Last week I posted a rant about the difficulty of creating lycanthropic stat blocks in 3rd Edition. The short version is this: Creating lycanthropes require you to create three separate stat blocks simultaneously while pulling information from both the base creature and the animal form. You end up juggling five stat blocks and if you discover that you need (or want) to make an adjustment on any one of them during the creation process you have to backtrack the change through all the other stat blocks.

Dear Prince of Persia,

You have one gimmick: A dagger that lets you rewind time.

You might want to try using it to some meaningful effect at some point during your movie.

Sincerely,

Justin Alexander

In all seriousness, Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time is a fairly entertaining action-adventure flick. But it’s not particularly clever, and that’s disappointing because a dagger that lets you rewind time should give you plenty of opportunities for cleverness.

I think the film’s real source of struggle is that they turn the Prince into the infallible star of an action movie: For example, one sequence has him effortlessly surf his way down an avalanche of sand, parkour-leap perfectly onto a narrow ledge, and somersault his way into the next chamber. And he’s doing that sort of thing pretty consistently throughout the entire movie.

But the essential nature of the dagger of time is that it lets you erase your mistakes. So if you never let your prototypical action hero make any mistakes, then you’re knee-capping your premise. The disappointing thing here is that the dagger of time gives you the opportunity to create a prototypical action hero who is still a fallible human being (because he achieves that action hero perfection through the use of the dagger) — thus re-creating cinematically the same basic appeal that the game had.

The film also chickens out of using the incredibly funny-yet-bittersweet ending from the original game, opting instead for a paint-by-numbers Hollywood Romance ending. Which I, personally, find disappointing.

Final analysis: Fun to see, but nothing you’re going to remember six months from now.

UPDATE: This page is out of date and no longer maintained. I’m leaving it up to keep the comments archived, but for a complete index of all articles related to node-based scenario design, check Part 1 of the series.

Here’s a convenient index of Node-Based Scenario Design for easy access, easy reading, and easy linking.

Part 1: The Plotted Approach
Part 2: Choose Your Own Adventure
Part 3: Inverting the Three Clue Rule
Part 4: Sample Scenario – Las Vegas CTU
Part 5: Plot vs. Node
Part 6: Alternative Node Design
Part 7: More Alternative Node Designs
Part 8: Freeform Design in the Cloud
Part 9: Types of Nodes

The essays on the Three Clue Rule and scenario-based design make for good supplementary reading if you haven’t seen them already.

UPDATE: A a sequel or supplement for Node-Based Scenario Design has been written under the mind-numbingly clever title Advanced Node-Based Design.

Werewolves suck.

I know what you’re thinking: “Justin, you’re obviously confused. Vampires suck. Werewolves bite.”

But lycanthropes seriously suck in 3rd Edition.

I’m not one of those who generally subscribes to the theory that 3rd Edition stat blocks are horrendous. (Although I did revise them to improve the usability of the actual block itself.) Prepping stat blocks usually represents only about 5% of the time that I spend prepping for a game.

But lycanthropes? I hate the little bastards.

I can generally whip out even the most complex stat blocks with templates and class levels and fancy equipment in 15 minutes or so. But I just spent more than two hours prepping the stat block for a single wererat, and I’m still pretty sure that I’ve screwed up the math somewhere. Probably a minor screw-up (the sort of thing that wouldn’t bother me in a private campaign); but since this is for a professional project it’s driving me insane.

It’s not the multiple stat blocks that bug me. I don’t actually have any problems using a lycanthrope straight out of the book. And I’ll frequently whip up multiple stat blocks for the same NPC in order to facilitate temporary effects (different equipment, rage, buffs, etc.).

The problem is that the rules for creating lycanthropes require you to create all three stat blocks sort of simultaneously while pulling information from both the base creature and the animal form. So you end up juggling five different stat blocks, and if you discover that you need to make an adjustment on any one of them you have to backtrack the change through all the other stat blocks.

On the one hand, I’m kind of looking at the rules for werewolves in 2nd Edition and 4th Edition and wondering if there’s any reason we can’t adopt that simplicity into 3rd Edition: Just give me one stat block and let me apply a simple template (“add bite attack”) when the were-creature enters hybrid form.

On the other hand, having gotten the rant out of my system, I’m beginning to suspect that the real problem isn’t necessarily the rules, but rather the organization of the rules. It seems like what the system needs is a clear order of progression:

(1) Create base creature.

(2) Apply lycanthrope template to create humanoid form.

(3) Apply hybrid template to the humanoid form create hybrid form.

(4) Apply animal form template to the humanoid form to create animal form.

And while it’s nice to have the generic “use any animal” guidelines, it would probably be easier in practice to have separate templates for each of the established types of were-creatures. Here’s a stab at what the wererat templates would look like:

WERERAT TEMPLATE
Apply this template to the base creature to create the wererat’s humanoid form. This template can be added to any humanoid or giant.

