Monthly Archives: August 2020

The Master of Disaster: Combat Encounters – 15

People often talk about the three pillars of Dungeons & Dragons and how crucial they are when making a well rounded campaign. Of the three pillars, exploration, role-playing and combat, I usually tend to focus on the role-playing pillar the most while paying less attention to the others. I’ve always felt that exploration was the toughest one for me, but as I run more Dungeons & Dragons games with different groups, I find that combat ends up feeling the weakest and least interesting.

Combat always seemed like a layup to me, wherein I could just launch enough monsters at the players and call it a day. It wasn’t until I had to deal with a real slog of a combat encounter where everyone was rolling terribly, that I realized just how bad at these encounters I actually was. Simply pitting stronger enemies against a party doesn’t make for an inherently fun encounter, so I wanted to outline some things that I’ve started to fold into my combat scenarios to make them more interesting.

LOCATION

One of my biggest issues with a lot of Dungeons & Dragons adventure modules, particularly the lower level ones, is that they don’t provide much in the way of variety for the players. Take the 5e book of one-shots, Tales from the Yawning Portal (TYP) for example. In TYP there’s a level 1-3 scenario called The Sunless Citadel, in which a group of adventurers has to go to this mysterious citadel that exists at the bottom of a ravine. While I’ve enjoyed running my players through this scenario, I’ve found that the majority of the fights they’ve gotten into basically turn into slug-fests where it’s just about standing your ground and hoping you hit more than your enemy does.

Most of the battles in The Sunless Citadel go this way, where there isn’t enough space or location variety to do any of the crazy stuff that makes Dungeons & Dragons so special. No one is going to swing from a chandelier or knock a dude into a pit if that stuff just isn’t there, and that’s the problem. These locations tend to lack a lot of variety often just being some dusty old dungeon where something was worshiped in a time long forgotten.

*Tales from the Yawning Portal – Wizards of the Coast*

My solution to this is to invite people to flex their creative muscles by allowing them to basically manifest room features (within reason) if they succeed on a good enough investigation or other appropriate check. It can be something as simple as letting them scoop up dust to throw in an enemy’s eyes to blind them, or finding an empty bottle to hurl at a threat. I’m not gonna let them just find a rocket launcher or anything like that, but I think it’s important to allow players to get wacky and shake up the mundanity of just rolling dice to hit armor classes.

Most of the wildest stories you here when people describe their experiences with Dungeons & Dragons tend to come out of some wacky combat scenario, but planning for wackiness is an impossibility. Sure you can put some fun stuff in every room to entice the players, but they might not always take the bait. Instead, I tend to entertain just about every wild thing they want to search for in the midst of combat, and will make a decision then and there.

LEVEL DESIGN

Level design is incredibly important when making a combat scenario, and I often find that limiting the playing field both in width or height makes for a boring encounter. It’s easy to craft a battle in a single story room, but that doesn’t really afford the players or enemies any opportunities to do much besides just run at or away from each other. Things like pillars and furniture can help for sure, but I find that the best encounters are the ones where the enemies aren’t always in your line of sight.

I prefer battles that span larger areas as opposed to confined spaces, but that’s a broad sentiment that needs to be explained. You can make a combat encounter be on the first floor of a house and call it a day, but it would be far more engaging if the entire house and both front and backyard were in play as well. Sure a battle could just naturally spill out into those areas, but that might not happen which could lead to a bland encounter.

What really makes these encounters slow down to a crawl is when the party starts out all bunched together and there’s no incentive for any of them to move. That’s why you need a diverse location with plenty for the players to explore beforehand that could have them start the encounter off a little scattered. It isn’t a way for me as a DM to punish the party for splitting up, instead it’s a way to make combat encounters more than just a war of attrition. Are the wizard and rogue looking through an office on the second floor while the fighter and cleric explore the lower floors? Great, now the players have to really take into account their strengths and weaknesses and open their decisions up beyond just “what attack do I use?”

*Descent into Avernus – Wizards of the Coast*

If they’re determined to group up again, make that an exciting event that might involve them using a full dash or disengage action. The act of self-preservation shouldn’t feel laborious, it should feel like a triumph. As a DM, you have be able to paint these less flashy actions as a victory for whoever needs to utilize them. Players have so many non-combat oriented abilities they can utilize, but no one will ever do any of them if it’s just about making sure the tank can take all the hits while casters do their work from a distance. My method is to make sure that every player has the opportunity to shine in a given combat encounter, while also putting them in positions where their characters might not be primed to be in. Just don’t be malicious about it.

