Order/Chaos Dice System: Introduction

A while ago, I got a copy of the indie PnP RPG Don’t Rest Your Head. It’s an interesting game, very influenced by stories like Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman and the neo-noir film Dark City, directed by Alex Proyas.

 

Although I’ve not had a chance to run it, it features a neat little resolution mechanic I’ve seen called ‘rich dice’. Conflict resolution involves rolling pools of dice of different colours; the success of the roll is determined by how many dice, regardless of colour, show a 1 or 2. The pool which shows the highest number ‘dominates’ the action and gives more information about how the character succeeded (or failed).

 

A similar mechanic is used in the new edition of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay; here, you can see at a glance (with practice) why a particular roll succeeded; maybe your second spent aiming was what helped you find the crack in their armour, maybe charging in screaming caught them off guard.

 

In DRYH, the GM rolls a pool (Pain) against 3 pools rolled by the players (Madness, Discipline and Exhaustion). What makes it interesting is any of the pools can dominate with a success, even Pain. Further, you can push certain stats (such as Exhaustion) for more dice; the extra dice might help you succeed, but if that pool dominates you end up with a further negative consequence.

I had a few ideas about how I could structure a similar system; I figured I’d feel them out on the blog to see if it all hangs together.

“You’re being economical with the Truth”

I recently finished LA Noire.

Like many recent R* games - yes, I realize it was actually published by R* and developed by Team Bondi – LA Noire kind of snuck up on me. I didn’t go into the game with too many preconceptions. I really, really enjoyed it, but I can see why going into it with the expectations that it’s Red Dead 1947 or Grand Theft Noire would be disappointing. I adored the atmosphere, and even played through in Black & White mode for the authentic cinematic experience.

As I was playing I was struck by how similar it was to a traditional adventure game. You find items, talk to characters and use things from your inventory. I guess the closest game to it would be the Phoenix Wright series, with the witness interrogations and crime scene investigation, though it does cut out the cartoon campness of the Ace Attorney games (to the point where it could perhaps be accused of taking itself a little too seriously). Mainly, though, I was surprised by how neatly they sidestepped a lot of the adventure game niggles that have plagued the genre for years.

Graphic adventure games have traditionally fallen back into ‘pixel hunts’. So, one particular item in the background is interactive, requiring careful combing of the screen with the cursor to find it. This is often exacerbated when only one particular item will satisfy the game’s peculiar requirement. Maybe a stick is needed to reach something just out of reach, but of course it’s only possible to use a stick for this, and in fact it’s not possible to take any other path round the puzzle.

LA Noire uses subtle musical cues and controller vibrations to highlight when your character, Phelps, is near an item he can examine. It even lets you know when you’ve found all the important items in a scene. There’s a limited pool of ‘intuition points’, which are replenished as you progress, that can highlight all the clues you need. I think most critically of all, you can even progress through the story without finding all the clues in an area.

Putting all this together you dissolve the frustration of not finding the correct item. LA Noire retains the satisfaction of solving a puzzle the correct way. At the same time, by allowing the player to progress without requiring them to collect a backpack full of the kind of things you’d find Wombles throwing away, it means players don't spend an hour trying everything in their inventory on everything in the environment. It should also be mentioned that the game lets you skip action sequences too so you can focus on investigating.

The other facet of this is to introduce a measure of replay value to the game. This is something helped by the game’s episodic nature. Each installment has the scope for some branching based on player choice within it without majorly affecting the overarching plotline. But on top of that, there’s an opportunity to go back and pick up any clues you’ve missed; in one case, I entirely missed out questioning a suspect by visiting the locations out of order and, although I still got the right guy, there was about half an hour of the case that I missed.

I’d also like to say a word about the scarcity of the action. In Grand Theft Auto, when you pick up a mission, you know pretty much what lies ahead. You’ll drive to a place, shoot some people, then drive somewhere else. Sometimes you’ll chase someone in a car, sometimes they’ll chase you. All well and good, but it begins to feel like the beginning of an episode of Casualty; When you start a simple sounding mission, you’re waiting for the inevitable complication. You know, you just know, that your job to deliver a package to a contact will end in violence.