Size and Type: Creature gains the “shapechanger” subtype.
Hit Dice and Hit Points: Add 1d8 hit die to the base creature.
Armor Class: +2 bonus to natural armor.

Special Qualities: alternate form, lycanthropic empathy, low-light vision, scent

Base Save Bonuses: Fort +2, Ref +2, Will +2
Abilities: Wis +2, may gain an ability score increase due to additional hit dice
Skills: +8 racial bonus on Climb and Swim checks. Gains (2 + Int modifier) skill points, treating Climb, Hide, Listen, Move Silently, Spot and Swim as class skills.
Feats: Alertness, Iron Will, Weapon Finesse

Challenge Rating: +2

WERERAT HYBRID TEMPLATE
Apply this template to the wererat’s humanoid form to create the stat block for its hybrid form.

Size and Type: Small or the size of the base creature, whichever is larger.
Armor Class: +1 bonus to natural armor (if better than the base creature’s natural armor bonus)
Attacks: Gains 2 claw attacks and 1 bite as a secondary attack (-5 penalty).

Special Attacks: curse of lycanthropy (Fort DC 15); cannot cast spells with verbal components
Special Qualities: DR 5/silver for afflicted lycanthropes; DR 10/silver for natural lycanthropes

Abilities: Dex +6, Con +2

WERERAT ANIMAL FORM TEMPLATE
Apply this template to the wererat’s humanoid form to create the stat block for its animal form.

Size and Type: Small
Speed: 40 ft., climb 20 ft.
Armor Class: +1 natural armor (if better than the base creature’s natural armor)
Attacks: Replace all attacks with a bite attack (1d4 plus disease).

Special Attacks: curse of lycanthropy (Fort DC 15); cannot cast spells with verbal, somatic, or material components
Special Qualities: DR 5/silver for afflicted lycanthropes; DR 10/silver for natural lycanthropes

Abilities: Dex +6, Con +2
Skills: Can choose to take 10 on Climb checks even if rushed or threatened. Can use their Dex modifier for Climb and Swim checks.

I think that should produce 100% rules-accurate stat blocks with less hassle.

(Pardon me for a moment while I wander away from my HTML editor…)

And the proof is in the pudding: Despite forgetting to apply the old age template to my base creature’s stats (so that I had to start over while I was half-way through the hybrid stat block) and taking extra time to design a custom magic item from scratch, it only took me half an hour to put together three wererat stat blocks for a 4th-level orc barbarian. And I’m far more confident of the result than I was of the mess I managed to generate after 2+ hours of struggle this morning.

(This, of course, is the point where one of you will point out some egregiously idiotic mistake I made in those templates and send me crying back to my drafting table.)

LYCANTHROPE WEEK
Wererats
Werewolves
Dire Werewolves

A couple of years ago David Myers, a media professor at Loyola University, published “Play and Punishment: The Sad and Curious Case of Twixt“. The paper described how Myers conducted a sociology experiment in the City of Heroes MMORPG while playing a character named Twixt. To sum up:

(1) Myers would enter a PVP area in the game and use whatever tactics were legally allowed by the rules of the game in order to win the area.

(2) These included tactics which other players felt were “cheap”, disrupted the normal cross-faction socializing, and/or interfered with non-PVP exploits being used to “farm” the zone.

(3) Other players attempted to force Myers to abandon his tactics by insulting, denigrating, threatening, and/or ostracizing him. (Myers was harassed in the chat channels and forums, expelled from his guild, and even received real-life death threats.)

The conclusion Myers wants to draw from this experiment is simple: “He said his experience demonstrated that modern-day social groups making use of modern-day technology can revert to “medieval and crude” methods in trying to manipulate and control others.”

As he put it in the original paper, “That is, the social order within CoH/V seemed to operate quite independently of game rules and almost solely for the sake of its own preservation. It did not seem within the purview of social orders and ordering within CoH/V to recognize (much less nurture) any sort of rationality — or, for that matter, any supra-social mechanism that might have adjudicated Twixt’s behavior on the basis of its ability to provide, over time, great knowledge of the game system….”

I’m somewhat conflicted.

PLAYING TO WIN

On the one hand, I’m an advocate of Sirlin’s philosophy of Playing to Win. (If you aren’t familiar with it, I highly recommend following that link.) When it comes to purely competitive games — games like Street Fighter 2, Starcraft, Twilight Imperium, or football — those who don’t play to win are clearly engaging in irrational and needlessly self-defeating behavior.

But should the PVP area of an MMORPG necessarily be considered a purely competitive environment?

It certainly can be: For example, the Warsong Gulch mini-game of capture the flag in World of Warcraft takes place in a sequestered game map: The only reason to go there is to enter into a PVP competition.