Make sure everyone has the chance to bail out and regroup if they need to, but give them a chance to be the focal point at all times in combat. Sure all the characters combined are a party that needs to work together, but being a party shouldn’t steal their individualism as characters. The line is quite thin, but making sure that a character both feels capable and under powered on their own is difficult, but I find that when it’s done right it makes for some very memorable moments.

LESS FREQUENT & MORE INTERESTING COMBAT SCENARIOS

This final point also builds on the previous one, but it’s important enough to be its own thing. There is nothing less interesting than opening a door to a small room, rolling initiative, beating the bad guys, then opening another door a few minutes later to do it all over again. It’s tedious and makes battle feel more like a chore than an opportunity for fun. I think combat scenarios should be bigger than just combat in general, which is confusing at first, but let me explain.

So you’ve got your big open mine where a bunch of goblins hang out. There are various natural ramps along the walls allowing for miners to reach new areas, there’s a mine cart track and a large molten lava pit in the center that’s used for smelting. We’ve got ourselves a big open combat scenario right there, but the party is bunched up together as they entered the room and don’t really have a reason to split up. That’s why you need to give them a reason.

Adding multiple objectives to combat scenarios beyond just killing everything is key. Have the players take a look around and find that there are half a dozen detonator plungers with wires leading off of them in various directions. If you visually track those wires, you can see a few of them are attached to explosive charges that are crammed into cracks in the walls. Also, this mine is right below a village of unsuspecting innocent people! Oh no! Now the party has to survive and accomplish a goal to truly be victorious.

But you need to have a contingency plan for when your players just try mage hand the wires off the explosives or something. Maybe some goblins with fire arrows will show up to detonate the charges themselves, or some fire elemental gets summoned to do it. Maybe the goblins are protected by a massive troll who is going to run interference for the party, thus emboldening the slinkier and more nimble characters to go and deal with the charges while the tankier classes try to push the troll into the lava.

That combat encounter alone is way more interesting than just a flat room with 7 goblins running up to you with swords. I firmly believe that adding in objectives, having waves of enemies show up at different times, and having a big space with a lot of different tiny stories going on in them is key. Some goblins are on planting charges duty, some are running defense, that troll is protecting both of those parties. Having all of that going on at once will make for a longer and more memorable combat scenario than the firing squad of goblin archers standing opposite the party.

I’m not the ultimate authority on this stuff, but I’ve had plenty of experience in making boring combat encounters. Adding in some of these elements alone made for a more engaged party in my experience. It’s a shame that Dungeons & Dragons often paints combat encounters into these random occurrences like something out of a Final Fantasy game where you open a door and enemies pop out.

The beauty of Dungeons & Dragons is that it empowers your players to use their imagination to conquer any challenge in their way. Too often I find that new players will use the rules and their abilities as static things, like it’s all they can do. The rules are there to guide you and give you a way to navigate the crazy shit you want to do and not the other way around. Regardless of if you take my advice in this article or not, make sure you’re emboldening your players to be creative whether they’re in combat or not.

Blog: Windows is the Worst Part of Game Pass – 08/26/20

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I want to get out ahead of this blog and say that I believe that Xbox Game Pass is a fantastic service that people should look into if they have the extra cash and a desire to play more games. That being said, the PC experience for the service isn’t great and I think that Windows is mostly to blame for that. This isn’t me complaining about the games or the value of the service itself, instead this focuses solely on how ironically miserable the PC launcher integrates with Windows.

To its credit, the Xbox app on PC is constantly being updated which is very reassuring but there are still so many things about the application that either don’t work or don’t integrate well with the rest of Windows for one reason or another.

Let’s start with achievements. One of the more endorphin-releasing things that the Xbox ecosystem has provided to us has to be the noise and animation that play out whenever you get an achievement. I don’t give a shit about the achievement itself, but it just feels nice to get them thanks to the way they’re presented. However you don’t get any of that on PC, or if you do I certainly haven’t found a way to enable it. There’s probably something I could to with my notification settings on Windows, but I fear that messing with those might invite every other app to send me notifications about their garbage.

