If I had to summarize the events of my current D&D campaign up to now in a paragraph, it would look something like that: The players started out being sold into slavery from an orphanage, were shipwrecked on an island, escaped with the help of the goddess Selune and were teleported to what has become their new home base in the Nentir Vale. There they investigated a mysterious death and disappearing standing stones in a village, discovering that a demon was inadvertently liberated there. They helped a barony to reinstall their rightful ruler in a rebellion, before hunting down the demon in an underground temple with a rift to a parallel plane. On killing the demon they were transported to that parallel plane, and are currently in a vampire castle where they need to kill the vampire lord to get back to their own world.

As you can see, a lot of things happened over 5 levels of gameplay. And only very little of it involved dungeon delving. And while I am not necessarily representative of anything, I do think that this sort of adventure with lots of story, lots of NPCs, and different interesting locations is very much what "modern" D&D looks like. It is a game of interactive story-telling, of role-playing mixed in about equal measure with combat.

Now Wizards of the Coast is working on the next edition of D&D, called D&D Next. And there is something like a beta test for this edition, with WotC handing out early versions of the rules plus adventures to test the new system. And one thing I noticed is that the adventures provided are not of the modern style described above. Rather they are all of the "classic" dungeon delve, hack'n'slash variety, like the Caves of Chaos, or the newly included Mines of Madness. The Mines of Madness adventure starts with the players in front of the entrance to said mines, being told that they are looking for some fabulous artifact in there. End of story. The decisions they have to take are of the type "you come to a crossing, do you go left or right?", and instead of NPCs to interact with there are series of rooms with monsters and traps.

Now before becoming DM in my current campaign I was a player in a campaign which could go on without any combat for months, and as this is with the same group of people I'm sure they noticed that my campaign has a lot more combat in it. In the vampire castle they are in there is the possibility, due to the castle's sandbox-y nature, to have several fights in a row. But there are also a lot of interesting NPCs to interact with, roleplaying scenes where the players need to decide whether to trust somebody, clues to find, and interesting choices to make. I am not a fan of hack'n'slash dungeons, where there is no logical rhyme or reason to an accumulation of rooms full of exotic monsters which seem to have no purpose whatsoever than to engage adventurers in combat.

And I am starting to wonder whether D&D Next as a rules system is designed for this "classic" style of adventuring. Which would be somewhat weird, because one of the main complaints about the current 4th edition of D&D was that the rules were too much designed for combat, and didn't give enough room for roleplaying. When I listen to a podcast of Mines of Madness, there is a lot *less* roleplaying going on than in my 4E campaign. In fact in that Mines of Madness games the player characters are apparently treated as disposable pawns, with multiple deaths in the dungeon each dealt with by the introduction of a replacement pre-rolled character coming out of nowhere.

What do you think? Are "classic" hack'n'slash adventures back in fashion? Have people given up on more involved stories where dialogue with NPCs is actually necessary and not just some random exchange of words with a tavern keeper or blacksmith between dungeon crawls? What kind of adventures would you like to play in D&D?

In discussions on the internet, when discussing groups of people, quite often these people are divided into two groups: The haves and the have-nots, the good and the bad, the intelligent and the stupid, the hardcore and the casual, and so on. Statements about these two groups are usually made as if there was a clear distinction between them. In mathematical terms, if you plotted something like video game skill on the x-axis and the number of people having this skill on the y-axis, people talk of it as if the distribution was bi-modal; that is as if the curve would have two distinctive humps, one of good players and one of bad players.

Scientifically speaking that is utter nonsense. The Central Limit Theorem says that if you make for example this plot of video game skill of a large enough population, what you will get is a bell curve with a single hump in the middle. That is why this curve is called a "normal distribution". The nature of this curve is that 68% of people are withing one standard deviation of the average. For example 68% of people have an IQ between 85 and 115, and are thus of average intelligence. Of course people are notoriously bad at estimating their own IQ or other qualities, so that if you rely on self-assessment you end up with the observation that most people are above average, which is a mathematical impossibility.

Why is that important in a discussion about games? For example I was reviewing a pen & paper roleplaying system yesterday and remarked that it was designed for experienced game masters and groups. And I got a comment saying "The rules system ain't helping a crap GM.". You see the pattern of thinking I described above: If a GM isn't experienced, he must be crap. The reality is that most game masters are average, and what I wanted to say in my review was that this system wasn't suitable for the average group. Yes, a "crappy" game master can ruin any system. But "crappy" GMs are exactly as rare as brilliant ones, and most GMs are simply average. And in my opinion certain rules systems are more suitable for average GMs and players than others are.

