Speaking of the virtues of strategic gaming, the Humble Bundle program is offering up a suite of Introversion games including Uplink, which is one of the most immersive computer games ever made (and which achieves that immersion by anachronistically eliminating save games and enforcing real-time strategy-based play).

For those unfamiliar with the Humble Bundle program, they put together packages of indie games which you can then buy by naming your own price. Not only can you name your own price, but a chunk of the money you pay is donated to charity. (And you get to specify exactly how much goes to charity and how much goes to the game designers.)

For those unfamiliar with Uplink, you assume the role of a computer hacker accepting jobs from anonymous clients to break into data systems around the globe. And when I say “assume the role”, I really mean it: The game takes the form of a client interface. The actual hacking is takes the form of fictional “awesome hacking”, but everything about the experience makes it feel like something you’re really doing and not just playing.

In addition to the extraordinary Uplink, the bundle also includes Defcon, Darwinia, Multiwinia, Crayon Physics, and Aquaria. (The last two games are bonuses and were not designed by Introversion.) Really, you can’t go wrong here. (Particularly since you can name your own price.)

Check it out.

I am going to quote something at length from the CRPG Addict because I think it’s important:

The problem [in The Bard’s Tale] is, it costs a lot to resurrect a dead character, especially a high-level dead character. Resurrecting six dead characters cost way more than I had at this point. I had to create a dummy character just to exit the Guild. I was able to resurrect one character immediately, but to get the other five, I had to build up my savings. It took a good three hours before they were all happy and healthy again.

It sounds horrible, especially to modern gamers, but I actually really, really like this aspect of The Bard’s Tale. Death isn’t a game-killer the way it is in Wizardry, but boy does it have consequences. Since you can only save in the Guild of Adventurers, every dungeon foray is a risk, creating a palpable tension as you wander your way through the passages. And every once in a while, you stumble into an encounter like this one (there were actually two more on this same level, with a dragon and a high-powered wizard) that makes your stomach drop and an expletive escape your lips.

Modern games make it far too easy. In something like Baldur’s Gate, you would save every five or ten minutes. If you stumble on to a soul sucker, you might treat the first battle against him like a test run. If your characters die–or, heck, even just lose more hit points than you want to spare–no problem. Just reload and run the encounter again with the experience at your back…

Because of the frequent save points, modern games depend on the difficulty of individual battles to make the games challenging. In The Bard’s Tale, Wizardry, and other games of the era I’m playing, there are plenty of difficult individual battles, but it’s the totality of the expedition that brings the difficulty. You must constantly strategize. How much gold do I need to get from this encounter to make the “trap zap” spell worthwhile? What should I set as my bottom hit point threshold before I return to the surface? Do I want to expend 15 spell points on this group of wights, or take the risk that they’ll turn me into a crippling old man with one touch? I’ve only got 15 squares left to map on this level, but my characters only have 1/2 their hit points. Should I press on or go back?

Exhilarating. Fortunately, I have a lot of games like this left to play.

In computer games, this is a trend which extends beyond CRPGs. In FPS games, for example, Halo ushered in the era of rechargeable shields/stamina and ending an era in which players shepherded health packs and treated entire missions as strategic challenges (instead of a string of tactical encounters).

If this sounds familiar, it should. Tabletop RPGs have been embracing the same trends, starting with a My Precious Encounter(TM) design ethos for published adventures and then hard-coding that design ethos into the game system.

Allow me to emphasize this one last time with two key pull quotes:

Modern games depend on the difficulty of individual battles to make the games challenging.

In [older games] there are plenty of difficult individual battles, but it’s the totality of the expedition that brings the difficulty.

Obviously this is a design ethos which has been most strongly championed by WotC in the 4th Edition of D&D (and then pushed even farther in D&D Gamma World). But it can be seen cropping up in a lot of places.

The argument can, of course, be made that this tactical focus is “more fun”: You’ll never end up trapped in the lower levels of the dungeon (nor will you figure out a clever way to escape). You’ll never find yourself desperately low on health (nor feel the exhilaration of overcoming the cyber-demon between you and the next health pack). You’ll never need to make a tough choice about whether to use your spells now or later (nor experience the satisfaction of blowing away an opponent with your well-earned stockpile of powerful enchantments).

But, ultimately, I think there’s a reason why we refer to “strategy and tactics” as a matched pair: They go together hand-in-hand. They complement each other. They improve each other. Strategic decisions shape (and re-shape) the immediacy of tactical play, naturally resulting in varied and disparate tactical challenges that must be overcome.

Of course, there will still be a great deal of variance in My Precious Encounters(TM) scenario design. (That is, after all, the “precious” part of carefully crafting your “perfect” encounters.) But in my experience, the result still feels curiously bland. Maybe in this encounter you’re fighting a couple of big brutes and in the next encounter you’re surrounded by grunts. But the encounters still all seem to follow the same basic trajectory.