But those are just achievements and their absence doesn’t actively prevent me from playing my games. Updates however, they’ll stop you dead in your tracks. There was a night that some friends and I wanted to play Halo together via Halo: The Master Chief Collection, something I’ve had installed on my computer since it was released on PC through the Xbox app at the end of last year.

I went to launch the game and join my friends but was stopped by a “version mismatch” error. It seemed that there was an update that just never happened for some reason which in all fairness isn’t a glitch exclusive to Game Pass. All I’d have to do would be to launch the Xbox app and update it, right? The app opened, I went to the Halo: The Master Chief Collection page where no notice of an update existed which made me assume that all I needed was to reboot the Game Pass app itself to clear things up.

After relaunching the application, I found that it kept getting locked up on a blank black screen right after the Xbox logo appeared. Not great, but I could probably go to the Windows Store app to check for updates, right? Turns out, the Windows Store app didn’t want to fetch my updates and instead felt like force-quitting whenever I clicked the downloads page. Maybe I can reinstall the Xbox app and it’ll finally work? Nope, the installer breaks every time I hit install ultimately requiring me to force quit the installer all together. This whole situation sucks.

*Halo: The Master Chief Collection – 343 Industries*

After two days of frantic Googling, the suggestion to check for Windows updates was floated by me and seemed like the last option before reluctantly calling customer service. That actually did the trick. Now I did in fact check my automatic update settings and although they were enabled they just never happened, so thanks again Windows. That update fixed everything, but the fact that everything broke because I was running a version of Windows that was a few months old is insane.

But fine, whatever, I can play my damn games now. There is one last thing that drives me utterly mad with Game Pass though, and that’s how every single time I launch a game for the first time, this slow and laggy dialogue box pops up asking if I authorize the app to use my information. I appreciate that I’m being asked about this stuff, but it really seems redundant when I’m actively paying for this service. I’d honestly prefer some filters to select what I want to be notified about would be better than just throwing a pop-up at me for everything. Also, I don’t need two fucking emails to be sent to me about it when I hit accept on a new game.

A lot of this sounds like nitpicking which it most definitely is, but if the ultimate goal of Xbox Game Pass on PC is to bring the console experience to the PC, then it’s failing. The whole allure of a console is that everything is self contained and just works without much issue, but the fact that Game Pass feels haphazardly bolted onto the rest of Windows makes its integration far less seamless. I love Game Pass as a service but it’s just not fully there on PC yet, and Windows is mostly to blame.

About That Avengers Beta

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Since their surge in mass popularity during the 2010’s, I’ve been yearning for an Avengers game that would appropriately blend the varied powers of the Earth’s mightiest heroes with actual fun gameplay. Things were looking very promising when Marvel’s Spider-Man released two years ago on the PlayStation 4, but all of those positive feelings slowly drained away as I spent some time with Square Enix’s Marvel’s Avengers beta.

The beta opens with the San Fransisco demo that’s been shown off before, swapping you between Captain America, Iron Man, Thor, The Hulk and Black Widow throughout various points in the level. In another, better game, swapping between the heroes every few minutes would be a lot of fun, granted it managed to nail that blend of power fantasy with the cohesion of team dynamics that the Avengers are known for. But based on this beta, Marvel’s Avengers doesn’t succeed at either.

From the start, you have to confront the awkward and unresponsive controls. Everything feels delayed, undermining the brawler feel that other superhero games have done well like the Batman Arkham series or even Marvel’s Spider-Man did. Some of the special abilities and heavy attacks pack a good punch, but by and large most of what I played in the beta felt pretty bland in the combat department.

Marvel’s Avengers combat failings stem from its desire to be a live-service game. Enemies have bloated health bars and can take multiple massive green fists to the face because my gear score or whatever wasn’t high enough. I understand that’s just an aspect of how a lot of these games are, but this decision honestly robs Marvel’s Avengers of letting the player feel like a superhero. The Hulk should not be getting taken to task by some generic robots holding shields.

There’s also the issue of the game not explaining a lot of stuff to you, but I acknowledge that this might just be a beta issue and hopefully will be addressed, but there’s a lot in Marvel’s Avengers that I just never understood. For instance, you’ve got a health bar at the top of the screen with a mysterious superhero specific bar underneath it. What this bar is, I don’t know. What I do know is that while I was getting my ass kicked by a swarm of robots, the bar went down. Was that the health bar? If that’s the case, then what’s the other one for? Are all of my special abilities on a cool-down that might get faster with better gear or skill upgrades, or can I do something in game to impact them?

