And now for something completly different..

If you did not read that title in a snarky British accent, go back and read it again. I'll wait. Now that I have your Monty Python muscles going, I want to say that having this to do each day once more is invigorating. Hopefully, I can get a decent following like I once had on this site.

Now, onto the business of what you are here for: video games and gaming information, news, or something along the lines of all things "game".

Today I am going to speak about game design. As you can undoubtedly deduce from my previous postings, game design is something that I find interesting, and having the proper design makes or breaks ANY game. First, let's go over the trump card of any computer nerd's day: MMORPGs. Or, say it with me, Mummorpuggers! These games have all sorts of different profit-making models but these are not what I, as a...What should I call myself here? For now I think "Game analyst" will work, though I don't enjoy the professional ring that has, as I do not get paid to do this. So as I was saying: as a game analyst, I am more interested in what sort of game they have and not so much interested in how I get their permission to play it.

Let's take WoW for a first off. Everyone who has even sniffed at online gaming has heard of this beast of a Mummorpugger. People nay-say for weeks on end about this game. However, I am here to take the heat of the lynch mob and tell you something mind-blowing.  This game is very good, based on the merits of being a game. Take away the shitty community of elitist assholes and troll ninja looters and you have yourself a very good game. However, this being a Mummorpugger, it has the one pitfall of ALL Mummorpuggers, and that is the grind-fest of endlessness.

The grind-fest is not entirely a bad thing. It is what keeps us playing for more than 6 days and then dropping it like a broken toy. The problem is changing this grind-fest up in new and exciting ways so that those of us who have been doing it for years can attempt to justify to our fried minds that it's not the same old thing over again.

Now let's go to another game front: the console game. Not that these can truly be homogenized into that category, but they all have one thing that they ALL have to show us. Console games have to have replay value. Replay value is what keeps us still playing the game AFTER we have "beaten" it. If a game that hits the shelves doesn't have a high replay value, people will be very wary of shelling out to meet the high price tags that these games have these days. Coughing up 60-90 bucks for a game you play once and are done with is not something ANYONE wants to do. So either they do not buy it on release day and wait for it to go down about 40-50 bucks in price, or they buy it at a store like GameStop and then bring it back for an exchange after they have beaten it within the return time frame, and get a game with some true replay value.

A console game with replay value is not something that is so hard to find these days. It is something that, after a long time of games being one-shots (albeit 90 hour one-shots), is a nice change to see.  Take an old favorite, Final Fantasy 9. That game took weeks to properly play through, but once you had done it, there were so few secrets to find that replaying the entire game for just those was not worth it. To top it off, some of those secrets were only completable if you rushed through certain parts of the game and thus were meant for speed plays, which is not something I place into the replay value of a game.

Let us continue by going into the realm of the hyper nerd. Tabletop games have just about always been something that is under the stereotype of the basement-dwelling momma's-boy with his basement-dwelling momma's-boy friends who meet every weekend to play at being cool. This stereotype cannot be farther from the truth. This will scare and shock a few of you, I am sure, but many thousands of our U.S. Military play tabletop games whilst overseas. I kid you not when I say that some of our most bad-ass people in this country are nerding it up while in danger of having a bomb dropped on them. Some celebrities also enjoy the game. Vin diesel (Or his real name, Mark Sinclair Vincent) is rumored to have his D&D character's name tattooed somewhere on his body. Oh, and you know those people who invent the very things you are reading this blog post on right now? Avid tabletop players exist among them.

Now that we have the stereotype shattering out of the way, let's get into game design for these. The basic game design for these tabletop games involves the use of a randomized polyhedral object being tossed onto the table to determine an outcome. In other words, a die is rolled and that can be the deciding factor in whether or not your character lives. This design is just about universal to the mainstream tabletop world. This is basically putting the RNG (Random number generator) that video games use into the players hands, and is overall good design when used properly.

To avoid going too in-depth into this subject I will avoid explaining the ins and outs of why DnD 3.5 edition is the single most horribly balanced game in the history of the world. However, I will explain why it works in theory. The class-based system relies on placing a label on your character and defining what your character is and what they can and cannot do in the world. This works because people like having choices, but they also like being secretly told what choices to make. If you look at the cover of the game it looks like everything works out for magic vs melee being even. This is due to smart class tables and clever wording. However, when you get your feet into the game it quickly devolves into a game of "Put the fighter in the middle of the battle and have the squishy mage who used all his spells already in a barrel". This is at low levels. As the levels come and go you will quickly switch positions. "Put the silver bullet mage in the middle of the fight and put everyone else in a barrel lest they get caught in the blast!".

The specifics of why this is have been put into much more detail than I am capable of, over the entirety of the internet. So I will not be doing that here. Now onto what constitutes good tabletop design. Above, I may have made it seem like a class-based system MUST fail. This is simply untrue, though a class-based system must be done properly. Magic and mundane must be able to compete with each other at an even pace the entire way. This is much easier said than it is done. A good way to think of it is this, "If one side looks more promising than the other, no one will choose the other, and thus there is no reason to place it in the game." There is, however, a universal truth with magic: magic will always appear more powerful than the mundane counterpart.

So what are we to do? The answer is simple: do not relegate your game to a "power fest". By this I mean, do not have battle rely on the constant use of abilities. Give your characters abilities, but give the use of these abilities a cost that matters to the characters. So the mages will have to think about whether or not to use a major spell or simply continue to attack with basic things. You might think from the surface that this favors the melee characters, but when a mage can bring out a weapon that is powered by his magic to blast a foe with a spout of arcane energy, the archer might get a bit envious. This is all about game design. Placing incentives to play different things for different situations is something that is difficult to work around with, especially for tabletop, where all the things that can be resolved with complex math that a computer usually does for a video game would have to be done by the players every time they wanted to do those particular actions.


Thank you for reading my ramblings on game design.