-informed; are you dumb? * Mi o vuku (MEE oh voo-koo): lit. to talk of the wolf (croatian), speak of the devil. * Thalai muzhuguthal (tha-LIE MOOz-GOO-thal): lit. pour water over someone's head (tamil), cut off a relationship. * Хоть кол на голове теши (coat-coal nah gohl-ehvee teh-SHEE): lit. you can sharpen an axe on this head (russian), a very stubborn person.

Other Languages Are Hard Today, Let’s Just Proverb It In English:

Cat's Forehead (japanese): a tiny space, usually used humbly to refer to owned land. It fell between chairs (swedish): group work that everyone assumed someone else would do, and didn't get done as a result * It gives me a beautiful leg (french): fat lot of good that'll do me Drown the fish (french): avoid a subject by talking about anything and everything else, confuse the issue In a river with piranhas, the alligator swims backstroke (brazil): protect your weaknesses * Accusation always follows the cat (iraqi): it's easy to blame someone who can't defend themselves The honey only sticks to the mustache of he who licked it (arabic): he who smelt it, dealt it * A hungry bear does not dance (greek): the reward must be worth the cost (or at least exist) * The crayfish sides with the crab (korean): people who have a lot in common stay friends * If you can't live longer, live deeper (italian): get the most of your time * A spoon does not know the taste of soup (welsh): intelligence is not wisdom Examine what is said, not who speaks (arab): don't take things at face value * Turn your face to the sun and the shadows will fall behind you (new zealand): have a positive outlook He who does not travel, does not know the value of men (moorish): wide experience is gr8 Do good and throw it in the sea (arab): don't expect anything back from kindness * Shared joy is a double joy; shared sorrow is halved (swedish): friends make things better If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together (african): strength in numbers, speed on your own.

#xellart #dungeons and dragons #original characters #zmija yilan

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morshtalon · 5 years

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Digital Devil Monogatari: Megami Tensei

Possibly part 1 of a series of posts on the whole series, maybe?

So, the first game in the popular MegaTen franchise is, wouldn't you know it, kind of weird. It was actually a video game sequel to a series of two novels starring a sort of villainous protagonist and the (government-mandated to exist ubiquitously through japanese media) high school exchange student as they become indirectly related to the summoning of ancient bad dudes Loki and Set through the magic of 80's computer programming, go into historic japanese landmarks to resurrect shinto goddesses, witness horrific, gruesome, sometimes sexual actions from the demons, go to space, fight using gods that turn into swords, and generally have a good time.

Naturally, considering the, um... Notorious source material, it's only logical that the videogame adaptation would, then, turn the sort of dark, villainous, intelligent programmer guy into a blank slate warrior with no personality, the girl into a standard RPG magic user, and drop them into a big dungeon crawl with almost no plot, nonsensical NPCs and a connection with the novels so tenuous they might as well have just taken some inspiration from it and opted to create a more original IP instead (I dunno, maybe put a "shin" in front of the title or something). Thus is born the antiquated experience that is Digital Devil Story: Megami Tensei.

While Japanese gamers did at the time have the original version of Dragon Quest - with the sprites that always faced down and the lack of a save system - ushering in a new style of role-playing gameplay into the mainstream, I suppose the mindset of RPG development was still rooted in the design philosophies of the western games from throughout the decade that were distilled into DQ. Games that, like Megami Tensei, typically featured a simplistic first-person view and a party of six characters, following the rough guidelines of the most recent version of D&D, and had generally no plot development, consisting instead of a hardcore, punishing trek through a few 20x20 grid mazes full of traps and gimmicks.

Furthermore, this type of experience, from what I heard, was huge in Japan, so it's no wonder Atlus chose to capitalize on that market instead of streamlining it and risk losing fans of the genre that were looking for an experience similar to what they had witnessed from RPGs so far. Less cynically, it's also entirely possible the developers themselves were huge fans of the first person dungeon crawler and wanted to replicate their positive experiences in a passionate love letter to the genre. Also, for what it's worth, they did add uniqueness in party management and customization, as you surely already know, but we'll get to that later.

I guess we'll never know the true context behind the original MegaTen's creation, but the point is, this is a very old-school game. I don't think it's nearly as brutal as the ones that inspired it, but it is also definitely far from holding your hand. At no point in the game is it entirely obvious exactly where items you're supposed to collect are located, so you mostly have no choice but to comb the entire dungeon yourself until you stumble upon the stuff you need to progress. Furthermore, sometimes the very NPCs that tell you there's even something to look for at all are slightly out of your way, so there's always the mental pressure of maybe having left something behind and having to backtrack and go to all sorts of places trying to find it when you run into the next dead-end.

By itself, this isn't really a bad thing. As an exploration-based dungeon crawl, it's expected that the player will have some agency over what they're doing, and it's refreshing to see a game where you have so much ground to cover, but with hardly any setpiece to spice up the crawling in terms of context, the job of entertaining the player falls squarely upon the gameplay's shoulders.

To that end, the gameplay is definitely more boring than stimulating. This is where I have to admit, I beat the Kyuuyaku Megami Tensei remake version of it. I have played the original, though, and I am aware of the differences between versions. I have also played future games in the franchise with the same issues, so there's no evidence that the original is much different in this regard. Anyway, apart from an intense earlygame where you're at risk of death from a stray Zan spell cast by a gnome if you're unlucky, the rest of the game's fights are uneventful, once you level up enough and have an array of serviceable demons at your side. There's only ever one group of enemy demons per fight. There can be up to eight of them, but all eight are the same type of demon, and the graphics will only show the one until the entire group is dead. It's kind of like every fight is against only one demon but the demon can attack several times and has an erratic, huge HP pool. Furthermore, targeting is completely random for all moves, and you'd think this would add a fake layer of frustration, but the game gives you an auto-battle option. It simply makes the entire party use their regular attack for as many rounds as you want and prevents text from popping up on screen to slow down the monster-slaying, but for the most part, this is more than enough to get you through whatever part of the dungeon you find yourself in, with only the occasional, very rare exceptions of either:

-A demon that has a dangerous ability, therefore making it so that you want to kill them as quickly as possible;

-A boss;

-A battle that you got yourself into without noticing your HP is getting low, so you have to get yourself back to good conditions before proceeding.

It's definitely more of a preparations game than a reactions game. Preparation is fine, but there's never any need for you to deploy clever strategies. The game is ALL about having a good arsenal of choices up your sleeve and, when you do, you're good to go, and then you need to be either very callous or purposefully challenging yourself while playing in order to get into a situation that requires mental resourcefulness and wit. I will admit, I checked some of the mechanical differences between the original and remake versions, and it seems like they reduced the HP of enemies and bosses quite a bit, and generally went to great lengths to streamline the gameplay and make it more in tune with the next few games in the series (as far I could tell from the party itself, Kyuuyaku seems to have taken the inner workings from Megami Tensei II and applied it retroactively to the first game as well to make it more consistent, but I'm not 100% sure). Maybe this means that the original is more nerve-wracking and you need to level up much more, but I doubt it really becomes more strategy-based and oriented towards exploiting the mechanics, like the style future franchise titles would strive to achieve. As far as I can tell, the abilities remain the same, only the stats change, so it's likely more of a formula redesign than any major gameplay departure. If it is though, I apologize, and rectify my statements regarding battle mechanics boredom as far as the original version is concerned.

But hey, regardless of version, the whole demon system is pretty cool. I don't remember the characters doing it much in the books, I believe Nakajima only had Cerberus and that was it, so there's a nice, original expansion of the novels'... mechanics (?) on display here. I don't think the demon conversation, recruitment and fusion systems need any introduction, but I will say that up until Shin Megami Tensei II, the seventh overall game in the franchise, for some odd reason all demons were limited to three abilities/spells (later three spells and a few abilities), so they were not very versatile. Furthermore, magic and abilities generally sucked for the most part in early MegaTen, and in this game, outside of Hanmahan, group healing and the occasional kaja spell, all you really want is a good punching bag to take the heat off of Nakajima and Yumiko.

Also, maybe it's just in the remake, but there are quite a few demons that are exclusive to the player through demon fusion. This begins happening from pretty much the start of the game, making them sort of unique all the way through and making it sort of cool for the player to go around with these demons that you can't see anywhere else and who are usually more powerful than the enemy demons in the area. Still, however, the limited abilities and limited usefulness of said abilities make things a bit boring and makes the demons sort of interchangeable for the most part, especially considering you can't even see them in battle. But hey, in 1987 I'm sure the vast array of options alone would have been pretty impressive and, considering the plethora of real-life inspiration that was put into the demons' designs, it's kind of still impressive today, really.