Maybe all of this is explained in the mess of a pause menu they’ve got, where the landfill of gear, crafting materials and currencies live. It’s one of those screens where your eyes just glaze over because of the sheer amount of garbage that’s on it. Luckily, there’s a button you can hit that will just equip the best gear for you, letting you avoid the nightmare of that entire menu.

https://twitter.com/9_volt_/status/1288861025501093888?s=20

What’s upsetting though is how none of your gear has any visual representation whatsoever. There’s plenty of articles of clothing to equip among the Avengers themselves, but none of it actually shows up at all. I actually understand why that isn’t a thing though. Marvel probably isn’t onboard with people making new Iron man armor from welded together scraps you found in a factory or a jungle. They want to “preserve the identity” of the characters or something, and letting you to adjust their appearances to something that isn’t “on brand” is probably a no. Also, I’m positive that buying alternate costumes is the monetization strategy for Marvel’s Avengers.

Ultimately Marvel’s Avengers just feels like a big miss on every front. It’s not a good action game, it doesn’t make you feel powerful, and it seems rife with ways to nickel and dime its player base. I can’t say definitively that it’s a disappointment yet, considering it isn’t actually out. This is a “beta,” and technically everything is subject to change. Sure the full game releases in just a few weeks, but maybe this is an older build of the game. Whether that’s true or this beta is indicative of what you can expect at release however, this was a miserable first impression.

Blog: I Wanna Rock – 08/19/20

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For one reason or another, I found myself really wanting to get behind the kit of a drum set again for the first time in years. Problem is, those are expensive, loud and take up a lot of space, a combination of elements that aren’t great for living in an apartment. So I decided to look into picking up a Rock Band 4 kit to fill that void at a reasonable price. After some research, I think it would genuinely be cheaper to buy a real drum set than the game itself.

It’s absolutely wild how out of control these listings are. On Amazon alone, the only full kit I could find is priced upwards of $1000. It’s even crazier when you remember that a decade ago we couldn’t walk through a GameStop without tripping over 17 plastic instruments that no one wanted. Yet here I am in 2020 staring at plastic guitars that start at $250.

I get that prices skyrocketed once Harmonix and Mad Catz stopped manufacturing the things, but the fact that the official Rock Band 4 website links to the previously mentioned $250 plastic guitar page on Amazon is bonkers. I understand that Rock Band 4 wasn’t exactly flying off the shelves when it launched back in 2015 and it made fiscal sense to stop producing them. I also understand that Mad Catz as a company literally went bankrupt because of dwindling sales over the years, but the Rock Band 4 instruments seemed like the final nail in the coffin.

I just wanna play the drums again, and the Rock Band drums were supposed to be a cheap alternative. I’m also pretty sure could interface with a PC as a midi controller in case I wanted to lay down actual drum beats for songs, which is a plus. I’d gladly have paid $150 or whatever the kit initially cost in 2015, but at this point it’s easier to just buy a real electronic drum set for a little more than to scour the depths of Craigslist for someone’s nasty, dust-covered and probably busted Rock Band 4 drum set.

Blog: Golf on Mars – 08/12/20

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Back in 2014, Captain Games released one of my favorite mobile games in Desert Golfing. It was a three dollar, procedurally generated 2D golf game that was fairly straightforward. There weren’t any tricks or additional depth to the game, it was just a really simple and well made infinite golf game that might occasionally screw you over with levels that were impossible to complete. It was addicting and calming in a way a lot of mobile games are not. Fast forward to July of 2020, and the sequel, Golf on Mars, was released and it quickly became an obsession of mine just like Desert Golfing did.

I don’t like golf very much as a sport, but I do enjoy it in video game form with 1996 Neo Geo classic Neo Turf Masters being one of my all time favorites. But I find most modern golf games to be a little more tedious and mechanics heavy than I usually enjoy. But Golf on Mars, like its predecessor, doesn’t try to be anything more than a fun way to kill a few minutes at a time. A ball appears, you drag your finger back and release to shoot and do your best to get it in the hole. There’s no par to contend with nor any reward for a hole-in-one, it is truly and endless meditative golf experience – or your version of hell if your really don’t like golf.

