Archive for the ‘DEAD’ Category

How Left 4 Dead 2 taught me to be a coward.

Thursday, February 11th, 2010

Surely my life isn’t all work and no play – I occassionally get to spend some time decapitating zombies in the very amazing Left 4 Dead 2.  This is a game that may as well have been written explicitly for me.  I enjoyed (and conquered most of the Achievements for) Left 4 Dead, so I was worried that L4D2 wouldn’t crank up the tension enough.

Au contraire.

I’ve had more pants-crapping, adrenaline-fueled moments in L4D2 than I can admit to.  The additional of melee weapons makes the game exceptional visceral.  There’s something to be said for sniping your way carefully to safety – there’s something else entirely, AMAZINGLY FUN to be said about carving your way out of a rampaging horde of rabid zombies with a machete, or the satisfying *crunk* of head colliding with cricket bat, then detaching and flying into the distance.

L4D2 is so good, in fact, that its the first game I’ve played where cowardice seemed like the most viable option.  Recently, I was playing online with some friends (including Story Games guru Andy Kitkowski), going through the Swamp Fever campaign.  The climax of this campaign is a showdown at a gothic Antebellum mansion – and it’s easily the hardest of the endgame scenarios in both versions of Left 4 Dead.  The infected pour in from every direction at long range, and even with a well-knit group chances are that you’ll get overwhelmed.

We managed to make it through (barely) and absconded from the upper balcony to the gates where a boat is due to arrive and holed up there for the last couple of waves of infected, waiting for the real killers – two (!) Tanks – big, beefy ‘roid-raging zombies that can knock you into next week.  This is the only place I’ve ever seen such a thing, and the first time I realized there were two Tanks, I almost gave up the idea of finishing the campaign.  But again, we soldiered through and (barely) survived intact.  The gate blew, and I ran along with the Rochelle-player out into the water.  It was then that I noticed Coach went down.

I was almost on the boat, but I stopped, knelt and pointed my sniper rifle back to see what was going on.  Nick was still there as well, and the two of them were being swarmed.  I had the sniper rifle (so much fun!) and started cutting through the swarm by shooting just over Coach’s head.  It looked like Nick was going to be able to get him up, but then a big rock came out from nowhere and knocked him to the ground as well – the calling card of another Tank attack.  So I had a choice – try to wade in and save them both (possible, but unlikely) or save my own virtual ass and get on the boat.

Normally, I play with a chip on my shoulder.  I aim to win – not just survive.  But this was the first time I’d gotten to the damn boat, and that elusive Achievement called to me.  Then I watched another wave of infected burst through the gates, past the now-dead Coach and nearly-dead Nick.  I turned and ran like the coward I was.  The feeling as the credits rolled wasn’t mixed – I was elated.  And not because I’d actually survived – but because a game had given me such a visceral shock, caused me such trouble, given me such pause that at the very end, when I had the chance to play the hero I turned tail and ran from the sheer horror of it.

Oh, the beauty.

Left 4 Dead + the First 101 Days

Wednesday, November 19th, 2008

Here we are at November 19th, 101 days into my GenCon Year.  Where are we?

Well, I’ve completed an overhaul of my Game Chef 2007 entry, Eidolon – now retitled Terrible World.  I’ve created a couple of prototypes and I’m alpha-testing it to make sure that the system mechanics aren’t completely out of whack.

Second, I’m in the process of formally writing up Strangers (more on that in my next post), a slice-of-life game based on the idea of an R-map ‘story machine’.

But what I really want to talk about is Left 4 Dead, the new zombie shooter from Valve.

* * *

Oh. My. God.  Even if this weren’t the most thematically appropriate game for me to play on the planet, this would be one hell of an amazing game.  In case you’re not into PC gaming, Left 4 Dead uses a new technology from Valve called the ‘Director AI’ that assesses the health of you and your teammates and adjusts the location of enemies and resources throughout the map.  I’ve played through the first two maps of the game more than a few times using the demo, and every single play-through felt different.  L4D keeps you on the edge of your seat, waiting for the next flood of rage zombies to come crashing through a door; and when you’re absolutely ready, it lets loose some slack, presenting room after empty room that you keep bursting into, waiting for that next adrenaline-fueled wave of enemies.  I’m not sure how it does it, but when you actually do release your sphincter, you’re due for a dose of REALLY rough times.

On other run-throughs, my co-ops and I have been hit by multiple waves of zombies in the opening seconds of the game, reducing us to pulp.

