Recently in Games Category

Away from the comforts—distractions—of home, most notably my desktop, and with classes beginning only this week, I had a sufficient block of time to study the Mutants & Masterminds rulebook. Really study it: not just sufficiently to create a specific character for a specific purpose, which I did for a still-born campaign of Gaimanesque gods walking among us, but to create several characters and compare their strengths and weaknesses, and measure how they would fare against one another in single combat. This was my first real attempt to measure M&M against Champions on a nuts-and-bolts level, as opposed to a higher-level evaluation of the designer’s intent.

In particular, I sought to break the system in various ways. One useful way to evaluate a system is to seek out the boundaries where it breaks down. I have a love-hate relationship with Champions stretching back to my college days. As a point-distribution and gigantic kludge, Champs is a minimaxer’s wet dream, permitting characters who are unholy exploits of rule loopholes made flesh…well, made statistics on paper, at least. This can play hell with game balance, especially if some players in a group are much better at exploiting rules than others, and if they are of a mind to do so. Yet players who take a liking to that kind of minimaxing find Champs a wonderfully rich ground for play, where designing the character in the first place is a hugely important part of the battle, sort of like designing a deck for Magic: the Gathering. The game gets particularly interesting when two such characters square off, a laboratory for applying irresistible forces to immovable objects.

M&M exhibits a more coherent, top-down design than Champs. Nevertheless, it is a point-based system, and the 2nd edition further includes a variety of kludgy rules of its own, inherited from the d20 system with which it seeks compatibility. Point balance and messy rules are a fertile breeding ground for rules exploits, so I expected to see many in M&M, too, and to compare the differing styles of rule abuse in M&M and Champs.

What I found, however, was little or no room for exploitation, which was something of a disappointment. The more carefully I examined the rules, the clearer it became that all the supposedly different powers were really more in the nature of symmetric powers. Here’s what I mean:

Where Champs has entirely different rules with different mechanics for applying the effects of direct, damaging attacks and blinding attacks and entangling attacks and mind control and so on and so forth, M&M has virtually identical mechanics for all of these. First the attacker must see whether he successfully hits a target; if so, the defender must see whether he can successfully resist the effects of a successful attack. The attempt to resist the effects can produce a variety of results, but for virtually every attack—dazzle, snare, paralyze, or zapping with laser beam eyes—the range of results is the same: no effect at some level, a partial incapacitation five points below that, and total incapacitation five points lower still, and two partials produce the same effect as one total. The attacks and defenses are different in the sense that a given target can be more or less resistant to each, but they are very much the same in that there is little reason, when creating a character, to choose one over the other. The effects are the same, the mechanics are the same, and the odds of success are the same over a range of targets, since any given target is equally likely to choose dazzle defense, snare defense, paralyze defense, laser-beam eye defense, and so on. The different attack and powers are symmetric, if not strictly identical.

The odds are the same because of M&M’s power level limits. Largely to prevent players from dumping all their points into one, huge attack (thereby encouraging investment in a presumably more interesting variety of powers as well as helping preserve some kind of game balance), M&M places caps on how powerful an attack can be, and how powerful a defense can be, scaled to the overall power level of the campaign. Were these caps high, they would have little impact, but they aren’t. Set modestly enough that a character can easily reach the maximum in attack and all relevant defenses (as over half the sample characters do), the advantages of one power over another in combat are leveled out. Characters may exchange power for finesse or vice versa, either offensively or defensively, but not offense for defense. With the flat distribution of the d20 and the two-stage process of determining whether an attack hits and whether it hurts, this trade-off is more cosmetic than substantial.

In short, M&M addresses the needs of play balance and the hazards of rule abuse by flattening powers out to uniformity, while Champs addresses the dilemma through embracing asymmetries. It’s hard to create an over-the-top power in M&M, apart from a few powers carrying an explicit warning to GMs not to let their players use such powers, because most powers are mechanically identical, no matter how different their descriptors. It’s easy to create an over-the-top character in Champions, although it is impossible to design one who will beat all other over-the-top characters, and no matter how many clocks you will clean, there’s someone out there who can clean your clock with the kinds of powers you can’t stop.

