A Multiplayer Experience

Writing about the ESO beta got me thinking about storylines for multiplayer games - MMORPGs specifically.  Multiplayer strategy and shooter games less so, because the point there is to have fun with the mechanics whereas the online RPG is all about creating your own character and guiding it through a series of stories.  After all, quests are supposed to be stories not monotonous level grinds, right?  

I guess that would be the first premise I’m starting with here.  A thing cannot both be and not be in the same respect at the same time and RPGs are story games.  Particularly, they are character-driven story games.  You might think this isn’t worth pointing out, but I think its something that MMORPGs have lost touch with.  Or maybe they never had touch.  Maybe they’re like one of those super conservative homeschooling couples that has a gabillion kids but you can’t be sure they’ve ever had sex or if they just reproduce by budding.  Just me?  Ok, self, lay off the homeschoolers.  This is no time to air one’s childhood grievances.  As the hilarious Yatzee once said, there is an inherent existential crisis that resides in the MMORPG genre.  View his whole review of WoW: Cataclysm here, in which he asks that terrifying question - “Why do you raid?”  When you raid for the sake of loot and loot for the sake of raiding, what exactly is the point?

At this point I should make a caveat about my own opinions.  I have never been particularly interested in MMORPGs because I felt that by their very nature they couldn’t have immersive stories and I don’t find any appeal in raiding for the loot and vice versa.  At least, I’m not interested in playing a game long-term for that reason.  That includes single player games - as much as I love Elder Scrolls games I stop playing them once I’ve exhausted the storylines.  I can’t be completely engrossed in looting bandit caves if there isn’t some reason I’m doing it.  Therefore my experience playing MMOs is somewhat limited.  I played Guild Wars 2 enough to get a character to the level cap, a smattering of Star Wars: The Old Republic, and up to level 10 in WoW.  At which point I decided it was boring and grindy and no amount of “Oh its really fun once you hit level 90” was going to get me to slog through the hours it would take me to get there. So anything I say here will be colored by that point of view, which I realize may not be shared by all humankind.  Ok then, now I’m getting on the soapbox.

I said that I don’t believe MMO storylines can be immersive by their nature, and I should probably revise that statement.  I don’t believe the currently accepted formula for an MMO storyline can be immersive because there’s always an inherent conflict between the what is presented to the player and the player’s knowledge.  My experience has been once I create a character I am presented with an epic quest wherein I am the Most Special of all Snowflakes and am the last great hope to save the world.  This is a wonderful starting point for a single player game, but when I’m looking at dozens of other players around me who are being told the exact same thing the epicness of my journey rings hollow.  I am clearly not the sole savior of the world, lone swinger of the Great Spatula of Justice, or any of that.  I’m just another player in the machine that is the game, and I don’t think I’m alone in saying that if you can see the machine behind the game there’s something amiss.  I wonder if there’s a way around that, a story that can still feel like a hero’s journey but also take into account the fact that there are many people involved.

Perhaps I am still power-tripping over being a Master of Dungeons but thinking along these lines brought me quickly to D&D, which is a story-driven multiplayer game.  In a D&D group, the DM has to consider the entire party when planning adventures.  Certainly there can be quests involving a single character’s background, but the overall focus has to be on the party as a whole or players will lose interest.  Have you ever played in a group where the DM’s significant other joins the game and all of a sudden the game has a laser-focus on one character?  That is the anti-fun and players will generally leave.  They will also leave if the DM tries to run each of them through the exact same situation concurrently.  That would be bewilderingly bad DMing.  So I guess my question is if player demand necessitates the production of true multi-player focused content from a single human, can we not demand it of huge companies comprised of many people?

That’s not to say that game developers need to become Dungeon Masters, that would be silly.  There is a difference between tabletop and virtual environments, one of them clearly being of scale.  Where a human DM can spend her time creating content for a specific group of players, game developers have a whole host of players to consider.  They can’t be expected to continually monitor the player base and create content based on their actions.  However, the current solution in my experience has been in essence to railroad players into a static storyline that is common to all.  I think there is a better way, and since there are essentially no new ideas I’m not the only one who thinks so.  Bethesda introduced the Radiant Story in Skyrim, and hopefully will continue to refine it in Elder Scrolls Online.