My only real gripe with the game is that the four co-op characters are completely alike.  I understand the reasoning: Having the characters as specialists weakens the whole ‘we all need to make it to the end’ vibe of the game.  It becomes a matter of each specialist doing their niche thing instead of all the players doing their damn best at fending off the dead.  It takes a lot of grief out of the mix.

It’s also been fun to play online, where the Counter Strike mentality has gotten more than one player killed but good.  Charging ahead alone is the fastest way to get killed – as is lurking in the aft.  The Director will measure that distance and pounce on you.  Online play also taught me that ‘turtling’ – taking it slow and clearing the level methodically – is a bad idea.  Go too slow and you’ll run out of bullets before the game runs out of zombies.  You have pistols that have unlimited ammo, but unless you’re a headshot god (much harder in L4D because of the erratic way that the Infected move!), running out of ammo is a bad idea.

Which brings me to the visuals and sound: Really great.  Given that there are so many objects on the screen at any one time, the graphics aren’t next-gen, but I can crank all of the settings up on my dual-core machine  and get a great ride.  The Infected lurch, fight, slump and then burst at you in a full-on screaming rage.  Again, because of the pure number of polygons, the bodies disappear but the blood doesn’t – making any serious encounter look like a pipe bomb went off in a slaughterhouse.  Molotovs set the Infected on fire, but they run at you anyways, a la 28 Days Later.

All in all, the game has given me a lot of inspiration for working some additional material and changes into DEAD.  The very idea of a Director (embodied by the Dead player) and the Threat deck in DEAD as a character in its own right just got a big pat on the back.

And with 264 days left, who knows?

Systems, Formal and Informal

Sunday, September 28th, 2008

In this post, Jonathan Walton asks “System Matters + Lumpley Principle = ?’.  At ‘Story by the Throat’, a blog name that I personally covet, Joel considers the differences between RPGs and what his friend Willem is doing with his own blogject, the College of Mythic Cartography.  Both posts consider the same subject: what is the boundary between structured play in RPGs and the unstructured ‘other stuff’ – either the happenings at the table in the Lumpley Principle, or in an activity such as story-jamming.

The answer to my mind is quite simple: with any activity of this kind, there are formal and informal systems.  The formal system in RPGs is the rule systems.  They define what is part of ‘the game’ – the exchanges of currency that can be made, and the channels that the players can operate in. 

Of course, the players also operate in one or more informal systems – social networks, interpersonal dynamics, gaming culture and the like – which have their own sets of rules and operations.  A classic examples of the informal systems at the table are the Girlfriend Effect, where the main squeeze of the GM gets special consideration for his or her character.  A more positive example is when I let my 5 year-old daughter know that there’s a better move that she can take in checkers.

With this in mind, story-jamming simply moves the formal systems surrounding story creation that are in place in most RPGs and places them inside the bounds of the informal social systems of the group doing the jamming.  The players do what feels right, and there’s no resistance from more formal systems of interaction – the game isn’t telling them what to do.  To varying degrees, the ‘classic’ RPG player wants that resistance.  They want the game to push back, to confine their actions.  Working within the bounds of that resistance makes the game interesting – the idea that you I can say ‘BANG’ and you can’t say ‘NUH UH’ – or rather, that you can say ‘NUH UH’, but you have to have the rules backing you up as well.

Various attempts over the years have been made to introduce formal structure to the informal areas of gaming, and vice-versa.  I would call any explicit Social Contract an attempt to introduce formality to the informal system around the game table.  Primetime Adventures codifies things like ‘everyone agreeing what the show is going to be about’ – that sort of explicit agreement is a formal structure inside the fuzziness of informal table gatherings.

While I have no problem with the abstraction of game rules to fit in with a given social situation (Willem’s friends want to story-jam, not to do something kinda like story-jamming), I don’t agree with the imposition of formal structures into the social realm of games.  At best, I think that games designs should function well regardless of the social structure of the participants – imagine the rules of chess falling apart because the two players didn’t like each other.  A game should contain enough formal structure to insulate play from egregious social dysfunction – at least to the point where play is still possible.  If everyone walks away from the table, that’s another situation entirely.

A lot of the ideas that I’ve been playing around with: DEAD, AFTER and Cold War being the three that stand out, revolve around the idea that complete harmony at the table is all fine and dandy, but it’s not what makes a game interesting.  What’s interesting is having your best friends around the table and gleefully backstabbing them for the sake of a good story – which is the only shared endgame that everyone at the table shares.