This is probably unsurprising, of course: By removing the strategic portion of the game, you’ve gutted a huge chunk of meaningful choice and consequence. In other words, you’ve crippled the gameplay.

From At Home: A Short History of Private Life by Bill Bryson:

Tallow [candles], made from rendered animal fat, had the great advantage that they could be made at home from the fat of any slaughtered animal. […] Because it melted so swiftly, the candle was constantly guttering and therefore needed trimming up to forty times an hour. Tallow also burned with an uneven light, and stank. And because tallow was really just a shaft of decomposing organic matter, the older a tallow got, the more malodorous it grew.

First thought: I need to do a better job of emphasizing quality of light when I’m describing scenes.

Second thought: Could tallow rendered from magical beasts be possessed of special properties? For example, dragon candles could counter darkness spells due to the potency of the light created. Would the tallow from a basilisk counter petrification, aid it, or even cause it?

For those who could afford it, oil lamps were the most efficient option, but oil was expensive and oil lamps were dirty and needed cleaning daily. Even over the course of an evening, a lamp might lose 40 percent of its illuminating power as its chimney accumulated soot. If not properly attended to, they could be terribly filthy. In At Home: The American Family, 1750-1870, Elisabeth Donaghy Garrett records how one girl who had attended a party in New England where the lamps smoked reported afterward, “Our noses were all black, & our clothes were perfectly gray and … quite ruined.”

In running an urban campaign, I make it a point to keep track of when the heroes have been trekking through sewers and getting sprayed with ichor. But it sounds like even their lamps can give them a rather thorough smirching.

Of course, eventually they start using continual light or continual flame spells, and these have every indication of being even cleaner and safer than a modern light bulb. After all, they don’t actually consume anything, so they can’t giving off great quantities of smoke, right?

But here’s another possibility: Perhaps continual flame spells operate by drawing their fuel from the Ethereal Plane — they are literally burning ether (pun intended). A sheen of scintillant silver marks the greasy reside they leave behind on nearby objects, but this is quite harmless (unless it is allowed to accumulate in great quantities, in which case the nearby casting of spells may cause the residue to ignite and produce unexpected wild magic effects). In addition, the small vortexes produced by continual flame spells on the Ethereal Plane (as they draw raw ether from one plane to the next) are quite easy to detect. Continual flames, therefore, are sometimes used to form navigational beacons on the Ethereal Plane, but they may also attract the attention of the ethereal marauders and the like.

Monte Cook recently posted “A Different Way to Slice the Pie” at WotC’s website. In this essay, he argues that system mastery is a bad idea and makes the game more difficult to learn.

… has everyone swallowed crazy pills around here?

From the essay:

The problem with a newly codified rule is that it becomes one more thing to remember. Moreover, it becomes a component of the game that you have to learn even though it might never come up in play. As unlikely as it seems, it’s possible in 3rd Edition for one to read and understand the “Attacks of Opportunity” section and then never actually have the rule come into play. Why? Because attacks of opportunity are triggered actions that don’t happen on the player’s turn. They’re also situational and easy to forget.

So imagine slicing the pie a different way. Rather than calling out attacks of opportunity as an element of D&D combat, you simply add the rules where and when they are needed. So it would say, as in 1st Edition, that if you move away from a foe, or use a missile weapon next to him, the foe gets a free attack.

With this approach, rules appear only when you need them. There’s less codification and fewer (potentially far fewer) rules to master before you can start playing. The rules are revealed on a need-to-know basis, as distinguished from rules that are “unpacked” and individually categorized and described in a large chapter of a rulebook.

Okay. Let’s break that argument down:

1. Take a rule which can be trivially memorized and referenced with needed.
2. Delete that rule.
3. Replace that rule with a bunch of new rules which are all similar to each other.
4. This will result in there being fewer rules for you to master before you start playing.

So, increasing the number of rules will somehow result in there being fewer rules?

That’s gotta be crazy pills talking, right?

To be clear here, what Cook is simultaneously talking about here is the idea of organizing the rulebook so that rules you don’t need at 1st level are segregated. That way new players don’t need to spend time learning rules that they won’t use until weeks or months later. That makes perfect sense. That’s exactly how the old BECMI boxed sets were organized, and although it made things a little more difficult to reference sometimes, if you do the separation correctly it can be a net gain for the game.

But what that has to do with taking one rule, turning it into 90 different rules, and then smearing them across the rulebook I’m somewhat at a loss to explain.

SYSTEM MASTERY

What I’m seeing here is yet another manifestation of the inherent hostility that has inexplicably grown up against the concept of “system mastery” over the past 5-6 years.

For example, we saw a similar bit of insanity 4 years ago from David Noonan when he claimed that giving every monster unique powers was much easier than referencing unified rules from the PHB because you can list the unique powers in the monster’s stat block (i.e., “the rules only appear where you need them” as Cook says). I pointed out that this was a false dilemma: You can both reference the unified rule and include it in the monster’s stat block (making it easy to use on-the-spot and also rewarding a player’s system mastery).