What I would like to see though is an expansion of the dynamic story beyond the sidequest and into a game as a whole.  In fact, what I would really love is to play an entire game whose developers didn’t write an actual story at all but rather a potential story waiting to be activated by the players.  By now any real game developers are probably staring at their monitors in horror, wondering if I realize the magnitude of what I’m asking.  Truth is, I do and I don’t.  I realize it is a huge thing to undertake, and I have an imagining of the kind of work necessary, but I am neither a game designer nor an AI engineer so specifics aren’t something I could really speculate about.

But generalizations are something I can speculate the hell out of, and if what I’m calling “potential storytelling” in my head were to come about I have a couple ideas on how it might happen.  I do know a little bit about relational databases and analytics - enough to know that the more data you have, the cleaner it is, and the more refined your methods of analyzing it are the better your results will be.  If the result is to be player engagement, then the more “data” or potential stories you have the better.  I believe (and this is the “faith” use of the word not “I believe you are full of crap”) this can be accomplished by building a network of smaller interconnected blocks of character archetypes, lore, morality codes, quest examples, and so on.

And here’s where I get science-fictiony.  You need more than a network of ideas to make a story, there has to be a plot.  The game still needs a Dungeon Master, one that can simultaneously create adventures for the solo player and for the group in hundreds of different places at once.  Or rather it needs something that does what D&D groups do when they get to big; split off into another group with another DM.  You see where I’m going with this, right?  An AI so powerful with such a vast database of possibilities that its calculated creativity is virtually indistinguishable from the real thing.  Maybe the Singularity will happen in the land of the MMO - perhaps that is even where it should happen.  Don’t give me that look, I’m being serious.***

The landscape of gaming is changing.  With the newer consoles and super-powerful PCs the graphics race that defined previous generations is becoming less relevant.  Games are looking more and more like their concept art as time goes on and “having cool graphics” isn’t the badge of honor it used to be.  Rather, I think the focus should be more on what technologies can be leveraged to make games more dynamic and immersive, more alive if you will.  If I’m being honest, if there’s any one thing I believe with anything approaching religious certainty it is that if a technology can be sufficiently imagined it can (and probably will) be created.  I would like to see this particular technology happen in my lifetime.

I find it a little ironic that after all that my solution to MMOs that seem too much like machines being a machine that appears human.  Granted, I could still be high from unwrapping 3 epics and 2 legendaries in Hearthstone yesterday and I’m just talking nonsense.  I should probably stop before I hurt myself.

***The author would like to reiterate that she is neither a game designer nor an AI programmer, but a crazy lady with a blog.

Heeeeeeeyo I have a Twitch Channel!

Well, technically everyone does so that's not exciting.  Whatever, crazy lady that's like getting excited about your breakfast cereal.  Which is Cheerios, not Cinnamon Toast Crunch or Reese's Puffs.  What is exciting is there is going to be something on my Twitch channel!!  Hurray!

I've never really had the urge to stream myself playing games (except for that brief early Hearthstone period where I was entertaining the silly notion that I could become the Most Powerful Wizard in the land) because there's nothing really exceptional about me or my gaming skills.  Unless you count "most distance physically traveled trying to force Mario over a jump by jerking the controller" as being exceptional.  I which case I am the CHAMPION.  However, I've been wanting to run a Pathfinder campaign for a really long time - I actually did get it started briefly back in Seattle but it didn't go very far.  My friends and I were all in food service, and trying to get three bartenders to have the same 6 hours off is like herding cats.  Feral cats, and you don't have any thumbs.  But this campaign idea has been kicking around in my brain ever since and the other week a golden opportunity came about for me to run it and start my very first stream.

The first session is this Sunday from 12-4 PST and will probably be boring because it will be all about character creation.  But if anyone is interested in following the adventures of some awesome DayKnights on Sundays, and possibly watch me make an ass of myself imitating NPCs demonstrate my amazing shouting prowess go and follow my channel!  I'm really excited about this because there are so many moments in tabletop gaming over the years I really wish I had a video archive of.  There's a creativity and openness to tabletop RPGs that just isn't possible to have in the vidja games.  Also I'm an attention whore.

One last thing, I'm using roll20.net to run this game and so far it is a seriously sick little piece of programming.  Check it out if you're thinking of running a virtual game yourself!

Collaboration: don't be that guy.