Enemies do have a few tricks of their own up their sleeve, too, though, and they usually fall into the "early RPG unfairness" spectrum quite nicely, such as being able to cast death spells when the game's programming is such that you get a game over if the 2 (out of 6) human party members die, even if all your demons are still alive (naturally the final boss can use a pretty accurate version of this move), or the loathsome "smiles and laughs" attack that permanently drains an experience level from a human party member if it hits, making you have to work your way back up again without even the mercy of having the enemy that sucked your level give a massive hoard of EXP when defeated. Or the mercy of adjusting the experience table (if you're level 41 and get a level sucked from you, now you're level 40 but you still need enough experience for level 42 to get back to level 41). It's basically a reset button.

The original version also had some major frustration in the fact that there was, like DQ and so many others of its time, no save feature. You had to visit a guy near the start of the game to get a password or use a late game spell from the girl. There was also no auto-mapping feature (though the mapper/mappara spell did exist, in the old MegaTen-style 3x5 grid), so you just had to create maps yourself, I guess, which is kind of like wizardry and bard's tale and such, and kind of interesting. Though, for a game that isn't all that stimulating otherwise, it's good that in the remake you don't also have to go get a sheet of graph paper to keep track of where you've been. I'm torn on whether the original's extra doses of hardcore game design are better or worse than the remake's streamlining, but it seems to me like the hardcoreness, probably caused by memory limitations and such, served more like an arbitrary layer of confusion placed over a game that didn't really have a juicy core, while the remake's alleviation of it brought about the black spots a bit more into the limelight... It's hard to make up my mind.

The more standard things to talk about in a review are usually average-to-enjoyable here. The environment graphics are pretty good for their time in the original version, and the remake has some good stuff in the late-game, but has a tendency to make the ground a fake-looking gradient that feels artificial and standoffish. Demon designs are always a treat in MegaTen and I wouldn't say this game is an exception, but I think the original designs look kind of goofy for the most part, while the remake uses the scaled-down style of SMT II and SMT If... instead of the better-looking, more detailed style of SMT I, so that's somewhat disappointing. The music is alright, nothing special, but it starts with really cheery, upbeat tunes that go against the ambiance, especially in the remake where they added a dark-ish prologue with more fitting, atmospheric music. The sheer length of each individual section of the dungeon means the tracks will start to get repetitive at some point, and they have a repetitive nature on their own, but they're not bad. I like the bass in Valhalla Corridor. I also like the last two areas' music. Bien's track sucks, though.

Either way, it surely isn't a great game. Nor does it have to be one, honestly. It's a 1987, sort of experimental game that toyed around with the concept of a dungeon crawler in a very japanese setting coming from a very risqué source. It has its merits in creativity, sorely marred by technical limitations and overly emphasizing on its subpar dungeon crawling gameplay, extending it to the point where it overstays its welcome quite a bit. The devs were wise in keeping the plot connections to its immediate sequel small (and it is fascinating, how different it is from all others in the franchise) because Megami Tensei 1 doesn't stand the test of time.

But again, such a thing shouldn't be expected from a late eighties, obscure weird little game, and for what it's worth, like I said about Dragon Quest, it served as a base, though in my opinion a rockier one, with which to found gameplay mechanics that would be expanded upon and embellished in future titles. I'd give it a 4 out of 10, perhaps an honorary extra half-point if the original version's gameplay is a tad more stimulating, but really it's hard to even give games like this a score. They're a product of the times, and they appeal to sensibilities of the times. Gamer mentalities, even within the genre, have moved past it, but it stays here as a testament to the growth of the series. Going into it, you're likely very aware of its shortcomings already, and whether you'd like it or not is, I think, even more independent of whatever mess of words I'd be able to string together like this than usual.

#megaten #megami tensei #review #criticism

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the-hospitality-fairy · 3 years

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5 tips to outsmart competition in the post-COVID hotel market

As travel slowly begins to recover, a renewed hospitality market is emerging. Travelers’ behavior has been drastically affected by the pandemic. Properly handling this radical shift in the market is no small task and will require hotels to demonstrate both long-term foresight and impeccable execution to thrive.

We can expect the post-COVID hospitality industry to grow increasingly competitive. The long lock downs, during which hotels saw very little to no commercial activity, gave hospitality professionals the time to pause and reflect on their future strategy. As soon as borders start to reopen, most hotels’ marketing efforts will be in full swing. Missing that recovery train will likely spell doom for unprepared establishments.

The purpose of this article is to leave no hotel behind in the post-pandemic rebuilding process. By considering and applying the subsequent five pieces of advice, hotels ought to be able to enter the recovery market with confidence and start working towards sustainable success.

Traveler behavior has significantly evolved during the pandemic

1. Understand guests’ behavior

In a post-COVID-19 world, travelers needs have significantly changed. Studies show that guests are now much more sensitive to a new kind of travel, with emphasis placed on sustainability and contribution to the local economy. On the other hand, many business travelers, who were the bread & butter of some hotels, are likely to travel much less if at all.

All these changes in travelers’ behavior will have a massive and lasting impact on hotels. In order to meet these new expectations, hotels need to achieve a deep understanding of their guests: from who they are to what they want.

Remember; All your grand plans and long-term vision means nothing if they are not rooted in reality; and reality is your guests. By simply asking them what they want (and what price they are willing to pay), you can go a long way towards building an efficient recovery strategy.

2. Make digitization a priority

If there is one sector that truly benefited from the pandemic, it is the online-shopping industry. While stuck at home, people have got used to buying goods and services on the internet; and hotel rooms are no exception. Within a post-COVID travel market, hotels cannot afford to rely solely on external platforms to ensure their digital presence.

In case you had previously been slacking in the digitization department, there is still time to review your online strategy before travel picks up again. Below is a list of priorities to work on:

Diversify your online offer through multiple channels (website, OTAs, Airbnb, …)

Optimize your website design (Booking experience, photo/video quality eta)

Invest in good social media and content production management

Work on your SEO and set up your hotel on the Google Suite, including My Business, Travel and Analytics

By working on improving your hotel’s digital presence, you significantly reduce the amount of commissions paid to intermediaries while accessing a much larger potential customer base.

Your digital strategy should resemble a Swiss army knife, able to adapt to all kind of different guests.

3. Get the right tools for your ambitions

Just as a craftsman needs enough tools to showcase his talents, a hotelier must be well-equipped to succeed in a highly competitive market. This applies to your hotel’s hardware (up-to-date amenities,technology) as well as digitally

There are many useful solutions in the industry that can help differentiate your offer from similar establishments. From personalized pricing solutions to up-selling tools and direct booking widgets, you can easily find multiple ways to incentivize potential guests to book in your hotel. Any solution that either speeds up/ accelerates your guests’ decision-making process, improve their online experience, or optimize your overall online revenue should be a welcome addition to your tech stack.

During the recovery period, you should also be on the lookout for innovative technology born out of the pandemic. For instance, solutions that allow you to capitalize on new habits, such as day-use bookings, are a great way to make your hotel stand out from the crowd.

Now is the perfect time for hotels to get into digital marketing.

4. Don’t sleep on Online Marketing

For too long, digital marketing has been the prerogative of the OTA monopoly lead by Booking.com and Expedia It used to be that almost every single hotel query on search engines displayed a link redirecting to one of the major booking platforms. This status-quo left very little room for hotels to compete on the digital marketing space.

However, the COVID-19 outbreak triggered a global paradigm shift. While travel came to a halt around the world, OTAs decided to shut down all of their digital marketing campaigns. Booking Holdings, Booking.com’s parent company, slashed its marketing expenses by a staggering 56%. Major players such as Expedia have stated that they would progressively move away from spending billions on digital advertisers towards a more loyalty-based customer acquisition strategy.

In addition Google is now empowering hotels to get more traffic through a few changes to their platform and search algorithm. Below is a list of some of the actions you might consider taking to improve your online traffic:

Advertise on both Google Ads and Google Travel

Promote your offers on social media, Instagram and Facebook

Set up tags to track your campaigns’ performance and adjust them accordingly.

Encourage your users to subscribe to your newsletter, send them regular emails to build customer loyalty and generate direct bookings.