* * *

As a postscript, the AGE Model takes all of this formal/informal stuff in stride.  The Gamespace is the home of the formal systems set up by the rules.  The Playspace is where the messy social stuff happens.  Interaction between the two spaces is the same idea covered by the Lumpley Principle, and taken together, and the two spaces taken as a whole, with all of their interconnections, is the answer to the equation ‘System Matters + Lumpley Principle’.  Call it the Fuzzyformal System, or something even more clever.

AGE Wordle

Monday, September 15th, 2008

Here’s a meme I can get behind.  Wordle creates typographical art out of a document.  I fed in the AGE Model, and got this out:

The Current Bucket List

Sunday, June 15th, 2008

Here, for my own benefit mainly, is a complete core dump of all the game ideas that I have either on the front burner, back burner, or in the percolator:

Front Burner:

Back Burner:

Percolating:

The core system finally has a name …

Tuesday, March 25th, 2008

Cairn.

After much deliberation and a lot of searching, I finally have a name for the core mechanic that is underlying DEAD, Cold War, Merchant and a lot of other ideas these days. It took a long time, but now it seems intuitive and simple: a cairn – a pile of stones infused with meaning.

Awesome.

I tinkered with the idea of using the Inuit word inuksuk, until I realized that I’d be the most recent in a long line of white folks co-opting the term. Inuksuk are fascinating, though – check out a scholarly paper here, and some photos on Google Images. They were used in some instances as hunting blinds and ‘beaters’ – fake humans that would confuse caribou being herded into a slaughter area by Inuit hunters. Inuksuk means “something which acts for or performs the function of a person.” Which is something to take to heart for the games: That the cards and tokens themselves act like an additional player in the game.

Speaking of which, Tycho on Penny Arcade was talking about the function of raid decks for the World of Warcraft TCG, particularly the Molten Core deck. I’ve been studying the WoW TCG for a while now – mechanically, it’s pretty standard, but the execution is very cool. The Raid decks are an excellent extension of both the gestalt of online play to the TCG, and a fun idea in and of themselves. They’re essentially ‘dungeon decks’, played by a separate player, which have highly synergized and powerful cards. Defeating a raid deck requires that multiple players act cooperatively to defeat the challenges within.

This is the same idea as with DEAD – an antagonist deck that the other players cooperatively are trying to defeat. DEAD simply rotates the roles of the antagonist, and adds some suspense to the game by giving the antagonist some bonuses against the players.

Cold War in the River City

Monday, March 24th, 2008

Not that long ago, I posted about a spy version of DEAD that I was knocking around. This weekend I visited River City Hobbies in Lacrosse, Wisconsin. River City is very much an old-timey hole-in-the-wall kind of hobby store: lots of back-issue comics and baseball cards sharing space with Warhammer and a dysfunctional RPG selection. I manage to spirit away a copy of the Drangonlance SAGA system (the true prize!), a copy of the GoO version of Tekumel, Malhavok’s Arcana PHB on consigment for a song. I also picked up a copy of my spy version of DEAD, tentatively titled Cold War.

It seemed at first that Fantasy Flight Games had already published my game idea. You can find it here. I played it with with gaming buddy Jerry over the weekend, and it’s a blast. It also, of course, almost gave me a fucking heart attack. Here was my game, already published. Was my system doooooooooooooooooomed?

The short answer is: No. While there are similarities, mechanically, between my game and Fantasy Flights, there are crucial differences. In FFG’s version, you play the CIA versus the KGB, one player to a side. You contest over objectives that are mainly Cold War hot-spots, but you do so one at a time. And the mechanics, which are very, very slick, are more about suits (Economy, Military, Media and Political), each suit having a given power. By tapping the card, you execute the power. For example, the Media suit, once tapped, allows you to look the top card on the draw pile and either keep it for yourself, put it back on the pile for the other guy, or discard it. Each card also has a value attached (1-6), and your goal is to make a set of cards that are equal to, but not over, the target number of the current objective.

Like I said: the game is very tight and a hell of a lot of fun. I managed to squeak a win over Jerry with the very last objective in play, having been in running behind for most of the game.

My idea differs in several ways: all of the players in my version are NATO agents, and everyone is also the opposition. Actions aren’t entirely symmetrical on both sides of the conflict (FFG’s game is perfectly symmetrical), and there’s only one location in play at any one time.

So once again I dodge a bullet – but this is a bullet with a fringe benefit. First of all, it shows me that my ideas are eminently workable – FFG’s game was a blast to play, so there’s a lot more hope for DEAD and the core mechanic. Second, I found a new, awesome, two-player game to add to my collection.