Really, this is less of a post and more of an excuse for me to relate the most hilariously awful gaming experience of my life.  Its been forever since I wrote anything (even for the Starcraft Diaries, though I have TONS of material) so I'm hoping to get the brain juices flowing once more.  Alrighty.  So, there's a group that meets every other Saturday at my preferred game store to play Pathfinder.  I love me some Pathfinder, so I decided to join one of the open tables.  When I got there I realized that every species of gamer that I enjoy playing with the least was present: the metagamer, the rules-obsessed cretin, the queen bee, the "party leader", and the strange older person who likes to play child characters.  That last one is pretty self-explanatory.  The group had this guy who must have been in his sixties and was playing TWO characters who were both children and were betrothed to each other.  I didn't know him well enough to do so, but I feel as though someone should have taken him aside and gently explained the creep factor.  Ok, on to the rest of the archetypes that are death to good role-playing experiences.

The metagamer.  I understand the allure of using your encyclopedic knowledge of the rules to build a character that is far more powerful than it should be at a given level.  One that knows the elemental weaknesses of hordes of mythical beasts even though they've been living on a farm for most of their life.  Or how to combine magic items so that they're rolling an entire mug of dice for damage.  I actually think it would be awesome to build a character that is either so intelligent or so hopped-up nuts that they realize their lives are being controlled by a bunch of Dew-swilling nerds, thereby allowing one to role-play the metagame.  I'm sure that's been thought of before, but it bears repeating and now I want my next character to be that nutjob.  Other than that, metagamers drive me up the wall.  I spent two hours creating a character for this game with the goal of being balanced, realistic, and not over-powered.  I thought that swanning in with a character as powerful as Galactus would be a bad thing, but apparently not.  I knew I was in trouble when people started asking me what magic items my character had.  My girl was a ninja, raised it the forest - +4 charisma belts weren't exactly growing on trees.  Anyway, it turned out that my character was completely useless when the battle finally happened, because the other characters were so powerful that the DM just threw a bunch of white dragons at us.  What good is a ninja against efffing DRAGONS?  I ask you.

So, the "Party Leader and SRS gamer".  This is a person who's been gaming for so long they believe they know what the best course of action is.  Forever.  Any ideas they don't like will be argued and argued to death until the person with the offending idea just gives up.  Their character must always be baddass and always portrayed in the best light.  If they fail a save they will spend the next five minutes describing that the character only failed the save because of some outside influence.  My favorite character of all time was a half-dragon/tielfling combat druid who was lawful neutral and took herself very seriously.  At one point the party was attacked by giant spiders who tried to trap them with their sticky spider-spit.  Every single member of the party made their reflex save to avoid the attack except my druid - her reflex save was rubbish.  Even her animal companion (a bear who was one size category above her) made his save and there she was stuck in a cocoon of spider-spit looking extremely foolish.  Yes, I felt the urge to get all shirty about it and argue that it was a very dignified cocoon but what was the damn point of that?  Always insisting your character is badass and resplendent is annoying for everyone around you.

The Rule-Obsessed Cretin.  This person will pick apart the gamemaster's every move with their knowledge of the rules, especially when doing so will give their character an advantage.  They don't care if it interrupts the narrative, bores other people to tears, or makes a certain person (me) want to stab them in the neck with a mechanical pencil.  They will whinge and complain if they aren't allowed all the magic items they feel they should have before a mission because they're in the book even though you're stuck in the middle of the forest.  Does that passing deer have an extensive pawning business?  They will also nitpick to death that they should be able to get their griffon's armor on before the dragons arrive because donning armor hastily reduces the time.  I'm sure the griffon was being super-cooperative about everything too, lifting his arms up so you can pull the chain shirt over his head.  Its an EFFING GRIFFON - its going to take more than three rounds to get its armor on.

So I spent most of this game session being incredibly irritated, tweeting about being irritated, and wishing I hadn't gotten myself into it in the first place.  The game started at 1pm and was supposed to end at midnight. I didn't make it that long, and made the excuse of having to get up early and fled.  Every attempt to role-play was met with out-of-character bemusement so eventually I stopped talking altogether.  Every idea I had was shot down, most of the time before I could even finish, by the "Party Leader".  The side conversations made it impossible to concentrate, and I could not get the thought out of my head that I was playing with a man in his 50's or 60's who liked to play children.