Collect new digital leads through innovative solutions

5. Accept being proven wrong

The hospitality market is in one its most volatile phases ever. With the constant new lock downs, quarantine regulations and border opening policies, it is extremely difficult to know exactly when people will go back to their old ways of traveling.

In this context, hotels will need to make bold decisions based on where they feel the market is headed or how they predict guest behavior will evolve. While navigating this unpredictable market, hoteliers are bound to make mistakes along the way, whether it is a premature reopening or an inaccurate prediction of new trends. These mistakes are part of any successful recovery strategy and are critical to achieve a deeper understanding of the renewed industry.

Although hoteliers cannot guarantee perfect navigation of such a volatile environment, they have the power to learn from their mistakes. Hotel businesses must learn to become much more malleable than they used to be. This means adopting agile management methods, close to that of a start-up, where changes can happen as soon as required by the market. In the end, the only true mistake hotels cannot afford to make is clinging to their predictions no matter what.

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prahlrus · 6 years

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dnd feelings

i’m going to talk about my dnd feelings at some length until perhaps it will become clear why i’m working on the dnd homebrew project that i am.

this post has become extremely long, so i’m hiding most of it below.

on 4/20 (no relation) of 2016, i tweeted, apropo of encountering The Fantasy Trip for the first time:

i think The Fantasy Trip is more or less the game i imagined DnD was before i ever actually encountered its rules

before i explain that, let me give a little bit of context.

context: TFT was the ultimate precursor to GURPS, the tabletop rpg that loomed large over my high school years and still occupies a place in my heart. if you want to read more about it, here’s a dedicated fansite and here’s a review by a longtime player.

personal context: my first edition of dnd was 3E, and when i opened the book i remember seeing that first chapter on abilities and thinking to myself “oh, that makes sense, the game probably has some set of mechanical abilities that represent the different things different characters can do and the game is about combining those in different ways to make the character you want.” then i read about how, in dnd, ‘ability’ meant ‘ability scores,’ of which there were only six and everyone had them.

in contrast, when i, fifteen years later, opened TFT, i was confronted by exactly that: a set of completely modular mechanics that characters can have, and a very minimal set of rules for combining them. it was a moment of great healing.

dnd 3E did actually what i expected it to have, in the end, but the modular mechanical abilities were spread throughout different parts of the system, their largest concentration as feats and spells, but also attached to different races and classes. however, the non-modular class-level-based mechanics were the beating heart of most dnd characters (on a continuum, of course, from the least module-friendly barbarian up through the specialist classes into the terrifying bonus feat engine that was the 3E fighter and summiting in the endlessly variable wizard) and i felt, although i don’t think i was able to put words to this feeling until i got into GURPS years later, that dnd was too rigid and inflexible in the kinds of characters it allows you to make.

now, there are a couple of good reasons why a game would be very rigid about how it allows you to combine its mechanics:

some of those mechanics might combine in balance-upsetting ways. in particular, dnd (and its imitators) are cautious to keep the best combat defenses and durability separate from the best offensive abilities. see, for example: restricting spellcasters from wearing armor and penalizing barbarians and monks who do so.

allowing players to choose any arbitrary collection of abilities leads to a kind of combinatorial explosion in character builds and can be paralyzing to non-obsessive players. this creates a huge burden of knowledge, which only grows as more content is added to the game.

the second of these seems like it became a failure point for 3.5E after a while. even though the design of the game was supposed to front-load the largest choices about your character, the gradual multiplication of race, class, prestige class, feat and spell options (to say nothing of magic items!) increased the burden of knowledge to an unmanageable level.

of course, it was still a playable game and people were welcome to filter out the parts they didn’t like or the books they didn’t know that well, but what become core pieces of the game wound up spread over altogether too many books (for example, the tiefling race in Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting and the warlock in Complete Arcane). in 4E, i think the intention was to limit this by basically making all character builds basically palette swaps of the fighter/rogue/wizard/cleric quartet. as far as i’m concerned, that fell flat because the preposterous, somewhat broken variety of 3.5E was actually core to the appeal.

now, a person might read the above and think that i would hate 5E because it does exactly the things that i was upset at 3E for doing: 5E takes its pool of modular mechanics and packages them up in classes and subclasses. sure, there are character backgrounds (honestly, an extremely good addition, although i don’t think i’m thrilled with the execution) and a small pool of feats, but the mechanical bulk of character creation is bundled up in your choice of race, class and subclass. certain classes (especially dedicating spellcasters) and subclasses (battle master, the elemental monk tradition) let you dial up the complexity ceiling, but the floor remains low.

it might be that i’ve mellowed in my old age or that i’ve seen how some of my non-dnd-playing friends were able to easily get into 5E, but i really sympathize with the design decisions. the designers have two objectives in a character creation system: giving characters cool powers and not overwhelming players with options. the class/subclass structure is a good way to limit the explosion of choices and make a more accessible game.

it also makes a game that’s strictly linear in its expansion.

ever new subclass added to the game adds exactly that: one subclass. a new spell might add a little more complexity, if it’s available to multiple caster classes, but in general each new thing adds only itself to the game, not itself plus a thousand possibilities of combination.

aside: i definitely don’t love the kitchen sink of 3.5E with all its expansions. not enough designers set about to design replacements for core material, and too many design supplements to it. although i never owned it, i really like the “variant players’ handbook” idea of Arcana Unearthed/Evolved. imo, every book that introduced new races or core classes should have offered the suggestion of what races or classes to remove from the game if you were including the new ones.

anyway, here’s the line of design thinking it led me down:

what if the subclasses were another layer, like backgrounds are, that gets chosen independently of class?

there’d need to be some way to make sure that classes with different core mechanics (like fighters and wizards) get different mechanics from the “same” subclass.

each mechanic should still be as modular as possible. The restrictions on who can have it should be at the level of the module, not the level of the ‘subclass.’

the ‘subclasses’ will be themed lists of features (which can have prerequisites) and spells, that characters can choose from as they gain levels.

in my original sketch, the related ‘wild’ classes (barbarian, druid, ranger) could be created by applying a ‘wild’ theme to the prototypical classes of fighter, magic-user and specialist, respectively. for this not to feel as flat as dnd 4e, the themes would need to have significant differences in the kinds of mechanics they offered. for this not to feel as overwhelming as 3E, each theme would have to be well-focused.

the state of the project now is that i’m replacing both alignment (because i never liked the dnd alignments too much in the first place) and subclasses as these ‘themes,’ which i’m calling ‘alignments.’ one alignment, for example, is based on order and protection. its spell list largely overlaps with the cleric spell list, and its features are mostly defensive and healing mechanics. a magic-user in this theme might be able to become fairly tank-y, but they wouldn’t have the damage output of magic-users in the other themes, that don’t have the same sorts of straight survivability features.

anyway that’s the extremely involved homebrew dnd project i’m working on right now:

design the three template classes that will be themed by choosing an alignment.

draw up a list of mechanics i want to be modular

assign them and the list of spells to my custom set of alignments

i have designed the template classes and listed 220 different features (feats). there are five different alignments, each of which has access to 58 feats. 20 are more generic and open to characters of any alignment.

i still have to write full rules text for the feats and probably design 10-20 new spells to fill out a couple of the lists. but i’d say that i am actually very close to having a playable total rebuild of dnd 5e?

go me, i guess.

#dnd #dnd 3e #dnd 5e #the fantasy trip #game design

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mrs3rdwardtrill-blog · 6 years

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palliddata · 7 years

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Design Theory: Gachapon

Good evening everyone. Allow me to introduce myself: My name is Tiger Louck, and I’ll be covering videogame industry and design related topics during my time here. I should have some pretty interesting stuff lined up here, so let’s begin.

What’s the point of the majority of games? Fun. What’s the other point of games? To make a developer money. You wanna know what’s Fun and Makes People Money? Gambling. But of course, in a similar fashion to cigarettes and alcohol, the dangers of gambling are well-documented and the industry is heavily regulated. But gambling is only considered gambling if you put real money in and get real money out, at least legally speaking. But speaking in terms of actual design, the Gachapon system, which recently appeared in a litany of high-profile games accross the industry, is absolutely gambling. If you’re not familiar with the system, or haven’t given it much thought when you’ve encountered it, this will come as a surprise, so allow me clue you in on this dumpster fire of an industry trend.