LA Noire has much less action, and the action is a fair bit clunkier than other similar R* games, but because it’s unexpected and almost restrained it works brilliantly. You turn up to question a suspect, you’re always aware they might try and run away, but because they don’t always when they do it is much more effective.

I think I’ve said everything I’d like to about LA Noire. Other, real websites have spoken at much greater length about what it does well and where it’s lacking. I was just excited when I played it that the changes made to broaden the genre's appeal mean we may get more strong story-based adventure games.

Plougher of Kings

In The Witcher 2, I’m playing as an arsehole. 

I demand rewards for work I would have offered for free in other games (hey, killing monsters is how I make a living!). I kill people who provoke me. I even fed two guys to a demented ghost they had provoked, justifying to myself their actions had brought their fate on themselves.

I mean, it helps that Geralt is already a bit of a prick to begin with: he’ll often haggle the price of a job without any input from the player, something that in other games would have been a dialogue choice left up to you. But this all works to let me get more inside his head. When confronted by the two guys and the angry ghost, I didn’t think about what I would do, I thought about what Geralt would do.

I’ve played a fair bit of TW2 over the past few days - including a ‘just ten minutes before bed’ session that ended up with me not getting to sleep until after 03:00 - and it’s made me think about roleplaying and consequences in video games. I know that sounds grandiose and pretentious, but bear with me here.

One of the things I didn’t initially click with in The Witcher The First was that you were forced to play as Geralt of Rivia. He's a genetically engineered and mutated monster hunter, covered in scars and with a slightly twisted sense of morality. In a way he’s the logical conclusion of the adventurer archetype, in the same way that the characters in Watchmen were a deconstruction of the superhero archetype. He literally exists only to solve problems in small villages by killing monsters.

Of course, as he is a defined character (he’s starred in books, graphic novels, even a TV series and film), all of the choices you make must be between the kind of things Geralt would do anyway. And as the morality is typically grey-on-grey in the Witcher world, the ‘right’ choice is hard to make.

The thing TW2 really does well is that the consequences for your actions are not immediately obvious. A choice you make might not have ramifications for another several hours of play, so if you don’t like the outcome of the action there’s not really much chance of reloading and picking something else. 

And it goes further than that. As a sweeping generalisation, games tend to be very predictable systems. I need enough information to make an informed choice about what to do. LA Noire is a good example of this: because it’s so vital to the gameplay, the facial tics and twitches to indicate lying have to be over the top. Unexpected consequences for actions the player has no information about is kind of a dick move for a developer.

Of course, real life is nothing like this. Getting up late for work one day might have all sorts of consequences for even the rest of your life. If you try and imagine every single thing that would have happened if you got up on time you’d go mad. TW2 exploits this to make your actions in the game world more real by making them less fair. Yeah, you couldn’t predict what the outcome of your action would be. You can’t go back and change it, you’re going to have to live with the consequences and think a bit harder the next time something like this crops up. 

So, as you can tell I’m enjoying The Witcher 2. I’ll try and post more thoughts up about it when I’m a bit further through; I’m still only in Chapter One, and I hear the second chapter is packed to the gills with awesomeness.

Demo Reviews

I've just got a hold of Red Dead Redemption, but as playing that is going to be a pretty mammoth undertaking, I thought I'd do some posts in the meantime!

I was in London this weekend to see some friends over from the other side of the world. Made the mistake of walking down Oxford Street, and happened to walk past Primark... The combination of the close press of a million souls, the 30°C late afternoon heat, and the already fairly ground-in Evil of Primark combined to create something akin to the 3rd Circle of Hell. I manged to avoid its Abyssal pull, and thought I was through the worst.

Then we got on the Underground.

Anyway, I've also been playing a couple of demos.

