Bioware Read My Mind
I've been designing my campaign for quite some time now. Officially, the campaign's been built in the D&D 4e mechanic for about nine months, and before that some of the underlying concepts have existed as part of an alternate reality game that I've been designing for almost two years. A lot of the ideas came to me in the same manner most of my good ideas come: in the middle of the night, while driving, in the shower, etc...
A week ago I purchased Dragon Age: Origins "Ultimate" Edition ($40 on Steam, I think). Everyone I know who's played it loved it, and it's a game that I've been looking forward to playing myself for quite some time, but didn't have the necessary hardware to run it adequately until recently. I've been playing it since, logging close to 40 hours of play time, and it's kind of awkward for me to see several of my ideas - ideas that I had thought were original creations of mine - in the game.
Some of the things are slightly different but the similarity exists at the core. And some things are almost direct copies... For example, DA:O has a village called Haven. My campaign has a village named Haven as well (to be honest, I was inspired by the Haven in Everquest 2), and it's eerily similar in terms of what it contains (I don't want to elaborate for spoiler reasons, as it relates to DA:O as well as my own campaign).
And it doesn't end there. Even the first two encounters are remarkably similar to the assault on Ostagar. They have "darkspawn", I have "shadowtouched" and "darktouched". Two companions are remarkably similar to NPCs I created for my campaign, and one of them even shares a similar name. I also found at least three world NPCs that are similar to NPCs in my world as well. Even my main antagonist makes an appearance (he is an older person in DA:O, but still). And there are several quests and even some items that are similar to what I had created on my own.
Similarities in any design process are inevitable. Someone once said that there's no such thing as an "original" idea any more (which is why Hollywood insists on remaking anything they can think of). And I admit that I probably share some background to those that created this content for Bioware: game designers/D&D player. "Great minds think alike," if you will.
But in the back of my mind I have a problem. During my campaign design I knew nothing about DA:O, and little did I know I was creating something that many might think is a mirror image of it. People might look at my creation and think "he took this from Dragon Age", even if I know for a fact that wasn't the case.
So here I am, seriously considering if I should rename my version of the village of Haven. Part of me doesn't want to change it because its design came out of my mind and, although inspired by loads of reference materials, is not "ripped" from a popular game. But another part of me can't help but think how many people out there would read my campaign and think just that.
Maybe I'll call it "Kirkwall"... That's original, right?
Ever Forward
Before I continue with this blog, I thought I'd clarify a little about myself. I am a "gamer" in the traditional sense, and have been involved with game design and game development for close to 25 years. But, as far as D&D goes, I'm somewhat inexperienced when it comes to running a campaign in person... I'm currently DM-ing four different campaigns and playing in around six or seven, all of which are "play by post" (mostly on the Wizards of the Coast forums). The last time I played a live session of D&D - with other humans - was around 1988.
A lot of my ramblings will seem to most as the trivial, nonsensical banter from someone who may not know what he's talking about and is not experienced in this sort of thing. I freely admit that, when it comes to running a campaign that isn't exclusively online, I don't have the level of experience in this genre that most of my readers do. I will make mistakes, say things that are incorrect, talk about things that have been talked to death... Simply because I'm clueless.
As it turns out, Critical Hits had an article today called "So You Want to Write RPGs", which talks about what it takes to be an RPG designer... And it got me thinking a bit. Of the seven things listed, I fail miserably at a couple of them, and the ones that I do fail at might not be that easy to remedy because of personal situations and available means (full time job, family, geography, etc...). So if I do want to make a run of this sort of thing, I have a lot of work to do. Will that stop me from doing what I want to do? Probably not. If I don't follow those suggestions and continue on the way I have been, I might end up with a product that sucks.
Honestly, I don't care if it does.