Gambling is, as I mentioned, supposedly fun. Fun as a concept is more nuanced than most people will ever think about, which in most cases is fine, there’s better things to waste your time on, but there’s a good number of cases where uncertainty in the one’s personal understanding of fun can be exploited. Gambling is one of these, because gambling isn’t actually that fun. How interesting is it, really, to determine success or failure using a device which gives you a random, evenly distributed number between one and six? What about using the contents of a deck? The fall of a ball into a spinning wheel? Exempting sleight of hand and card counting (which casinos will throw you out for, anyway) there is literally no way to control these outcomes. Success or failure does not reflect upon the player in any way: failure is not your fault, but neither is victory, so both feel hollow.

And yet people play.

Part of the reason why is pretty reasonable stuff: casinos have atmosphere, and people, and lots of fun entertainers and alcohol. All perfectly reasonable things to find fun. Gambling always tries to be a party, or, in less commercial contexts, a hangout at bare minimum. But there’s other psychological phenomena at work here; have you ever been asked to kiss or blow on a pair of dice? Why is it traditional to shake them around in your cupped hands before throwing them on the table? Humans are aggressive pattern finders, and it is at this juncture that this finally bites us in the ass. Victory is not expected in gambling, but it is possible, so when it happens, the player becomes very happy, and tries to find out what caused the victory in the first place. If this were spear hunting, there’d be enough information in the course of the event that the hunter would be able to construct an accurate-enough picture of why the hunt was successful, and that picture would be mostly truthful to the reality of the situation. But that information was never present in gambling, since the bare act of throwing dice is simply not complicated enough to have things with understandable cause and effect. Because the player can’t reliably attain success, the natural instinct is to experiment, and the moment a thing you do coincides with a successful outcome of the dice (or cards, or marble on that stupid spinning thing) the player latches onto that event. A man at a craps table asks the woman at his left to kiss the dice, like he sees people do in the movies all the time, and it just so happens that the cascade of unknown variables says “YOU WIN” this time, and so he does it again and again and again, every loss ignored because he only cares about the victories, and the victories say the kiss works.

“Yeah, I had some losses this time, but there’s hope, because I know my method works, so I’m gonna come back.” He says, walking out of the casino with empty pockets

Then the operant conditioning starts to kick in. He keeps going to the casino because going to the casino is where the success, and the rewards, and the happiness is. His bank account says one thing but he’s more inclined to trust his brain, which is saying another, and by god he swears by his methods. They call this fun, but I have my doubts

So what, then, is Gachapon, and why is it gambling?

The roots of the phenomenon are old, at least compared to most videogame trends. It started in japan, in the 90s at the latest, and rapidly spread throughout the world. It’s those small vending machines that you put quarters into and get a small capsule with a toy or figurine in it. The name is also spelled Gashapon, and it’s actually a romanization of a japanese onomatopoeia for the sound of the crank and plop of the mechanism and capsule. The idea was that players would try to collect every figurine in the collection, and as they neared a complete collection, they’d get duplicates instead of what they wanted, prompting them to purchase again, or resort to trading if they could.

The gambling psychology at play here has to do with the unexpected victory when the player is at the point where they get lots of duplicates. Players don’t remember getting duplicates, but they do expect them, so when they do get a capsule that they actually wanted, they get just enough motivation to continue, and forget the fact that they’re getting duplicates. The naive user feels justified in their purchase, as they’re basing their judgement on how they feel, as opposed to the math of the situation, which says they just spent ten dollars to get a small plastic figurine.

It turns out this system works really well in videogame monetization. It’s already been present for years in games like World of Warcraft and rogue/roguelike RPGs in the way the loot that drops from enemies is randomized, forcing players to redo boss fights to get the gear they want, but it was unexamined as a mechanic; accepted, but not scrutinized. Until recently, the most effective use of this system was by the very same World of Warcraft, which had a business model based around getting a player invested and then stretching the amount of time it takes them to do things (thus standardizing the exponential experience curve in RPGs in favor of a linear one).

It was an effective way of forcing the reuse of content. Then Team Fortress 2 went free to play.

If I remember correctly, the game’s revenue something like quadrupled near-instantly. The core of the monetisation wasn’t something anyone else was considering monetizable: appearances. Turns out people will pay real money to look good in a virtual environ, who knew? In terms of gachapon systems, TF2 is actually the least straightforward and, frankly, a bad example of the system when you compare it to something like Overwatch, because while TF2 introduced the system, Overwatch didn’t so much perfect it as they did corporatize it (see the next article for more on that).

Overwatch has a wide variety of ways to customize the look of its many heros. All told, there are skins, emotes, voice lines, sprays, victory poses, and highlight intros, plus player icons independant of the character being played. Putting aside the issues i have with not letting players make their own player icon and spray, the system has a large possibility space for personal expression. All of these cosmetics are acquired through a randomized “loot box” system. Instead of creating duplicates when trying to fill a set, the overwatch gachapon system floods the pool of available items with items the player is likely to not want, like boring sprays and generic voice lines. The “bad outcome” is different than normal Gachapon, but the effect and principle is the same. The only thing it’s possible to buy on the Overwatch store is the lootboxes. While the boxes do give players in-game currency which can be used to buy skins, this money is doled out in very small amounts, and so if a player wants a lot of items, or a very valuable one, the best they can expect is to get it via the boxes. This, combined with the usual sales and events, means that a player attempting to get an item worth a dollar or so on its own may spend $40 on loot boxes attempting to improve their chance of getting it, and then rationalize the expenditure through all the other items they got (which even discounting the truly undesired items will be a fair few). In this way a player will spend more money attempting to get an item than they would have if the item was simply available to purchase directly.

The moment players realize what’s happening, the system becomes deeply depressing, and pretty soon most players are gonna realize they aren’t gambling men, and don’t enjoy the sensation of a tidal wave of crapulent cosmetics and unpredictable barriers between them and looking good.

#tiger louck #Gachapon #lootbox #overwatch #game design #palliddata #Original

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bossrush · 7 years

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Decisions, Decisions...

Whenever I’m talking about any of the underlying design elements of games (especially when it comes to systems), “interesting decisions” and “meaningful decisions” are terms I tend to throw around fairly frequently – and I’m sure at times they seem almost indistinguishable. I use them both almost exclusively in a positive context, often to justify a change or decision I’m making or proposing (for example, changing Fire Emblem’s Rock-Paper-Scissors system into something more tangible would provide players with more interesting decisions, since the pros and cons of each weapon type would interact more freely with context).

However, I’ve recently read an interesting article – “The Danger of Interesting Decisions” by Dan Felder – that both works to illustrate the pitfalls of such a broad design principal and introduces a safer alternative in “Satisfying Decisions,” or decisions that have no ambiguity in the positive nature or “correctness” of their outcome. I may be wildly misinterpreting the driving message of this article, although perhaps I may just fall into the “narrow psychographic” of players/designers who put a high amount of value in decisions with non-obvious answers. Regardless, I think it’s important to both take a moment to talk about decisions in general, as well as say my piece on the value of those whose purpose is to be interesting and meaningful, as well as those simply meant to be satisfying.

SATISFYING DECISIONS

Satisfying Decisions are probably the easiest to define – as the player, you make a decision that undoubtedly was the “best” one, often being put in a position to make this decision as a reward for previous good decision-making (or skillful execution of inputs, etc.) or simply because the game is rewarding the player frequently in a small way. In this case, think of executing an enemy with Darius’s ult in League of Legends, or dodging an attack at the last moment to trigger Witch Time in Bayonetta.

In the first case, this “Satisfying Decision” is playing an integral role in the “Reward” element of the Encourage-Enable-Reward nature of his kit, so by earning the position of being near a low-health enemy marked by several bleed stacks, you get to make the no-brainer decision of bringing down your index finger on that R button with righteous satisfaction and watching as your foe gets removed from the fight and your ult’s cooldown resets, ready for another use. This decision would instead become “interesting” if it did not reset and you had to choose your target wisely.

Likewise, in Bayonetta, you’re never going to be challenged with the decision of “do I want to get hit or do I want to dodge,” or “do I want to do a dodge that doesn’t have the right timing to give me Witch Time” – no, you go for that Witch Time whenever you can, and then get to make the interesting decision of how to best use that precious moment of full combat freedom. And you know what? Both of these feel really, really good. But only being faced with easy decisions is by no means the best or only way to let the player feel good (outside purely execution-based games like Super Meat Boy or any given rhythm game), so maybe we might want to think about introducing something to balance them out.

INTERESTING DECISIONS

Interesting Decisions are those that challenge the player to choose between two seemingly equal options, each with distinct outcomes based on the circumstance – one of which might be right while the other is wrong, or more optimal while the other is less optimal.