I gave Transformers: War for Cybertron a whirl, a game I've had fairly mixed feelings about. I was initially excited when I heard about it because... well, it's Transformers, innit? And it could never be as bad as the absolute mess of CGI Michael Bay released as a film, could it? Then my initial excitement turned partially to doubt; surely the whole point of Transformers was they were robots in disguise, right? That's why they said it in the song. I've never been completely comfortable with the Cybertron based parts of the Transformers continuities, and here was a game based entirely on Cybertron.

The demo was multiplayer only, not really the part of a game I look forward to most. Still, it gave a reasonable idea of what the robot-on-robot action would be like (fairly clunky and visually indistinct, as it turns out), and while it didn't strain my underpant elastic at first, I've chewed it over in my brain for the past few days and have started to warm to it. I think a single player mode with a bit more character and charm is exactly what I'm looking for, and I hear that's exactly what the game has. Still, I do hope that the vehicle modes in the full game are more inspiring than they are in the demo; just about everyone in the matches I played stuck to the robot mode, a sad indictment of a game based around Transforming robots.   

The other demo I tried was Blur, a collision of Burnout and Mario Kart. There is honestly no other way to describe it. The action is pretty eyeball-searing, but I think the fun of both the above games comes from clustering around the TV with your housemates, handing out the beers, and then squealing obscenities at each other. Maybe if I'd played Blur in such surroundings it would've jumped straight to the top of my most wanted list, but, as it is, it's probably going to stay low priority at least until it comes down in price.

Fable II Thoughts

I've spent the past couple of weeks ploughing through Lionhead's Fable II. I actually played Brutal Legend just before it (which, looking back over some old, old posts was a game I was really looking forward to) but that will have to be a post for a different time.

So...

I played the first Fable game a few years ago on PC, and quite enjoyed it. It didn't quite have enough freedom for me, I never felt like I was exploring or really adventuring. The world was presented as a series of small, mostly linear 'bubbles' with a couple of key locations in them, so you couldn't wander off the beaten track. The story also wasn't the best, and I think I eventually gave up around two thirds of the way through. That said, there was something engaging about the central character, and the way his appearance reflected your actions in the game.

Fable II builds what I thought were the strong areas of the first game. Unfortunately, some of the poor areas are carried across directly; for instance, the story was particularly uninspiring. It's full of paper thin characters and ridiculous moments where a character (I like to mentally label them Professor Von Plotexposition) turns up and explains what's happening. There was some backstory to explain why the Bad Guy was the bad guy (actually, that's a lie... his fall from his originally tragic situation to a cruel tyrant was explained in one line of dialogue, which itself was simply a cheesy metaphor), but it really was hard to care about any of it. At all. I mean, it says something about the game that I was more upset about a bad guy kicking my dog than I was when my sister was murdered (actually it may say more about me).

I think I would have preferred if the story had actually been more generic and spent more time playing on other RPG cliches, something it does on several occasions very well. Slight spoiler here, but there's a brilliant twist on the classic 'My son thinks he's an adventurer and has wondered into a dungeon' quest; if the style of this quest had been carried across to the main story I would have lapped it up right the way through, and we wouldn't have had the jarring shifts in tone that the game is currently plagued with. One minute, you're helping a pair of bumbling brothers (Freelance Necromancers) who have accidentally raised the dead, and the next you're forced into torturing some prisoners in the Bad Guy's castle.

I did at least enjoy the voice acting; good to see an almost entirely British cast (Stephen Fry, Julia Sawalha), even if it does slip into cliche comedy accents in several places. You'll already be able to tell what accents the peasants have before you even have the game.

One area where there has been an obvious improvement, however, is in the graphics. They weren't too shabby in the original, they had a certain cartoony charm. In Fable II they are absolutely stunning. In particular, the seasonal shifts (sadly there isn't a Harvest Moon-style seasonal cycle, changes in the seasons are driven by plot) and the lighting and weather effects are amazing. Seeing the sun breaking through the clouds, or watching snow slowly drift to the ground are some particular highlights.