Both approaches have their merits. M&M’s approach allows for simpler character design, certainly. There’s less math. It’s also easier for a newcomer to the system to wrap his head around its intricacies, even if he isn’t coming from a d20/D&D background, because the intricacies are so similar to one another. M&M is definitely the way to go for a group that approaches combat with a mindset of “just tell me what I need to roll to hit the guy nearest to me.” But for groups that really like to wallow in the tactical environment, who want every fight to present new challenges, who really like working for every possible edge, Champs offers a much, much richer gaming environment. And, while I’m ready to admit Champions’s many faults, it’s this richness that prevents me from becoming an M&M convert.

I loaded an old copy of Pharaoh into my laptop, and am slowly working through the campaigns. Doing so has reminded me how frustrating early titles in the city-builder series could be, before the refinements of Zeus and Emperor came out, and especially when buggy behavior still hiccupped through the system.

(I’m having a lot of trouble, particularly, with my granaries simply shutting down for no apparent reason as a scenario progresses. They have easy access to labor—forced access, really, as I build them between huts, so whichever way the labor contractor goes to find workers, he finds some—and there’s a labor surplus, and I’ve set food production and distribution to a high labor priority, so the granaries should stay staffed 24/7. But after several years, labor abruptly stops appearing in the granaries. And without labor, the granaries don’t work. Without working granaries, the markets can’t get food. Without food, housing collapses disastrously to primitive huts, my labor pool evaporates, and the whole scenario grinds to a halt. Very frustrating.)

Nevertheless, it’s rewarding to see the granaries fill, the treasury grow, the houses improve, and the pyramids rise from the desert. After a brief setup phase, I hardly have to pay attention; there’s a long delay between building a functioning city and victory, simply because it takes so long to accumulate materials for a monument, especially if the materials must be imported from limited suppliers. I can let the game run in the background while I work on other stuff for the local library.

It’s this, I suspect, which condemned the city-builder series to the lower shelves, despite a rich structure worthy of the famed SimCity series, which, in part, it deliberately emulates. Not enough action. Most people don’t go in for a game that you can let run for a half hour without fiddling with it. Other titles in the series were more engaging, but Pharaoh makes a virtue of watching the pyramids slowly rise. I find it peaceful. Like bonsai, it’s a slow art form, sculpting a pixilated city which responds to your input, but will only be bent so far—if you push the system in a direction it doesn’t want to go, the city withers and dies. It’s an exercise in patience and adaptability unlike the control and conquest more common to computer games, and good for the soul.

I spent much of yesterday afternoon playing web games, specifically the subgenre of point-and-click puzzles called “locked room” or “room escape” or simply “escape” games. These games plunk you into a locked room, and challenge you to escape, usually by rummaging around in the desk drawers and under the cushions of the couch for useful tools like screwdrivers, keys, and scraps of paper with combinations written on them.

These games don’t offer much variety; I suspect they are so common because they’re easy to design and code. Sometimes you get an amnesiac narrator nattering on about how confused he is. The puzzles are almost identical, the only real difference being the skill with which the coder calls your attention to significant items...and the range of competence in this crucial design element is astounding.

Graphic adventures have been with us for a few decades now, long enough for everyone with the slightest interest in making or playing them to be familiar with “find the pixel” and know it is a grievous sin in game design. “Find the pixel” is a puzzle that requires you to click on the appropriate pixel with inadequate (or totally absent) motivation. Clicking on the right test tube among an entire warehouse-sized lab is a typical example, or picking up the right fist-sized rock from a desert landscape, or clicking on the dollar bill that just looks like a tiny, tiny smudge of green because the dollar bill is almost entirely concealed under a stack of books. The pros work to set important objects apart from the background, isolating them from background noise and highlighting them with high-contrast colors; alternately, they can provide instructions elsewhere, like a photo of the chemistry lab with the appropriate test tube circled. The amateurs don’t. Often they simply expect you to click on a spot that doesn’t look any different from the rest of the room—in locked room games, the seam where the wall meets the floor is particularly popular, being the vantage point from which you can look under furniture or behind potted plants. (In one game I played yesterday, one end of one support strut of a plain-looking end table slides out of the rest of the strut to become a screwdriver. Of course! Don’t all your end tables conceal screwdrivers? No, the other three struts don’t do anything at all. Don’t be silly. Why would you need a second screwdriver?) The real amateurs may even require you to click that spot several times, as you might batter down a door that doesn’t give on the first slam. If the first click doesn’t offer the player some feedback like crumbling plaster or bending hinges, he’s pretty well screwed, because the rational response is to think, “Well, that didn’t work; I should try something else.”