Take, for example, knocking down a tough monster in Monster Hunter while you are near death. Here, you have an obvious “wrong” answer (do nothing, or take some other action that would clearly harm you or take you further away from your goal), as well as a few answers that will yield different but positive outcomes – in this case, taking the short opportunity to either use your most powerful attacks on the vulnerable monster, or roll away from danger and drink a potion to allow yourself to indulge in greedier combos or make more wrong decisions down the line. Since dropping to 0 health multiple times and failing to deal enough damage to the monster before the time limit is up are both lose conditions here, both of these options seem good, but which one is the best?

With a good (ie. not needlessly convoluted) interesting decision, it all depends on the player’s ability to analyze their current situation and plan ahead based on its potential outcome(s). So in this case, drinking would be the most optimal option if the monster in question has an attack that can reliably hit the player (whether due to their build and strategy or them not yet knowing how to anticipate and avoid it), whereas going in for the damage would be the most optimal option if doing so is the only way to break an out-of-reach part that poses a risk while unbroken, or if the player’s weapon relies heavily on large openings for its damage output (ie. Greatsword/Hammer/Gunlance). Usually, many of these interesting decisions pepper the moment-to-moment gameplay of Action/Hunting games and Fighting games alike, as players must decide how close or far they should be to their opponent or which combo or attack to go for on the fly, with these decisions relying largely on how well the player can read the situation.

MEANINGFUL DECISIONS

Meaningful Decisions are those that have a tangible weight to them, but rather than existing as right or wrong, or on a spectrum of optimization, they simply change how the player is able to interact with the game and approach its many challenges and decisions. The core of a meaningful decision is that “meaning” – the decision you’re making needs to have an outcome that means something, that changes the way you think about what you’re doing.

The importance of meaningful decisions is the most noticeable in their absence – perhaps you’ve played a PvP game whose characters are negligible in their differences, or one that offers a complex customization subsystem yet only one viable “build” for each of its characters, classes, etc. Or, take for example League of Legends’ current “Rune” system, where players are able to slap on tiny granules of raw stats that are applied to their champion of choice at the start of the game. Choosing between +1 Attack Damage and +1% Critical Chance doesn’t feel very meaningful, and even with some of the more distinctive Keystone Masteries, you’ll often find yourself in a situation where the champion you’ve chosen to play simply gets way more value out of one than the others. The illusion of choice is often what’s left after a failed implementation of meaningful decisions.

To look at these sorts of decisions done right, consider character moveset builds in Darkest Dungeon (which I am contractually obliged to mention once per article): giving the Jester its 4 music-based support moves or its 4 sickle-based damaging moves doesn’t make it better or worse at what it does, because “what it does” depends on how you choose to use it. Beyond that, this has even more meat to it once you realize you can mix and match these two distinctive movesets to further tailor its output to your needs. The decision of how you build this character is “meaningful” because, while not inherently “satisfying” (or particularly “challenging” – this is where choosing which of those 4 moves to spend your Jester’s single turn per round comes in), it changes the way you think about using that character in a significant way.

THE ANATOMY OF A DECISION

So now that we’ve got the Big Three out of the way, let’s look at the only card game I know enough about to use as an example: Hearthstone. While a lot of its appeal is surely due to its more approachable tone and ties to a monstrously popular franchise, its competitive scene has taken root due to a health dose of satisfying, interesting, and meaningful decisions.

For those who haven’t played, the premise is simple: choose a character, build a deck, and use that deck to beat your opponent’s character before their deck beats yours.

The satisfying decisions here are obvious - for example, if you have a minion on the board and your opponent doesn’t, you can use it to attack them at no cost beyond that minion’s one action per turn, depleting your opponent’s health and bringing you closer to victory. A clearly “right” decision, usually punctuated by a cheeky battle cry and a satisfying crunch.

The interesting decisions are usually what put you in a position to make the satisfying ones. Do you use that minion to attack another enemy’s minion and potentially remove it from play (sometimes at the cost of your own minion), or do you go straight for their character’s face? Do you put down three more minions for a potential burst of damage next turn, or do you play it safe in case your opponent has an AoE spell up their sleeve? Do you summon a 2/2 Slime, or gain an empty Mana Crystal? Sometimes you might not find out whether you made the right decision even after the match is over, yet this is often what keeps each new match as engaging as the last.

The meaningful decisions, then, are done almost entirely outside of any match. Do you build a safe and balanced deck? One that prioritized board control? Perhaps bank on powering up and summoning the terrifying C’Thun? Do you play that deck with a Priest that can keep minions topped off with their Lesser Heal, or a Hunter who can keep up the pressure with liberal use of Steady Shot? Do you take advantage of the Hunter’s unique trap-like Secret cards, unleash their menagerie of ferocious beasts, or keep a quiver full of their flexible offensive Spell cards?

...Of course, all of these decisions have their extremes. Only trying to satisfy the player without challenging them or allowing them to explore diverse options can result in a popcorn-like game that feels more like a toy (many mobile game apps fall into this). As expressed in “The Danger of Interesting Decisions,” simply trying to tie up the player with endless crossroads of nail-biting ambiguity can lead to the kind of frustration that will only drive them away, rather than engage them. And even providing equal-but-different options in excess can lead to a paralysis of indecision that stops the player from engaging with the game entirely. With those dangers in mind, I do ultimately think that a healthy ecosystem involving all these types of decisions is what makes for the most engaging and rewarding gameplay experiences…And of course, those are the ones I want to design!

#Hearthstone #League of Legends #Bayonetta #Monster Hunter #Darkest Dungeon #game design

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inventors-fair · 4 years

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A Brief History of Surprise

I feel that with this first round of submissions, I’m seeing a lot of “complexity for complexity’s sake,” a lot of “what ifs” that rely on clever appearances taking precedent over elegant design. With that in mind, I thought I’d do a little bit of a personal essay on what I found surprising over Magic’s history. I hope that you will learn a little more about what I’m after and maybe relate to some of it yourselves.

So, what surprised me?

Incremental Rewards

My first block ever was the Alara block, and I’ll always have some nostalgia for it, despite the weirdness. Following that, though, was Zendikar. Zendikar was a fast, aggressive set, and yet there were payoffs that I found amazing once you got there. Sadistic Sacrament was pretty mediocre on its own, but once I ramped up to ten mana, I could selectively mill my opponent and they would know exactly what I had taken out. Hopelessness! Fantastic! And then I saw my first brand-new build-around-me card: Archmage’s Ascension. You could build up over time, over specific cards, with specific strategies, and then control to your heart’s content. Tutoring every turn! What power! And all you had to do was work for it.

Following this, I will say that the Eldrazi surprised me too. Big creatures with massive rewards, sure, they were...something. But there was something off about them, something that I still find strange. I think that their god-like card value was too much for me to handle. I didn’t focus on playing them — I focused on how to beat them. And that wasn’t fun. I was scared. Keyword soup has its time and place, but ability soup has to be balanced.

That New Recursion

The Return to Ravnica prerelease was the first one I had ever been to. Scavenge, Overload, Unleash, Detain and Populate were all fantastic mechanics, and then came along Gatecrash. The fact is, Extort remains my favorite out of all of them to play, but I keep coming back to Cipher. What a messed-up and amazing flavor, complex and strange, nuanced and difficult. Hitting with a creature and creating spells every turn was hard to pull off, but the design remains one of my favorites, and I don’t know why.

I wish they had brought it back for Modern Horizons, honestly. It’s hard to make flavorfully work in every context, because frankly, it almost sounds like sci-fi. And yet it works! It’s shadowy, powerful, strong-get-stronger vibe. And even though it wasn’t really popular, well, I still loved it. I wanted to give other spells Cipher. I wanted to see more than what was there. I wanted to unlock its secrets.

Just my Type

I groked Bestow. Theros as a whole was the set I played the most socially for a good long time. I didn’t like every aspect, but I think that Bestow was the mechanic I was least expecting. Enchantment creatures made sense, no different than artifact creatures. But now, we had creatures that could become auras, creatures that targeted upon casting, beings that engulfed other beings in light and stars and the power of Nyx!

Bestow was the first mechanic I knew I couldn’t have come up with by any stretch of the imagination, not on my own. I had been making custom cards since high school, and this was early in my college career. I was bowled over, blown away, enthralled — enchanted, if you will. I still enjoy Theros limited. It’s no Innistrad, but it’s fun, a swing between battlecruising, aggressive strategizing, and the occasional God.