And I got it for half price!

Today’s DEADcast.

Sunday, March 16th, 2008

Well, I’ve finally untangled the Gordian Knot of the token economy for DEAD.  It took a lot of the starch out of me, and I’m writing this blog post with my face feeling a bit numb from a long day of writing and thinking.   However, I think I’ve finally arrived at a much, much mroe elegant design, and I’ve saved myself a lot of disappointment in the later playtests.

I actually had to throw away yet another possible refinement to DEAD: trading in the character sheet.  I toyed with the idea for about 10 minutes, then told my wife about it across the table at the coffee house, and she looked me straight in the eyes and said ‘NO!’  She’s right, of course.  At some point you have to shove the baby bird out of the nest, wings perfectly formed or not.  If the sheets seem irrelevant for play after the playtests, at least I have an idea of how to approach the issue.

After delving into 4e and its new MMORPGness, I’ve taken a page from that book as well, using the transactions of MMORPG skills (particularly Guild Wars, which I’m familiar with) to help me frame different action cards in my mind.  It’s helped quite a bit.

Yep, chips make it better.

Thursday, January 31st, 2008

The chip & card mechanic (still unnamed) makes the economy in DEAD much more fluid and interesting; it’ll lower the number of cards I have to make dramatically; it creates a nice way to tie Interludes and Action Sequences.

I have to go redesign about 100 cards now.  Then I’ll cry for a bit.

Suddenly I have a core system.

Wednesday, January 30th, 2008

After writing a bunch of ideas down for the spy version of DEAD, tentatively called Cold War, I started to get that tingle in the back of my brain that I was on the edge of something. And today it broke through, when I was writing notes on my redux of Merchant, the medieval/slightly fantasy mercantile boardgame that I made oh-so-long-ago that can’t actually be played by human beings. Well, not without the aid of a computer, anyways.

What gel’d together was this: In Cold War, you have a number of locations in play (strategically important nations around the world – Afghanistan, Mexico, Cuba, etc.), and each has a stack of poker chips on it – either red (Soviet Bloc) or blue (US/NATO) to denote the current balance of power in the country. In Merchant, there’s a similar mechanic – a stack of poker chips denotes the development of resources on that particular location card. For example, you start with salt flats and build up to a salt mine. Color is used to denote who owns what.

Well, why not do something similar with DEAD? The current mechanic uses points instead of poker chips to denote Threat levels for the locations. These numbers are out of whack with the costs of the Action cards of the protagonists, making for some difficult balancing. By turning the chips into the Threat level, there’s both a handy visual reference for all involved, and the math (chips to Action points) is similar.

Of course, what’s the first stumbling block I’ve come across? What to call this shared set of core mechanics.

Such is the way my brain works, that brand identity would pop up as immediate concern. Oi vey.

Company of the DEAD

Wednesday, January 2nd, 2008

I’ve been playing a bit of Company of Heroes: Opposing Fronts, which I recieved for Christmas.  It was in the middle of this that I was also doing a bit of thinking about card resources and making the card play in DEAD more dynamic.  While the results that I came to with DEAD had little to do with CoH, I realized that you could very easily port the system that I’m generating with DEAD over to a WW2 game.  Elements of the spy version of DEAD also crept in.

I don’t think I’d go right ahead and call it NAZI, for obvious reasons.  But the idea would be the same.  At any point in the game, there’s one player who is the Opposition – and whose ‘real’ character is neutral while they are the adversary.  During the action part of the game, the players are united against the Opposition, but in order to maximize their own effectiveness, they have to play cards against each other as well.

It’s possible that the system would have to be changed in order to accomodate the ‘Band of Brothers’ ideal that goes along with most WW2 portrayals today.  Maybe I’d be better off setting it in a less glamourized time period, like Vietnam.

Food for thought.

Almost Buggered.

Friday, December 21st, 2007

I went to my local FLGS to do some holiday shopping – mostly to pick up some card games for the wife and I to play, and I ran across Last Night on Earth.  It’s a zombie game, and I had to buy it just because a cursory look at hte back of the box almost stopped my heart.  Here was a game that was very close to the original formulation for DEAD.  I mean, f’n rilly rilly close.  Players can choose to play on the zombie team, item cards, narrative-sounding cards … egads.

After I got it home, I realized that I was pretty safe.  The implementation is close to the original form that I had for DEAD, but not the current one.  Secondly, the ‘narrative’ elements aren’t actually – they’re just pretty window dressing for actions on the board.