Golf on Mars doesn’t innovate too much, but adds in two integral features that will better prevent you from hitting a sudden dead-end in the way you could in Desert Golfing. The first is the ability to add spin to the ball. A small circle will appear that denotes if you’re spinning the ball clockwise or counterclockwise, which is controlled by dragging another finger across the screen while you’re pulled back for your shot. It’s simple and doesn’t really have too many practical applications for a lot of levels, but whenever I’d need to land on one of the many precarious platforms, I was glad it was there.

The other is the ability to skip levels. Sometimes the procedural generation will spit out levels that you literally cannot finish. Maybe the hole is on a platform too high or far away, or an obstacle fell over and covered the hole. Whatever it is, after 25 strokes the game pops up a button that allows you to skip the level. It might not seem like a big innovation, but it truly sucked in Desert Golfing to be on hole 5000 or something, and suddenly be face to face with an impossible challenge that would make the game unplayable. I wish you could just hit that button from the start considering I never need 25 strokes to realize a hole is functionally busted, but it is what it is.

Otherwise, Golf on Mars is just a really solid time waster. It isn’t a game of depth or something that requires much attention, but it’s a great game to pull out when you’ve got nothing else to do. I think everyone who has a passing interest in arcade styled golf games should give it a shot, but I’m not here to tell you how to spend your money. All I know is that I’m on level 2100, and I’m still opening up the app almost daily in the hopes I’ll see a UFO or something.

Gut Check: Fall Guys

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Approximately 17 years ago at the last E3, the folks over at Devolver Digital had their annual conference(?) in which they revealed among other things, Fall Guys. Looking at that initial trailer, I had no idea what to expect and immediately shrugged it off as some sort of Mario Party clone. Fast forward to just last week when it finally released on Steam and as a “free” PlayStation Plus offering, and it’s completely blown up to the point where the servers couldn’t handle the amount of people trying to play it. It turns out Fall Guys isn’t a clone of a bad game from a bad franchise.

In Fall Guys, you take control of a little marshmallow looking creature who can only run, dive and grab onto things. Using the few moves at your disposal, you wade through several rounds of platforming challenges and obstacles with up to 59 other people in order to qualify for the next round. It can be a chaotic mess at times, but I mean that in the best way possible.

All of the levels I saw were very clearly inspired from shows like Wipeout, Ninja Warrior and Most Extreme Elimination Challenge, all of which are filled with plenty of hazards and obstacles that you need to overcome. I feel it’s important to remind you once more that you are doing this alongside 59 other people, which intentionally leads to some comical physics-based shenanigans. Succeed at enough of these challenges before your opponents and you’ll end up at an equally obstacle-filled level that has a crown at the end of it. Latch onto that crown and congratulations, you’re the big winner.

I’ll be completely honest here and say that I broke my own rule with Gut Check and played less than an hour of Fall Guys, but not because I disliked it. I actually really dig what Fall Guys is doing, catering to both my love of wacky physics and marshmallows. Yet despite being extremely in my wheelhouse, it just feels like a game without legs. Some games blow up in popularity and get to enjoy a long lifespan because of it like Rocket League or even Overwatch, but Fall Guys doesn’t seem like it has the depth or variation to keep things fresh and interesting for very long. It’s simply a game that was fun to play through until I won… which I did… the first time I played it.

I don’t say that in an attempt to brag or anything because I was genuinely shocked it happened as well. I never really excelled at any level to the point where I felt like I was deserving of the coveted crown, but I just kind of lucked my way into it regardless. Two key things happened to me during my one-shot championship run that made all the difference.

The first thing felt a lot like I was cheating. Not every level in Fall Guys is based around individual success, with some levels grouping folks into teams and squaring off against one another. During one of these team levels we were tasked with essentially playing keep-away where we had to grab a tail off the back of an opponent and don it ourselves. With that tuft of fur firmly above my ass, I had to avoid my other competitors till the end of the round to score a point. That’s when the wacky physics of Fall Guys broke, and a spinning baton caught me in just the right position to clip me through the boundary of the map with no way back inside. So there I was in a white void, donning a beautiful tail and a slight amount of guilt attributed to the fact that I had inadvertently cheated in a competitive multiplayer game. Time eventually ran out, my team won under dubious conditions and we all progressed onward.