Speaking of, the Gods surprised me as well. I loved these things. Their lack of creature-dom, the ability to become real and then swing in with cackling precision, was just what I loved about powerful cards those days. You had to work for them. They didn’t just do things on their own. I liked Magic the most when you had to figure it out. Maybe that’s why I’m liking Party so much in this new set.

Coming Together

You know, looking back on my Magic history and personal journey, I find myself pleasantly surprised by two specific mechanics: Party and Historic. These aren’t mechanics per se like Cipher or Bestow, but the batching made sense in a flavorful way that changed the way I build decks in limited. I searched for specific aspects, played my cards to maximize the benefit of playing other cards, and had to make something cohesive that rewarded me for playing right. That’s really all you want out of a game.

I had a blast playing with ZNR and DOM in the drafts that I was able to do, even if I didn’t do the best compared to other players. Utilizing complex mechanics made me feel good even when I wasn’t the best at them. That’s what surprised me the most, considering my lukewarm reception to the cards at first. I underestimated how much I’d enjoy playing with them because I underestimated myself.

Okay, now I’m going to run down a list of surprising cards to me and why I love them. Most of these cards I was surprised upon seeing them, and many played well as well. Let’s get specific.

Mirror-Sigil Sergeant: I get to play my favorite color AND get hella rhinos out of it? Double double, baby!

Thraximundar: I think this is still one of my favorite legends. I want to know everything about him. That name, that flavor... Oh, and a decent card, I suppose.

Ransack the Lab: This is exactly what black should be doing! Great card, you love to see it and play it.

As Foretold: Holy crap, this card. I love it so much. Combo exploitable, free spell increments, great name, great art. I had to reread it so many times.

Vorapede: I always love my Baneslayers, but I pulled this card blind, and the aggression was more than I was used to.

Elbrus, the Binding Blade: Another blind Dark Ascension card! This was the kind of reward I loved working up to.

Gauntlets of Light: I wanted this card and I got this card. Toughness aggro is a beast to beat.

Klothys, God of Destiny: This card surprised me because I hadn’t expected a multicolored God. But she fit well, she played GREAT, and I love her.

Shaman of the Great Hunt: Repeatable multicolored draw? Jesus, what a beast. I felt my stomach turn when this thing hit the table.

Bestial Menace: Oh, an old favorite. Animal summoning never felt so good. I wanted them all to be friends.

Avacyn, Angel of Hope: So simple, so powerful, and she did exactly what she said on the tin. Feels good every time.

The Adventure mechanic: Never before seen, impossible to conceive, staggeringly surprising, and it played great.

Ugin, the Spirit Dragon: Powerful, yes, but the flavor? Ghostfire, plus removal, and then the inverse of his brother Nicol Bolas. Could not have been better.

Should you play to my favorites? Well, obviously not. Should you push the envelope? Don’t push it off a cliff; it’s not a paper airplane. Should you think about your past and consider how the designers of Magic created your own favorite cards that made you gasp and squeal and swear?

YES. Yes! That’s the whole point of this contest! Delve into yourself! Make something that you love! Do something that’s new and yours but is rooted in the real! You’re not here to show off the possibilities of your custom card maker, you’re here to make something you love! If you don’t love it, start over. If you love it for the wrong reasons, start over. Magic should be for everyone. That’s the thing about all those cards and mechanics and ramblings above there: those are the reasons I love those cards. A thousand other players can love them for a thousand other reasons. Empathize beyond.

We are a community. Never forget that.

@abelzumi

#mtg #magic the gathering #inventor's fair #surprise me #monday blog #long post

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m-willis · 7 years

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If Clean Sheet Co. designed caps for the World Baseball Classic

I like to find the places where established systems and traditions smash into one another. For instance: what happens if you mix the visual cultures of soccer and baseball? I made the Soccer out of Context project to figure it out. How about if you combine a consistent, minimal design aesthetic with the World Cup? I created the 32 Nations series of designs to see. It was while working on 32 Nations that I realized I didn’t just have to imagine the places where these mashups were “real.” I could bring them to life.

That’s when I started Clean Sheet Co.

We began with t-shirts, then moved on to scarves and hats. (There’s even more on tap.) Along the way, I learned a few things. One of the biggest: the best way to demonstrate that something can be improved is to make something new. Another: national identity is something everybody cares about, but nobody owns. (Those specific lessons led us to create the People’s Crest, an open-source crest design for American soccer fans that’s free to download, use and remix.)

This is where it gets fun. With design series like Soccer out of Context, I’ve established a platform for interesting projects in this space. With Clean Sheet Co., I’ve got an apparel company ready to bring those projects to life. And my favorite things to design around are national identity, sports, interesting crossovers, and existing concepts that could be improved.

Well hey there, World Baseball Classic.

;

The WBC checks all the boxes. Sports + national symbolism + a unique cultural crossover (baseball in a soccer-style international tournament). Oh, and there’s some definite potential for improvement.

Sounds like a design project to me.

So I started with the question: What if Clean Sheet Co. designed caps for all 16 participants in the 2017 World Baseball Classic? We’ve been circling around the idea of making baseball caps (snapbacks, naturally) for a while now. This is a great opportunity to test those waters. The 16 designs you’ll see here are still concepts, but we want to know if we should bring any of them to life.

All of our design projects have guidelines, and this one is no exception. Here are the guidelines that informed this exercise:

No language characters. Sure, letters on baseball caps have a long and prominent tradition. Sure, they can look good. Sure, they can even be creative. All that said, we’re not using language elements in our designs. The idea is that the designs themselves should communicate the national identity without “spelling it out”, so to speak.

Also, guideline #1 solves a thorny problem - namely, what language system to use for what team? Currently, WBC designs use mostly english language characters. Teams like the Netherlands and Italy can use their own native spellings (Nederlands and Italia, respectively). But none of the Asian countries even use their own character sets. I understand why (marketing, audience expectation, tradition), but I don’t quite approve. For caps, we can do better. (And anyhow, initials on international ballcaps have always looked kind of cheesey to me - while initals work really well for cities and club teams, national identity somehow seems too potent to be represented up by a letter or two on a ballcap).

All caps have to be items Clean Sheet Co. could theoretically produce and sell. If you want one, let us know here.

We reserve the right to approach these guidelines creatively.

All set? Let’s get to it.

Pool A: Israel, South Korea, the Netherlands, Chinese Taipei

Israel

Israel is one of several WBC participants with a fantastic visual pedigree. Two strong colors (royal blue, white) and a universally-recognized symbol (the Star of David). The team’s current WBC cap is really good, with some extra adornment (the “I” initial and squigly lines). The classic Star of David mark can also stand on its own. The Clean Sheet Co. version of the cap introduces a white front panel, but otherwise, it’s easy to leave perfection alone.

South Korea

Like their group-mates Israel, this iteration of the South Korean team wears royal blue and white. And while Korea has always worn blue in these competitions (a departure from their soccer compatriots), they don't always wear the same exact shade. Korea sometimes wears a lighter shade of blue - bordering on Carolina blue. It plays well, and we haven’t forgotten it. The South Korea ballcap features light blue accents - the brim, eyelets and button (or squatchee, if you prefer). The logo features the red-blue yin-yang from the country’s beautiful flag. Strong and unique.

The Netherlands

Say what you will about the Netherlands - but they get international branding right. The country’s teams are generally attired in eye-catching orange. Amsterdam owns the “XXX” idea. The Dutch understand the value of a strong brand. One item they don’t always elevate on the national stage is the fantastic rampant lion, very prominent in national heraldry. The lion is beautiful, traditional, and cool. It’s the perfect ballcap emblem. Orange and black complete the package.

Chinese Taipei

Chinese Taipei, the politically diplomatic way to reference the state also called Taiwan or the Republic of China, has a suspect WBC identity. To its credit, it has elements with both eastern and western appeal - but to me it doesn’t add up to a coherent design. I know there are fans of this logo, but I'm not one of them. If Taiwan didn’t already have a strong visual brand, it would be simply be a case of mediocrity filling a vacuum. But take a look at the sun symbol on the flag Chinese Taipei uses in international competition. It’s gorgeous. And it works perfectly on a ballcap. Done.