So DEAD is still safe, for now.  But egads, I need to get on the stick.  Between LNoE and Zombies!!!, the market’s getting a wee bit crowded.  What LNoE has done for me is push me even harder in a narrative direction with the game – making more of player-player interaction and using it as a currency in the game.

Plus, I got to buy myself a game during the Christmas shopping season and didn’t get in trouble for it!  Woot!

DEAD Card Count + A New Idea

Thursday, December 6th, 2007

Threat Card Deck: 120 cards finished (with some multiples). About 200 or so other possible cards in layout.

Action Card Deck: 400 cards laid out, awaiting game text.

Story Card Deck: 250-ish cards laid out.

That’s a lot of cards.

* * *

I was hit with a brainwave today: Using the basic mechanics of DEAD to create a Cold War/Now/WWII (or some alt-history version of any of the above) spy game. Each player has their Agent (either the Good Guys or the Not Good Guys – but everyone is on the same side), and also plays the opposition for the other players. In other words, instead of one player being the declared opposition (as in DEAD), all players are opposing (and ostensibly helping) each other simultaneously. The currency for being effective with your agent relies heavily on effectively opposing the other players assuring that people work hard at it.

There are some serious questions about information flow and secrecy: Do you gain points by opposing someone without them knowing? Bluffing? Is there some way to double-blind the process but assure staying inside the rules (assuming that you also want integrity in the game – if you can rely on people not cheating, that’s a different thing entirely).

A name hasn’t popped up yet – thank goodness Spione has already been taken. I suppose it’ll depend on the era.

DEAD Card Design … Finally.

Thursday, October 18th, 2007

Here’s a sample of a Threat card from DEAD:

Threat Example Card

I wanted a nice, clean card design that didn’t lean on ‘darkness’ too heavily – a lot of card games that I’ve been studying have way too much going on to be very legible.  The 5 at the top is the number of Threat points necessary to activate the card.  I’ve scanned a crapload of art from the Walking Dead series of comics to use as placeholders until I figure out what I’m going to do about art.  I’ve considered a cattle call at the local university for willing (free) zombies.

Then come the card title, the description, and the card’s categories – in this case it’s a ‘sudden’ card, which means that it can be played at any time during a turn, provided the points are available to activate it.  The ‘special’ designation is because it modifies another card, and does nothing on its own.

My main focus now has been on creating churning out craploads of cards of various sorts.  Not easy when you consider the wide variety of possiblities for cards.  It’s kinda crazy.  Right now I’m projecting a deck of 120+ Threat cards and 250+ Story cards (which will have the same basic design, only with a different color splat across the front).

DEAD Again & Other Things

Thursday, July 19th, 2007

Well crap. That didn’t work.

I can’t make excuses for that lapse. All I can say is that by now, I’ve lost just about everyone that I had to start with. Well, I’ve started from zero before, so I can do it again. What I won’t do is spend an entire post grousing about not posting.

* *

DEAD has had a couple of playtests, and now I’m in the process of re-writing the rules. One of the things I never realized about a game like this is just how much radical change goes on. DEAD is nothing like it was in the last iteration – or at least very little like it. Much of the change has to do with simplicity – I shaved off lots of rules that I put in to satisfy some sort of hold-over ideas about balance and character survivability. The name of the game is DEAD, fer chrissakes. Survivability shouldn’t be on the menu.

Another radical change has come from the Kumawife – she handed me a solution to designing a game with 250+ cards in it: lo-fi prototyping.

Instead of spending a lot of time in Illustrator making cards, I’ve simply made a whole passel of bits and pieces – the numbers, the card labels and the backgrounds. Then I print out an armload of them, cut them out, and paste together a set of cards that can be changed ad hoc. The only parts that I need to make individually are the rule text, which I can print out in a simple Excel doc.

So that’s a great improvement.

* * *

I’ve done a little purchasing in my time off – my central purchase is a copy of Greg Stolze’s REIGN. I can’t believe how … how Elsewhere the ORE System has become in this iteration. Stolze treats the dice in a very manipulative manner, with verbs like gobble and squish for the mechanics. Brilliant, and I haven’t even gotten to the meat of the system yet. More as I read it.

* * * *

Finally – a new trend that I’ve noticed in the Story Games blogosphere: proliferation. Folks don’t just have one blog – they have one for every project, plus projects with other people. Witness the Play Collective and the constellation of blogs belonging to Johnathan Walton. I think I may have to get myself some of those.

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