Ten years ago I was the lead programmer of a group called "The Redeemed Assassins", and we were developing The Opera: an add-on for the original Half-Life from Valve Software. Development of TO was a brutal, painstaking process that took several years, and during that time we suffered in ways I can't even begin to describe. But we did it anyway. When asked why we would go through so much trouble to create something that would be disliked by anyone who saw it, and would probably not last a week (we released at the same time that CounterStrike came on to the scene; 99% of all Half-Life servers were running CS at the time, and there simply wasn't an audience for anything else) we had a simple answer: "If one person found our product enjoyable, that will make us happy."
After over two years of development, we finally released it... And it lasted about three weeks before it was overwhelmed by the tens of thousands of CounterStrike servers. But, to our surprise and happiness, there was actually more than one person out there that really liked what we did. That made it all worthwhile, and despite appeasing only a handful of people it reassured us that the past two years weren't a total waste.
As nice as it would be, I'm certainly not doing this for fame or fortune. As I mentioned at the beginning of this post, I've been a game designer for almost twenty-five years and during that time I don't think I've ever been paid to do anything game related (Valve flew me for a day to Seattle to meet the HL2 development team... Does that count?). This isn't a career, and at this point in my life I'm not expecting to make a living doing this sort of thing. But I do it anyway because I do this for myself and the hope that there's someone out there that might actually enjoy my creations.
So I press on, pouring hours upon hours in to something that has no other apparent reward beyond being a part of it. I will continue development of this campaign in the way that I think it should be, even if some of my designs might be awkward and not for everyone. The campaign might end up being such a train wreck that that nobody will ever run it in a table top game, or it might be so campy and flawed that nobody cares for it.
But in the back of my mind I'll remain hopeful that one person out there might like it, or might benefit in some way from that which I do.
Until I find out who that one person is... "Ever forward."
Splitting the Party
"Order of the Stick: Don't Spilt the Party" Volume 4 available at Giant In the Playground (click on above image)
Everybody says "don't split the party"... Most of the time the reason they give is "bad things will happen", which they inevitably do. The real reason is that it's a potential nightmare when it comes to doing it in a table top session. It doesn't always go over well when you tell half of the group "I'm going to ignore you for a while."
As I've stated many a time, all my campaigns as of late have been "play by post", so it's actually rather easy to split the party: just make two separate threads. Short of cloning myself, that's not a readily available option at the table.
In my campaign there are two specific instances that I can think of where the party will be split. One of them is a skill challenge scenario so it's not that bad to handle (it's basically a skill challenge in which you can't see each other), but one is the single most complex encounter in my entire campaign. And it's an encounter that I, quite honestly, really like. In fact, it's probably my favorite encounter in the whole campaign.
So when it came time to write up that encounter for the module... what do I do? I already ran the encounter once in a PbP forum and it went rather well, but looking at the original design I have to wonder how would such an encounter be managed in a table top scenario.
Here are the elements, described in the most generic sense so as not to spoil anything:
- Five PCs.
- Around 20 NPCs, most of which are neutrals and/or minions. Only one or two would qualify as true allies, and that is compensated for by the encounter strength.
- Short of a better way of describing it, one "environmental effect" that has a broad scope and affects everyone in a large area (categorized as an "Elite Hazard", if you must know).
- Two areas of potential combat that are divided geographically. That "division" involves a good two to three hundred feet, the areas do not have line of sight or line of effect with each other, and there is some blocking terrain features between the two.
Everything is peachy until that last one, and then the whole table top scenario falls apart. And it's not just a matter of mechanics, but of "fun": there is only one DM after all, so certain players might begin to feel ignored while the action occurs in an area they're not even aware of. And trying to run both encounter scenes at the same time might be a rather confusing experience; heck, I had a hard time doing it using the MasterPlan encounter manager (I had both groups in the same set).
I find myself forced to redesign my favorite encounter to make it one area. I'm not thrilled at the idea, but the whole point of creating this campaign is so that others can run it. And I don't want to create encounters that are simply not usable at the table.