OK: Which custom cap from #WBC2017 group 1 should we produce for sale? https://t.co/iLtoPVhzee

— Clean Sheet Co. (@CleanSheetCo)

March 15, 2017

Pool B: Australia, China, Cuba, Japan

Australia

Australia’s baseball identity is, on balance, pretty decent. But it’s got some issues. The most pressing: from the squad’s colors to the letter ‘A’, the current visual package looks way too much like how a video game who couldn’t secure MLB rights might depict the Oakland A’s. This is fixable. The Australian national identity is tied up with that of the kangaroo. This version of the ’roo is inspired by the one used by the Australian air force. Depicted in classic Aussie green and gold, there’s no way this cap is confused for any other team – or nation.

China

Out of China's population of 1.4 billion people, apparently a couple dozen can play baseball. Along with soccer, I’m hoping baseball becomes a national obsession in China. How great would that be for the inernational growth of the game? The current cap isn’t doing much - an olde english “C” has little pedigree or connection to the country. I debated using a dragon mark here - but getting that exactly right would have required some extra-special dedication. In its stead, this cap (inspired by the five stars on the national flag) is both strong and incontrovertibly Chinese.

Cuba

Cuba will always have one of the most compelling stories in this tournament. The baseball-obsessed country’s own national league continues to exist in a separate universe from the rest of the world, shrouding world-class players in mystery. As Cuba opens up to the world, that might change, and one day, I hope to see an MLB team in Havana. (Los Cubanos de la Habana, with a cigar-inspired logo, if I might put in an early pitch). I don’t know who designed the WBC Cuba caps, but they seem rote. A serif ‘C’ doesn’t begin to evoke this country’s story. We opted for a solitary white star on a triangular front-panel field of red, backed by blue – approximating the famous Cuban flag. It's a start.

Japan

Despite what WBC caps might say, Japan isn’t “J”. If they were an english letter, they’d be “N” - the english-language consonant that begins the word ("Nihon") that attepmts to represent how Japanese verbally express the name of their own country. Or they’d use the japanese glyph for Japan, 日本. But there’s a better, less confusing way: just use the flag. There’s no more recognizably simple symbol in the world than the Japanese flag. Use it! The red sun pairs here with navy blue, which Japan has traditionally worn as a sporting accent color. It’s unmistakably Japanese, and beautiful.

OK: Which custom cap from #WBC2017 group 2 should we produce for sale?https://t.co/Fu7bMduzzh

— Clean Sheet Co. (@CleanSheetCo)

March 15, 2017

Pool C: Canada, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, USA

Canada

This one’s simple. The maple leaf in silvery white on a red background, black brim lending a little edge to the look. Canada already did the heavy lifting here - the iconic leaf is a design masterpiece. All we have to do is get out of its way.

Colombia

I love that more South American countries are joining the WBC party. Visually, Colombia is challenging not because it lacks for great visuals to pull from, but because of its graphic similarity to neighbors and fellow yellow-red-blue enthusiasts Ecuador and Venezuela. We’ll get to tournament-participant Venezuela in a minute, but for now, we’re leaning on deep yellow to set Colombia apart. A stylized version of the condor, a dominating feature of the Colombian coat of arms, gives the cap some competitive personality.

The Dominican Republic

This one is a favorite. The Dominican Republic has a fantastic flag, with alternating quarter-panels of red and blue, divided by a white cross and a seal. The cap re-creates that – we only see one view here, but the panels alternate in quarters around the entire cap in the harlequin style. No further symbol or decoration is needed here - the look is strong and completely distinctive.

USA

There are a lot of ways to go here (especially when the symbol you’re looking to improve on is this) - but only one we at Clean Sheet Co. could fathom. The People’s Crest is our choice to represent American athletic endeavor, and it happens to look great on a ballcap. We went with a navy front panel and a white body to really help the colors pop.

Note: by popular demand, we're making this one! The USA Cap, in all navy, is available for pre-order at Clean Sheet Co. right now! You can get it here.

OK: Which custom cap from #WBC2017 group 3 should we produce for sale? https://t.co/5Hb0xege4d

— Clean Sheet Co. (@CleanSheetCo)

March 15, 2017

Pool D: Italy, Mexico, Puerto Rico, Venezuela

Italy

This was a tricky one. Italy doesn’t actually have a wealth of national symbols to pull from. When we designed an Italy World Cup t-shirt, the Stella d’Italia (Star of Italy) was a welcome discovery – but that wasn’t really the right symbol here. In looking at the country's national crests and symbols, there is one recurring element – the olive branch. It never quite stands on its own, content to be a decorative touch in most applications. Well, we’re changing that. An olive sprig stands in appropriate green against a field of Italian azzure blue. A small touch: the green-white-red of the national flag gets a nod at the bottom of the branch. (And yes, the branch kind of looks like a cursive “I” - this is a happy coincidence.)

Mexico

The current Mexican WBC cap is great, probably the best of the field. It’s hard to improve on it. We went for simplicity - a basic pattern, derived from Aztec textile traditions, creates a distinctive shape. OK, it’s an “X” - but this is a creative violation of our “no characters” rule. I’d argue that “La Equis” has symbolic meaning for Mexico in a way no other letter does to it’s particular country – it’s a point of national pride. It’s also a universally-recognized symbol as much as it is a letter of any particular language. Add in the indigineous pattern (if you squint, you can even see an Aztec temple in the negative space beneath the legs of the “X”) and it’s a no-brainer.

Puerto Rico

We looked for a while at options for Puerto Rico before finding the island’s crest, topped with a royal crown (to symbolize the island’s Spanish heritage). Simplified, in silver on a field of red, the idea took on surprising strengh, so we went with it. A stripe of blue beneath the crown gives a splash of the island’s other national color.

Venezuela

You don’t see looks like this on the field too often. Perhaps that’s for the best, but that didn’t stop us. The Venezuelan national flag is the inspiration for the striped front panel, and the galloping silver horse is taken directly from the country’s coat of arms. Even if this one never takes the field, we really enjoyed imagining the look.

OK: Which custom cap from #WBC2017 group 4 should we produce for sale? https://t.co/onlQAa7muV

— Clean Sheet Co. (@CleanSheetCo)

March 15, 2017

And that’s the field. Like any of these caps? Hit up Clean Sheet Co. in the usual spots and let us know. If there’s enough interest, we may bring a few of these to life.

(And thanks for ingulging me. I love projects like this. If you like this kind of stuff, we talk about it every day on the Clean Sheet Co. Inner Circle Slack group. Join! )

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thomasroach · 5 years

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Outward Review – A Rough Adventure

The post Outward Review – A Rough Adventure appeared first on Fextralife.

The following post is this author’s opinion and does not reflect the thoughts and feelings of Fextralife as a whole nor the individual content creators associated with the site. Any link that goes outside of Fextralife are owned by their respective authors.

Can you defy the bitter cold, brutal heat, and ravenous monsters that all desire your death? Outward is an RPG that doesn’t hold your hand in the slightest, as you make your way through an open-world filled with adventure and death. Only with careful preparation will you survive the dangers of this world.

Outward Review – A Rough Adventure

Genre: Survival RPG Developed by: Nine Dots Studio Published by: Deep Silver Release date: 26 Mar 2019 Platforms: PC (Reviewed), XBOX One, PS4 Website: https://www.ninedotsstudio.com/outward Price at time of review: $39.99

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Outward Features

Play solo or coop in local or online modes

Dynamic defeat scenarios that react to your context

Constant auto-saving means there’s no turning back

Ritualistic, step-by-step approach to spellcasting

Constant auto-saving means you must live with your decisions

Encounter dynamic defeat scenarios

A unique experience with every playthrough

An immersive exploration experience

Creatures will be harder to beat in co-op mode

Single-player, online co-op and local co-op with split screen

Story and Setting

Outward starts you off indebted to your tribe, a debt in which you must try to repay. In an effort to clear the amount you owe, you embark on an ill-fated voyage to try and earn enough to pay it off. Of course the ship runs aground, leaving you with almost no money and a crowd of angry villagers demanding payment. From here on out, the game opens up into three distinct main quest lines, with a small variety of sidequests you can participate in. Sounds like a good setup, but it is not executed well in my opinion.

This is a good friend, or so I’m told

You are tossed into this town and told someone in your family did something bad, you’re again told this one person is a close friend, you’re told that you are a part of this tribe. Due to the way the story is told, none of this is given adequate time to develop. I’ve poked at one of the main quest lines out of a feeling of professional obligation and I still have no real drive to pursue it. This is fine though as Outward does not advertise itself as a game with an in-depth story, rather the focus is on the story that you make for yourself.