But the PVP area Myers was competing in presents a more complicated situation: Other players clearly had coherent and rational non-PVP reasons for participating in that area. Myers may have been following the rules of the game, but should that automatically give his agenda priority over the agendas of the other players in the game?

At one level the question really becomes: Why are we playing these games?

And, frankly, I have no doubt that Myers would have found similar responses to his “griefing” tactics even if he had been using them in a completely and indisputably competitive environment. Sirlin elucidates the fundamental nature of scrub behavior, and it’s absolutely trivial to find complaints of “cheap sniper!” or “spawn camper!”  in any number of FPS deathmatches. (Although would the responses have become so severely virulent without the accompanying disruption of a social norm? That’s an interesting question.)

But I think there is a deeper failure of self-analysis on the part of Myers.

TWIXT IN THE REAL WORLD

In his paper, Myers writes:

In real-world environments, “natural” laws governing social relationships, if they exist at all, are part of the same social system in which they operate and, for that reason, are difficult to isolate, measure, and confirm. In Twixt’s case, however, two unique sets of rules – one governing the game system, one governing the game society — offered an opportunity to observe how social rules adapt to system rules (or, more speculatively, how social laws might reproduce natural laws.) And, the clearest answer, based on Twixt’s experience, is that they don’t. Rather, if game rules pose some threat to social order, these rules are simply ignored. And further, if some player — like Twixt — decides to explore those rules fully, then that player is shunned, silenced, and, if at all possible, expelled.

Myers assumes that the game rules should naturally define the rules of society. That society, in failing to live by those rules, is acting irrationally.

To analyze the legitimacy of Myers assumption, let’s hypothetically apply Twixt’s behavior to the real world:

Twixt enters a small town. He sees a woman he desires, so he rapes her. He then moves on to other women and begins raping them, one after another. The people of the town don’t like what Twixt is doing: Attempts to physically restrain or kill him fail (either because he’s too strong or perhaps they are unarmed while he has a gun), so he quickly finds himself ostracized from society. People avoid him, and when they can’t avoid him they try to shame him into changing his behavior.

From Twixt’s point of view he’s playing by the rules of reality: The system is clearly set up to reward mass procreation and a wide “sowing of the seed”. Nor is he breaking any natural laws of reality. In fact, people keep praying to God for Twixt to stop and God never does anything to stop him. That only proves that Twixt is playing by the rules. (Myers specifically uses the fact that the GMs in City of Heroes didn’t punish his behavior as indicative that his behavior was within the rules of the game.)

Twixt is just “exploring those rules fully”. And Myers apparently expects us to consider the efforts of the townsfolk to have Twixt “shunned, silenced, and, if at all possible, expelled” to be “medieval and crude”.

But I think we can all agree that Twixt the Serial Rapist should be punished and ostracized by society.

Myers writes, “If either natural or system laws governing social order in the real world are in any way analogous to the game rule sof the COH/V virtual world, we can conclude that social orders in general are more likely to deny than reveal those laws.” He goes on to say that this denial “seems drastically and overly harsh, even unnatural“.

But the very nature of society is to deny the primacy of natural law. “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law” has been pretty consistently shown to be a spectacularly crappy philosophy (as Twixt the Serial Rapist demonstrates). A healthy society, on the other hand, tends to operate on the principle that “your freedom ends where my nose begins”.

Myers, on the other hand, seems to willfully ignore the fact that his flailing hands are smashing into people’s noses.

IN CONCLUSION

But while I find Myers’ general conclusions regarding the function of society to be wrong-headed, I remain conflicted regarding the specific example of behavior in City of Heroes.

While “your freedom ends where my nose begins” is a relatively solid philosophy in the real world, we obviously set it aside when we sit down to play a competitive game. (Football, for example, would be a relatively boring game if all the players politely agreed not to invade each others’ personal space.) In fact, I would argue that one of the things that makes a game appealing is specifically the fact that it constitutes a safe environment in which we agree to abandon certain social norms.

(And, by extension, one of the reasons why “The Most Dangerous Game” is such an appealing scenario is because it ironically inverts the paradigm again by removing the safety of the game-space.)

But here we come to the crux of the matter: Are MMORPGs games? Or are they digital extensions of our social lives?

That’s obviously not a question with an easy black-or-white answer. MMORPGs create a complex shade of gray somewhere in the middle of that scale, and they create a natural conflict between people who have different opinions about how much they should be played as games and how much they should be lived as a social outlet.

Myers chose to define himself as an unrepentent blackguard: He vigorously approached City of Heroes as nothing but a game space and, thus, refused to acknowledge any aspect of the social aspect of the game. This conveniently placed him at the extreme end of the MMORPG scale, which meant that everyone else in the game was almost guaranteed to lie further towards the social end of the scale.

Which explains why, as one person quoted by Myers said, “everyone hates you twixty”.