The levelling system works well, though it certainly could have been deeper. As your character kills enemies with your various abilities you gain experience associated with that area; shoot an enemy to death and you get more experience to invest in the Skill tree. Your character can specialise in Strength, Skill or Will, and there's also a 'general' experience pool that can be used to advance your character in any of the trees. One small problem, though, is that I reckon most characters will end up with lots of experience in all three areas over the course rather than specialising in one. You are supposed to be the only hero who has the mastery over all areas, so I guess it kind of fits, but one of the central themes about the game is choice. Why not make the choice as to which path you progress down meaningful, instead of allowing anyone become an expert at everything?

What is very cool, though an idea carried over from the first game, is that advancing your hero in the three areas will change your appearance. Focus on Strength, and you muscles visibly bulge, concentrate on Will and glowing runes will start to appear on your skin. Go with Skill and your character... erm, gets taller?

Anyway, leading on from this, the reintroduction of alignment morphing from games like the Black & White series is welcome. I'm a sucker for stuff like this; by the end of the game by character was a 6' tall bodybuilder, sporting a rather fetching cuffed overcoat, shiny white teeth and a halo. In particular I like how there are now two character sliders; one for your character's 'purity', which is a measure of how greedy and indulgent you are, and one for your character's 'alignment' which is how selfless you are. Tou could be a Good character who is Corrupt (a decadent character who drinks and sleeps with prostitutes, but wouldn't harm anyone else) or an Evil character who is also Pure (someone very organised and regimented; more of a brutal dictator than a psychopathic killer!). The former character would end up looking fat and unhealthy, and the latter would attract a cloud of smoke and end up with a chalk-white complexion.

(Incidentally, how stupid is it that you have to eat celery to get thinner? All the running, fighting, dancing, chopping wood, etc. etc. makes no difference to your figure!)

Also, some locations change depending on your actions through the game; the effects of this can be seen fairly early on, with one location in the main city of Bowerstone changing either to a hive of scum and villainy or a fairly well-to-do area with a scattering of shops depending on whether a guard you encounter ends up being fired or not (as a direct consequence of your actions).

The area where I had the most fun, however, was interacting with the world and the economy. Unlike a world like Oblivion, Morrowind, or Fallout 3, prices of goods depend on supply and demand along with the local economy. Keep an eye open, and you can make money shipping goods from areas where they're on sale over to areas where they're in demand. Invest a lot of money in an area and the quality of their goods goes up, allowing for a bigger margin if you decide to play trader. I may be wrong, but I think if you pick up things like blacksmithing jobs it can result in the weapon shops producing more, but don't hold me to that. Still, if you fancy to property trade, you can buy cheap buildings in town, pour a load of money into the local economy, then sell the houses on again in a booming market with a redecorated interior to make a fat profit.

In fact, it would have been interesting if this had gone further, if it would basically a fantasy Renaissance-era version of Elite; imagine if you could own woodmills or ore mines, and by having a stranglehold on the supply of raw materials you could ensure your blacksmiths were producing the best or only weapons. You could even encourage strife to boost the sales of your own weapons (I'm sure this happens in a film, but I'll be buggered if I can remember which one.). By the sounds of it, this aspect of the game is set to be vastly improved on in Fable III. The idea that your entire kingdom will change depending on your actions as ruler is quite exciting, with, for instance, particular neighbourhoods falling into disrepair if you neglect to tackle crime.

I should mention when you take the time to earn money like this playing the game ends up pretty easy; money is plentiful, therefore it's easy to buy health potions, food, and property.

Bottom line is that Fable II isn't really a 'proper' RPG by any means. It isn't even a particularly accomplished action-RPG as the combat is way too simplistic (compare Fable II to a stat heavy, crunchy behemoth like Dragons Age: Origins). What it is, is a toy box where you can mess about with the various tools at your disposal; it sort of reminds me of playing with Playmobil as a child. It's even pretty much one of the only games I would consider playing through as evil, as the evil is much more of the top hat-wearing, mustache twirling Villainy than actual EVIL evil.

In many ways, this all makes it a classic bit of Lionhead software. Similar to Black & White, it's a series of cool mechanics without a huge amount of traditional 'game' holding it all together; this is both the title's main strength and main weakness.