The next thing that happened came at the very end of the final level. After navigating through falling rocks, spinning batons, swinging hammers and more, I followed the path and several other marshmallow people up towards the golden crown. The crown hovered between two platforms that you’d have to jump from in order to snag it in mid air. It also bobbed up and down to make it a little dicier for everyone involved. I watched about a dozen people in front of me mistime that jump and fall into the chasm below. So instead of leaping frantically like dope I just kind of stood there for a bit, unhampered until the crown was in my reach and I was able to snag it.

I won my first match of Fall Guys and I felt like I really shouldn’t have. It felt like a fluke from top to bottom, but I won the whole damn thing and in return I was granted some cosmetic items and the feeling that I had beaten the entirety of Fall Guys. With a little bit of patience and a ton of luck however I got to feel the “thrill” of winning, which was less of a feeling of accomplishment and more a feeling of suspicion, like I was going to get in trouble for winning it all by accident.

I can’t see a lot of people sticking with Fall Guys because it just doesn’t seem like the kind of game you can really get better at. No matter how good at platforming you are, you’re still vulnerable to the obstacles in the level as well as the other players themselves. I’m not trying to diminish the fun I had with Fall Guys because it left me with a sense of fondness towards it, but failed to hook me in a way that would make me want to break my undefeated streak. I bet they’ll hang my jersey in the rafters for this victory someday.

Blog: Blasted Borderlands – 08/05/20

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A few days ago I was gifted a copy of Borderlands 3, the latest entry in a long running loot driven shooter series I’ve always been lukewarm on at the best of times. There are a lot of reasons that I didn’t rush out to purchase the game when it released last year, but a friend of mine displayed his overwhelming generosity by purchasing me a copy in our latest attempt at finding a game that we could play together. At the time of writing this we haven’t actually been able to synchronize our schedules and play together, but I have put a little bit of time into Borderlands 3 regardless.

I initially didn’t intend to ever play this game considering that the idea of supporting Gearbox Software CEO and magician, Randy Pitchford, a colossal tool that’s no stranger to controversy, was just not something I felt comfortable with. But despite my feelings about the man at the top, I know there are genuinely good people who work on these games that wish their boss would just shut up and stop stealing focus away from the product they’ve worked on for years.

The first thing I ended up doing in Borderlands 3 was turning the volume down to the point where I don’t have to hear any of the dialogue. I’ve never thought the narrative in Borderlands games were anything worth a damn, but I know some people would disagree. The real reason I silenced the game however, is solely because I generally find these games deeply unfunny. Sure there are a few jokes that land, but for the most part I just find a lot of the dialogue to be grating. Often times the humor tries trade on this concept of everything be over the top and wacky in a way that just feels desperate. Like they’re begging you to chuckle at something to the point where literal shit is flying out of toilets when you open them, something I’m sure someone finds deeply funny.

From the little bits of story I’ve reluctantly picked up during my playtime, it seems like the whole plot revolves around two twins who are post-apocalyptic Twitch streamers, which is one hell of a premise to bank on. I’m genuinely terrified of how many times I’ll hear a phrase like, “and don’t forget to like, comment, and subscribe, or else I’ll blow your brains out.” I’d love to be proven wrong, but the series doesn’t exactly have a great track record in that regard.

But once you mute the dialogue and just follow the quest markers towards the next group of things to shoot, Borderlands 3 is a mechanically sound and fun experience. In my opinion, the Borderlands franchise has never excelled at much outside of being a really fun cooperative game that gives you a lot of ways to dispatch your enemies. The variety of powers, guns and grenades at your disposal are seemingly infinite, and you’ll get so many of them that you’ll find yourself drowning in what I imagine a Second Amendment themed wet dream might look like.

Ultimately I can’t really see myself playing much of Borderlands 3 on my own, but when I’m finally able to sync up with my pals I’m sure I’ll have a much better time. From what I’ve played, Borderlands 3 isn’t a bad game by any metric, it just doesn’t seem like something I would want to experience on my own. I’d rather talk to my friends and make actually funny jokes over what I can only assume are the in-game characters making old meme references. And I don’t need a game to do that for me when I can do it just fine by myself.