Naturally, badly designed games aren’t any fun to play. But they do more damage than merely wasting your time. They also make other, similar games less enjoyable!

Imagine sitting down to one of these games and clicking about a bit, making some small progress on the obvious elements, and eventually getting stuck. Ideally, this is the most stimulating part of a puzzle game, when you are forced to stretch your perceptions or find creative approaches to obstacles. In a good game, persistence will pay off, and success will be all the sweeter for it. In a bad game, though, a reasonable amount of persistence won’t get you anywhere, because the pixel you need to click is unfairly hidden. Sorry, you didn’t click the proper square inch of this blank wall. Barring fabulous luck or compulsive clicking that borders on a mental disorder, you must either quit and walk away from the game or look up the answer in one of the walkthroughs readily available online, probably feeling slightly soiled. Chances are your conscience will soon be assuaged by an answer so unreasonable that you would never in a million years have considered it.

But! There’s always the chance that you’re playing a well-made game, in which case you’ve just spoiled a good, challenging puzzle by looking up the answer too quickly. (Or by walking away from the puzzle, forever unsure whether the payoff was just one small mental leap away.) And there’s no way to tell which you’re dealing with without looking up the answer, by which time it’s too late.

Badly designed puzzles spoil the trust between player and designer that good puzzles both deserve and depend on. I wish the low-grade coders would think about that before deciding they, too, can make a complete game by duplicating everyone else’s puzzle elements, shuffling them into a new order, and padding out the “challenge” by replacing actual, clever puzzle design with a shortage of information.

I have a policy not to get too excited over game previews. Previews are about the glamorous things the designer intends for his game to do, and not about whether the execution will match the intent, or even meet basic standards in the unglamorous but necessary elements of game design, like pathfinding and a manageable interface. What was “opponents dynamically change their tactics to match the player’s” in the PREview all too often becomes “opponents may charge or dive for cover, unless a chair is in the way” in the REview.

Despite myself, and despite the almost total lack of information available, I’m excited over the upcoming The Old Republic MMO, on the strength of a single preview from a magazine I don’t trust. Developer Bioware has a stellar reputation, so there’s reason to expect the game’s fundamentals to be sound. And I get a strong if totally unreliable sense that the design focus is on individual narrative, which has (for me) two happy implications: a lot of PvE content, and a structure rich in solo and small group play. (I realize the whole point of MMOs is playing with and against others, but I find I don’t enjoy the chaos of large-scale “raid” play nearly so much as tightly-knit, smaller groups.) Like Bioware’s Mass Effect, The Old Republic is supposed to be about advancement through narrative, rather than through the treadmill of grinding out xp and incrementally better gear, which I embrace. Every class is to have its own set of quests, which should delight altaholics even as irreversible decisions in those quest lines drives them mad. Quests are set aside in private “instances,” which friends can join, so you won’t see a line of fellow heroes (villains) doing the same supposedly unique galaxy-saving (-conquering) quests you are.

But will the game deliver on these promises? The gear grind is already visible in mentions of an arms race of ever heavier and more destructive blasters among stormtroopers and in the customization of bounty hunter armor…though it’s hard to imagine how Jedi might do the same with their lightsabers. The focus on small-scale play may be an illusion resulting from press releases focusing on introductory content, almost of necessity smaller and simpler than massive raid play, which the developers will naturally hammer out first. Even fundamental design goals can get jettisoned between development and release, if implementation proves too difficult or expensive—and there is yet no official release date.

The absence of a release date alone should curb my enthusiasm. There’s no point in getting worked up about a game that probably won’t arrive for a year or more, and may never arrive at all. Plenty of time to get excited—or not—as substantial information becomes available. Still, the enthusiasm is there, much as I would like to pound it back into the box, with a label reading “Do not open before Xmas or release date, whichever comes first.”