So has anyone out there ever split the party? Any suggestions on how a situation such as the above would work?
Utility: Truly Random Die Rolls
Image provided by XKCD - http://xkcd.com/221/
I've been a programmer for close to thirty years, and during all that time I've had a nasty habit that I show no sign of getting rid of: if I need a program, I don't spend much time actively looking for it... I just write one!
In the online D&D games I was a part of before I entered the world of the Wizards of the Coast forums, there was a certain degree of trust: the DM made all the rolls. The players simply said what actions they wanted to take and trusted the DM to not screw them. As a DM it also allows me to, every now and then, to "fudge" the rolls of the players so that things don't go from bad to worse for them (DISCLAIMER: If I ever fudge player rolls, it's always in the player's favor. I never do anything malicious to the players because I don't like how the dice fall). So far, this has worked out pretty well.
In the Wizards of the Coast forums I noticed an interesting phenomenon: players like to be in control of their own fate. They want to make all their own die rolls, even death saves (I've seen players do several death save rolls all at once, just so they know how long they have before they're truly dead). With that in mind, a lot of DMs go as far as to post the monster defenses right from the start so the players themselves know when they hit or miss before the DM does; with that knowledge, they can write the hits and misses in to their own roleplay text.
But there is little trust in this... Players can't say "I rolled a hit"; they have to prove it. So they use a variety of online die rolling sites: Invisible Castle and CoCo's die roller, and post direct links to the rolls on the site.
I've tried to use these sites, but they just feel... awkward. So I wrote my own: dice.brainclouds.net.
Now one would think that creating a die roller is an easy thing: just generate a random number every time. But I'm a computer science/mathematics person, and I realize something: computers can't generate "random" numbers.
A computer's random number generator is actually a complex equation based on a variety of internal factors. Since it is a mathematical process, it might not seem obvious but over time some patterns do occur. One could argue that similar patterns exist in physical dice; as the edges of the die wear, dice begin to roll a certain way. But I wanted something truly, genuinely random... So I turned to the place that provides just that: RANDOM.ORG.
RANDOM.ORG "guarantees" randomness because they technically do not use a mathematical equation. I'll let their website explain:
Perhaps you have wondered how predictable machines like computers can generate randomness. In reality, most random numbers used in computer programs are pseudo-random, which means they are a generated in a predictable fashion using a mathematical formula. This is fine for many purposes, but it may not be random in the way you expect if you're used to dice rolls and lottery drawings.
RANDOM.ORG offers true random numbers to anyone on the Internet. The randomness comes from atmospheric noise, which for many purposes is better than the pseudo-random number algorithms typically used in computer programs. People use RANDOM.ORG for holding drawings, lotteries and sweepstakes, to drive games and gambling sites, for scientific applications and for art and music. The service has existed since 1998 and was built and is being operated by Mads Haahr of the School of Computer Science and Statistics at Trinity College, Dublin in Ireland.
But then I thought of something else... "Law of Averages". If many people were using the system, if one person got lucky and got all the good rolls another person would get the bad ones. So I decided to make all the die pools unique to each person. In other words, imagine you own your set of dice that nobody else could use. Nobody will "steal" die rolls from you!
So there you have it... an over-engineered die rolling program. What did you expect from a software engineer, anyway?
Anyone and everyone is welcome to use it. It's currently in what I like to call a "beta" form, and is being actively used by several people on the Wizards of the Coast "play by post" forums, even though it technically isn't an officially sanctioned utility for such a thing. Maybe some day it will be.
Here you go: http://dice.brainclouds.net/
Finally, I also have the functionality on the website as a standalone application (that goes to RANDOM.ORG and retrieves the rolls). One of these days I'll package it up and distribute it. I'm also considering making something similar for smartphones, but that will take some doing.