In other words, Cook’s thesis that rules should “only appear where you need them” is fundamentally flawed. For maximum utility, rules should appear where you need them AND they should be based on universal mechanics which are easier to learn and master.

Why?

Well, for example, let’s imagine that Monster A has a special attack. In order to use Monster A, I’ll need to read the rules for that special attack and understand how to use it. Ideally, I’d find these rules in the monster’s stat block (so that they can be easily referenced when I use the monster). But if I use Monster A several times, I’ll probably remember how the special attack works. I will have mastered those rules and no longer need to read them before using Monster A.

Why anyone would think that’s a bad thing, I dunno. I’m assuming they’re masochists.

But let’s take this farther: Now I want to run Monster B. It, too, has a special attack. And as with Monster A, I’ll need to read the rules for that special attack and understand how to use it.

Unless, of course, Monster B uses the same rules for its special attack that Monster A uses for its special attack. Then I can use my mastery of the rules from Monster A to run Monster B without reading its rules. (Even better would be if this special attack were referred to by a common, unique name so that I could tell at a glance that this was the same ability.)

Legends & Labyrinths leverages the principles of system mastery through its Sidebar Reference System (SRS). (As I’ve discussed before.) I’m not saying that’s a universal solution that everyone should adopt (although I know that, personally, I wish all my RPG rulebooks used it). But I don’t understand why any game designer would want to run away from the principles of system mastery or make their games harder to learn and use.

Because, in reality, the power of system mastery extends beyond merely “I know that rule”. Memorizing the rule is only the first step; learning how to use the rule (and use it effectively) is the next one. For example, a Chess player doesn’t just memorize the rules for how a rook moves. They combine that knowledge with how the other pieces move and, from that, learn how force is projected on the board. And then they grow from there.

And the same is true in D&D or any other roleplaying game.

Tagline: Wizards of the Coast and the Bourbaki card game design team strike again in this surprisingly fascinating and addictive card game, the first in a line of non-collectible games meant to provide competition with games like Uno and Skip-Bo.

Thirteen years later, Twitch remains one of my favorite card games. My review speaks highly of it, but a game with that kind of staying power deserves special attention. Sadly, it is long out of print and virtually unattainable as I write this. If you get a chance, though, I recommend you grab a copy ASAP.

The premise of the game is simple: Someone plays a card. The cards tells you who goes next. If it’s you, you’ve got to play another card before someone challenges you and you have to take the entire stack of cards. If it’s not you, you’ve got to figure out who it is and challenge them before they can play. Be careful, if you play or challenge wrong you’ll end up taking those cards.

Simple, right? Right.

Until you start playing the game, that is. Then what seems so simple on the surface suddenly seems to be the most complicated thing you’ve ever done.

The basic game centers around eight different cards. The four basic cards are Left, Right, 2 Left and 2 Right. These cards tell you who goes next (the player to your left, your right, two seats to your left, and two seats to your right – respectively). In addition the card Ditto means that the last card’s effect is repeated, the card Back At Ya! sends the turn back to the last player to play a card. The last trick is that all players are given a color card, and a duplicate of this card is place in the play deck. When that color card is played the person to who it belongs must play next. Finally there are the challenge cards – these cards are keyed to the colors of the players. If a player is too slow or if they make a mistake, you can challenge them with the challenge card corresponding to their color.

The name of the game is speed, and once you’re into the heat of the chase you’re going to find that these simple rules are more than challenge enough.

Now let’s take another step, into the Advanced Game. At this point we add three more cards: Pick a Color, Rotate Colors, and Left to Right. These are called “Pause Cards”, when they are played gameplay temporarily stops while their results are gauged. Pick a Color means that the person who just played the card picks the color of another player, and then that player plays a card (resuming play). Rotate colors means that everyone takes their color card (indicating what color they are) and hand them to the player on their left – this causes confusion regarding what color to use to challenge which players and what color you are when the color cards come up during gameplay. Finally, Left to Right means that all cards referring to a particular direction mean exactly the opposite – left means right and right means left. Conveniently there are exactly two of these cards, meaning that once play is reversed, it will eventually turn back the other way.

Twitch is the first in a line of games Wizards of the Coast is producing in order to apparently attempt to compete with traditional family games. On the strength of this product I intend to go out of my way to also purchase Pivot, Alpha Blitz, and GoWild! — the other products in this line-up.

At seven bucks you can’t lose with this game. It won’t be put on the shelf next to your Magic cards or your Doomtown cards, but I think it more than amply deserves a place alongside such classic games as Uno and Skip-Bo.

Style: 4
Substance: 5

Author: Richard Garfield, Skaff Elias, Jim Lin, and Dave Pettey
Company/Publisher: Wizards of the Coast
Cost: $6.95
Page count: n/a
ISBN: 1-57530-581-X
Originally Posted: 1998/05/30