Even with that though, things fall a little flat as I can tell the devs put a fair amount of work into this world, but very little of it comes across to the player. Very few NPCs will talk with you, and many of them are just shopkeepers that have just add a little bit of flavored text. If there’s books or other written lore entries in this game, I haven’t found them yet. There are ruins scattered throughout the game, but so far I’ve not found much inside any of them so far. To be fair, this is a very slow paced game and I’ve not gotten too deep into the more dangerous ruins, so there might be more if you venture further in. That being said, it’s not very excusable that I’m still so clueless on the world given the amount of time I have spent playing.

And thus starts the legend of the Bird Lady

Gameplay

In my original draft, this section was turning into a small novel as there are a lot of mechanics in this game but two things made me stream-line this section. Firstly, if the mechanics of this game aren’t going to interest you, the Cliff Notes version is all you really need to read.

Secondly, if the mechanics of this are your cup of tea, then all you’ll want to read is the Cliff Notes version. See, a lot of this game is about exploration, discovery, and the story that you create. Going through the game and making decisions based on imperfect knowledge is a major part of what makes this game unique. There is a tutorial, and it is a must for this game, but you’ll really be short-changing yourself if you go in with a complete understanding of the mechanics. This is the same for most things in this title, for some this will sound like heaven and for some it will sound like a complete waste of time.

Avatar customization is limited, but it has a purple hair option so it’s all good.

At its core, this is an action-RPG, while there are plenty of side mechanics, the main thrust is exploring dungeons and beating down the bad guys and monsters. After administering the beat downs you will loot all of their stuff, maybe find an upgrade or two, sell the rest, and move onto the next group of walking loot.

Combat

This brings me to my major criticism of the game, and one that I think will be the proverbial straw for many gamers. The combat is not fun as it is clunky, unresponsive, and it is difficult to use the flashier more complex spells if you’re playing solo. After the most difficult fights have ended, I don’t feel like I achieved a victory, rather I just feel like I cheesed the AI. I honestly can’t tell if this is the result of inexperience or if it was a deliberate design choice. Either way, combat really needs to be better given how much of it you’ll be doing.

As for the rest of the mechanics I’ll just skim over them. Survival is a big aspect of this game, with hot and cold weather, hunger, thirst, and the need for sleep. It might sound like a bother, but the game does a good job of encouraging you naturally to keep track of all your bars. As long as you are mindful, you won’t get in trouble.

That being said, the UI to convey some of the information is lacking. For example as you take damage, you recive ‘burnt health’ which reduces your max HP until you either eat specific foods, drink a potion, or sleep. However, the UI really isn’t very clear on this and I died several times before I figured out what that slightly different color red meant on my health circle.

I mean it’s obvious in hindsight, but it did take a few deaths to figure it out

Death

Speaking of death, you don’t really ‘die’ in this game. If you lose all your health, you’ll pass-out instead. This will cost you one day (which can be a major problem for some quests) and you’ll wake up in a context sensitive situation. This can either be fun, an annoyance, or a really bad situation since the time might have caused some food to rot, which means you can’t eat to get rid of that hunger status, as well as your max HP and stamina is also now reduced. It is certainly an interesting way to handle death, I’ll give the developers that. Something to be aware of is that because you can’t ever die, the game does not allow you to save. There is only one auto-save for your character, and the game is saving almost constantly. Don’t count on ALT-F4 to bail you out of a bad choice either.

Character Progression

Character progression is mostly done by getting new gear, you don’t level up in this game, though you can gain new skills. Some skills are free, some cost silver, and a few require you to spend one of your three skill points to unlock. While skills help, your gear is everything here. Getting a new piece of armor or a better weapon drastically effects how well you do in combat. This also means in certain situations you can lose all your advancement because all your gear gets taken, needless to say that really stings. Though it is always possible to get your stuff back, however it might be pose a big challenge, but as far as I can tell nothing gets destroyed unless you sell it to a merchant and their inventory resets.

Multiplayer/Co-op

Multiplayer is potentially a big bonus here as not only does it have online drop-in drop-out gameplay, but it has split screen co-op as well. I didn’t get to test this feature a lot but from what little I did test out multiplayer worked well. It does seem to make the combat an order of magnitude easier though, which could be a concern. To me this is a non-feature since I don’t have anyone in my house I can play with and I’m not all that interested in playing with random people, but I can see how others would love the ability to play an RPG like this with a friend.

Crafting

Finally, there is quite the crafting system to explore here. There are no skill points here, you either have the materials to make something or you don’t. There are recipes but you don’t get to read them before crafting, If you look it up on a wiki (or in some cases just take an educated guess) you can craft the item and the recipe will be added to your journal. While you can craft weapons and armor, you’ll mostly be crafting adventuring supplies such as fire rags and potions. Cooking is a major crafting area as well and is very well integrated into the other systems. Different dishes have different bonuses, with more complex dishes providing additional bonuses.

Audio and Visual

There is honestly not much to say here, the visuals are to put it simply, functional. Occasionally you’ll come across some interesting monster designs and much of the gear you can equip is unique in design, but most of the terrain and architecture is very plain looking. There’s also tons of small, tiny errors in the terrain with the occasional prop that just looks out of place such as the giant rib cages that look like they’re made of plastic.

This does not look like weather-aged bone

Another thing about the visuals that ties in with gameplay is lighting. When it’s supposed to be dark, it is dark. Running out of light in a dungeon is not good situation to be in. While this sounds like an interesting mechanic, it really doesn’t work well when you are outside. If you’ve lived your life in the city, you really don’t realize how dark the great outdoors gets. As someone who does a significant amount of camping in his life trust me, this games gets moonless nights perfectly, which ultimately means you can’t see a darn thing. This makes outdoor navigation a massive pain, even if you have a lantern.

I did not doctor this screen shot at all

Audio is a bit of a mixed bag as the actual songs aren’t bad, and SFX are serviceable, but whatever system they are using for dynamic music is a bit wonky. I’ll be on my 17th trip back to town to sell off the two swords I looted and suddenly the music will swell into this epic score, usually spooking me a bit in the process. The voice acting is a bit off as well. It really does feel like they just went around the office and said “Hey, you’re not doing anything. Go get into the sound booth!” I really don’t think you’ll miss much by muting the sound and listening to your own stuff, but it won’t hurt the ears to leave their stuff on either.

Replayability

OK this might be a bit of a controversial view point, but I feel this game has very limited replayability. As I mentioned in the gameplay section, the vast majority of your adventuring effectiveness is in your gear. True, there is the choice of using magic or not, and which of the skill trees you wish to max out, but honestly you’ll probably have a favorite combat style that you’ll want to stick with. The only real reason to replay the game will be to experience all three faction story lines, since once you join a faction, you’re locked out of the others.

As I’ve already stated though, I don’t feel the main quest lines aren’t all that compelling. Certainly not enough for me to want to redo the game from the start. I really feel that whether or not you want to replay this game is going to hang on both how compelling you find the three factions vs how much the gameplay annoys you.

Pricepoint

So despite that fact that I just roasted Outward for a perceived lack of replayability, I still feel this game is a good buy. Assuming again, the mechanics sound like your cup of tea. Due to the pacing and the size of the world, this is going to take you a solid 30-40 hours to finish one of the main quest lines. It might take you a little less time for additional playthroughs, but not much so for a $40 game, that’s not bad at all. The devs give an estimate of 40-80 hours to fully experience the game, and I can see someone easily spending 60+ hours in this game if the mechanics happen to click with them. Toss in the fun you can have with a friend or random people on the internet, and Outward will really give you your money’s worth.

Final Thoughts

If I could give this game two scores I would. This game has a target audience and for them this is easily a 7.5, maybe even an eight. For the average gamer looking for a neat RPG experience to tide them over until Elder Scrolls 6 or Cyperpunk 2077 it would not even come close to that. Very slow pacing, unexplained mechanics, removal of modern systems, clunky combat, all of this adds up to an experience that the average gamer is probably not going to enjoy.

But if you are in that target group, those looking for an RPG that absolutely does not hold your hand and allows you to get hopelessly lost if you don’t pay attention, and will rip you a new one if you mess up, then this game is for you hands down. In the end though, I do need to choose a single score, and I’m going to go with the one I think will reflect the experience most people will have with this game.

If you enjoyed this review be sure to read more with our latest thoughts on action shinobi Sekiro Review: Shinobis Die Many Times. Or you can check out what we thought about CD Projekt Red’s upcoming sci-fi action RPG in Cyberpunk 2077 Preview: When Fallout Meets Blade Runner.

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