Overly Complex Encounters
"Out of intense complexities intense simplicities emerge" - Winston Churchill
Part of my problem designing a D&D 4e module is that I haven't played a live table top D&D game in over ten years. During that time, all the games I've been involved with are "play by post": I'm currently DM-ing several online games, and playing multiple characters in many more.
And the reason I can do so many concurrently is because of the nature of "play by post". The advantage of PbP is that all the mechanics involved in managing encounters is transparent to the players, so the players may not be fully aware of the amount of work the DM has to do. Since all my games are PbP and I have a multitude of utilities in order for me to do that management, I have the luxury of making some rather complex encounters. These may not translate well to a table top setting.
Several of the encounters in Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 of my campaign involve NPC allies. If it were one ally that's not a problem, but I use them a lot, and in once very specific case there are five PCs, five to six enemies and - last time I counted - twenty-three allies and/or non-combatants. I can't imagine what it would be like to handle the status of thirty-four creatures using pen and paper, dealing with things like rolling initiative over a dozen times. Heck, most people might not even own that many miniatures.
So there's my problem... I really like some of these encounters (the one I mention above is my favorite in the entire campaign), but some DMs might take one look at them and think "No way I'm going to deal with all that!" For the sake of publishing, I think I'm virtually forced to modify them so that they are manageable, so that DMs won't be dismayed at running them and elect to either reduce the complexity or skip the encounter entirely.
Another option I'm considering is possibly including two versions in the module, or at least enough descriptive text to explain how to simplify a seemingly complex encounter. But that would feel kind of odd... Including a "normal" version and a "use this if you're crazy" version of the same encounter.
But something interesting happened relating to all this... In addition to all the 4e campaigns I'm active in, I'm also active in one rather epic 3.5e campaign (also PbP). In that campaign we are a group of eight 8th level players currently fighting over ninety orcs, most of which are minions. As a player it doesn't appear that overwhelming, but I can see the amount of work involved in managing such an encounter. Even dealing with all the markers on the digital map is quite daunting sometimes.
But in 3.5e it seems almost... normal, as if that level of complexity was expected and commonplace. In 4e, it's ludricrous. I assume that's simply due to the nature of the 4e mechanic, and the new level of number crunching involved.
So has anyone out there run these sort of "epic" encounters where there are few against many, or perhaps a normal encounter that has a lot of NPCs just waiting to be turned in to collateral damage?
And the reason I can do so many concurrently is because of the nature of "play by post". The advantage of PbP is that all the mechanics involved in managing encounters is transparent to the players, so the players may not be fully aware of the amount of management the DM has to make. Since all my games are PbP and I have a multitude of utilities in order for me to do that management, I have the luxury of making some rather complex encounters. These may not translate well to a table top setting.
And there's the added benefit of time. It's much easier to do that much die rolling and encounter management when you don't have five people sitting across from you at the table wondering "well? Are you done yet?"
Several of the encounters in Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 of my campaign involve NPC allies. If it were one ally that's not a problem, but I use them a lot, and in once very specific case there are five PCs, five to six enemies and twenty-three allies. I can't imagine what it would be like to handle the status of thirty-four creatures using pen and paper, dealing with things like rolling initiative over twenty times. Heck, most people might not even own that many miniatures.
So there's my problem... I really like some of these encounters (the one I mention above is my favorite in the entire campaign), but some DMs might take one look at them and think "no way I'm going to deal with all that!" For the sake of publishing, I'm forced to modify them so that they are manageable, so that DMs won't be dismayed at running them, preferring to reduce the complexity or skip the encounter entirely.
I've been interested in getting a feel for live games once again, even if it was simply observing and not an active player. Maybe then I'll have a better idea of whether these encounters really are as complex as I fear them to be.
About the Author
Software developer and game designer in Miami, Florida. Currently working on content for Dungeons and Dragons 5th Edition, Pathfinder, 13th Age and other systems.
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Recent Posts
- Hacking an AI Chat Bot (Part Three)
- Hacking an AI Chat Bot (Part Two)
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