Oh, I forgot one.  The Queen Bee.  I'm a girl, and I game.  I don't assume that the corollary of those two things existing together in my person means I deserve all the attention in the room - I try to earn it by thinking about what I say, contributing to conversation, and not interrupting people while they're talking.  You know, manners.  The Queen Bee does not think this way.  She deserves all the attention and when she doesn't get it the game will not move forward.  Its horrifying, and maybe that's where some of the bad press we ladies have been getting lately has been coming from.  But you know what?  Attention whores can be of either gender.  I've met both - I don't like it and I don't like them.  I probably have more to say on the subject but I'll have to think about it more first.

D&D Next

Yes, Dungeons and Dragons isn't a video game.  But without it, I doubt the single-player RPG would have happened at all.  And lets be honest, RPGs are like the really cool girl in high school that all the other genres want to dress like.  The concept of leveling up has snuck into the God of War series, Devil May Cry, Assassin's Creed, and tons of others.  And besides, this is my blog, and there's maybe three people who are going to read this.  So I write what I want!  Suck it, my girlfriend is Science!

Zing.

I didn't get into D&D until relatively late in life, thanks to an extremely Catholic upbringing.  There was a radio series I used to listen to obsessively called "Adventures in Odyssey" that had a two-part episode detailing the horrible dangers of Role-Playing Games.  And that Jack Chick pamphlet everyone likes to make fun of?  All the grown-ups in my little microcosm of life thought that made complete sense.  To be fair, "Adventures in Odyssey" was pretty well written and I still remember some of the characters with great fondness.  But the point is I was well into my twenties before I rolled my first d20; and the further point is I've met some of the best people I know through pencil and dice RPGs.  

A new edition of D&D is happening soon, and the lovely people at WOTC have released a playtest version so that the gaming community might judge and comment on its growth.  A beta test, as it were.  At first there were only combat rules, and a single environment.  A week and a half ago character creation rules were released so our DM could bring his own story points and adventure hooks to the table.  And it enabled me to create Ashura Miri, the con-artist katana-wielding rogue who sometimes doesn't think before jumping out of a bush to cut that guy's head off.  Because he had a friend, and when you're not getting sneak attack bonuses sometimes you whiff your attacks and he almost cuts you in half with his greatsword.

So far the system is pretty smooth.  I never played 4th Edition because my friends all hated it, so 3.5 and Pathfinder is what I'm used to.  But I've heard they've taken some things from 4E that were popular and integrated them.  I think the backgrounds and specialties have roots in 4E, but if I'm wrong I'll deny it.  However, I love that addition to character creation because it helped me get a firm grip on my character's personality.  Combat is pretty similar to earlier editions, but streamlined because of the advantage/disadvantage mechanic.  Remember having to calculate what your barbarian's attack bonuses are while raging?  Or what penalties you take while duel-weilding?  Now you don't have to worry about it - if you're at advantage you roll 2d20 and take the higher result, and disadvantage is the opposite.  Some people might think this is an over-simplification but I've always thought more squabbling about the numbers = less fun.  The skills are now completely married to attributes, and so far there isn't a rank system.  You're either trained or you aren't.  

I'm wondering if WOTC is going to de-power the magic classes a bit before the official release; our wizard necromancer cast a spell yesterday that literally ate a berserker from the inside out.  It was a first level spell.  On the one hand, that could lead to some truly epic adventures, on the other it seems a tiny bit excessive for a level 1 character.  Although I'm incredibly excited to find out what druids will be able to do.  And bards.  Maybe not great in combat, but role-playing a bard is one of the most fun things in the world.

As of now, I'm completely on board with the new edition.  It has all the mechanics I loved from 3.5 with some great additions.  Even though they've only released 4 races and classes there is some amazing variety to be had.  As an example, two of us in the group are playing Rogues but I'm a Charlatan/Thief and he's a Thug/Bounty Hunter.  We've got a Fighter who's an archer and one who's a sword-and-board expert.  A wizard who's a healer and one who's a necromancer.

What I really love is the chance to learn this system from the ground up; I've always wanted to run a campaign but I feel like I'm constantly having to look up rules which wouldn't make it much fun for my players.  And so far its looking like 5E might be backwards-compatible with my 3.5 books which means I can still use the Book of Vile Darkness to plan encounters!