The same consideration is true for any other discussion about e.g. video game skill or dedication. Most people have an average skill and average dedication to a game. For a game to work well, it needs to work for the average, because that is most of the audience. "The good" and "the bad" are two more extreme, and much rarer cases, and are thus less important to consider in game design. Of course the extremes can be important for business models, for example the Free2Play whales who subsidize the game for everybody else. But that only works for games with specific business models, it would be a lot more difficult to give thousands of dollars to Blizzard for World of Warcraft, even if you purchased all possible pets and mounts. And while I am on a spending spree trying to buy every possible 4th edition D&D book and adventure, I doubt that will make a noticeable impression on the finances of Wizards of the Coast.

Designing for the average is actually rather difficult, as they aren't easy to get hold of. Various games for example had extensive beta tests, and then found to their surprise that average players in the release version of the game behaved very differently than the beta players, who by definition were a more dedicated part of the total audience. People voicing their opinion on game forums are likewise usually not average players. So if you design for the vocal minority of either extreme, you can run into problems with the silent majority.

In summary, I find it helps to think of people as being mostly average, as opposed to dividing them into two groups. Most of the people talking about "bad players", or "morons & slackers", or any of these terms are just chest-thumping to demonstrate their inflated opinion of themselves. The reality, as usual, is much more mundane. Most people are average.

Tim Westhaven sent me a free downloadable copy of his indie pen & paper roleplaying game Shattered Moon, and I promised to review it. Now I am aware of the difficulties of getting the word out on indie pen & paper games; nevertheless I'm afraid my review isn't going to help Tim very much, because I think there isn't much overlap between the readership of this blog and the target audience of Shattered Moon. Shattered Moon is what I would call a hardcore system, for experienced roleplayers who think that a game like D&D is too simple. Hardcore pen & paper roleplayers do exist, but they don't tend to hang out at places like mine.

Now how does one review a pen & paper roleplaying system? Basically by looking at two relatively separate things: The lore or setting on the one hand, and the rules system on the other. You could call that "world" and "game". Of course there is some overlap, for example a wizard casting a fireball will have certain implications on the nature of the world, as well as on gameplay. If you want to know how NOT to review a pen & paper roleplaying system, you only need to visit YouTube, where videos promising a review of some game system usually end up being half-hour rants on how wrong the hair-color of one sub-race of elves in that system is. :)

The world of Shattered Moon is a grim one, which could be described as post-apocalyptic fantasy.
That is it plays on our Earth, in the future, after an apocalypse; but that apocalypse wasn't the usual nuclear one, but was magical of nature. The moon shattered, thus the name of the system, the dark goddess Lilith "returns" to Earth, as does magic. And the players are nuoSidhe, "reawoken" dwarves, elves, goblins, ogres and trolls whose souls used to be trapped in human form. Like all post-apocalyptic settings, this is not a happy place. And the world (supported by some game rules) is designed to give rise to a lot of horror and unpleasant moral conflict. This is not an "a figher, a cleric, a wizard, and a rogue walk into a dungeon and come out with lots of treasure" kind of setting. And it is definitively not suitable for children, as if you hadn't guessed that.

But what is really hardcore about Shattered Moon is the gameplay, which is one of the weirdest and most challenging rules systems I've ever come across. In general roleplaying rule systems can be sorted by complexity of rules, ranging from systems which basically are improvised theater, have no rules and rely completely on the game master to make up the rules on the fly, to systems which have tons of rules and math and tables where you need a computer to figure out the result of a combat action. Shattered Moon manages to have both tons of rules and math and need for a computer PLUS being based on game master decisions instead of dice. It is a diceless system (although it does have a deck of fate cards to produce random results if needed) without the dicelessness getting rid of the math. If you believe that 4th edition Dungeons & Dragons is "too game-y" with its miniatures and battlemaps and dice, you might be surprised that Shattered Moon manages to be a lot more game-y and complicated without dice.

So how does this work? It is beyond this review to explain the whole system, and I won't even pretend that I have understood all the details. But basically it is based on player-controlled activity pools [AP] and FatePoints [FP]. Any activity costs AP, and the outcome can be further influenced by spending FP. Different types of activities have different activity pools, calculated from different stats and modifiers. To determine success the AP is compared to the difficulty of the action, determined by the game master and called activity rating [AR]. That is relatively easy if the action is "passive", that is not actively opposed by another player or non-player character; rules for "duelled activities" are a lot more complicated, with even something like a debate being played out like a combat, with spending points and using abilities. In combat, AP also serve to determine initiative, thus the character or monster with the highest AP acts first, spends some AP while acting, and thus drops down in the initiative order. All this is further complicated by FP, which can be used by players to do things like "induce a catastrophe", or "call a miracle". Players not only state what they want to do, but constantly also have to expend various resources to influence results, which makes gameplay very tactical.

Reading the rules for the first time is likely to make your head spin, the example of a combat taking 3 rounds takes 11 pages of the rulebook to describe. But looking at it from a zoomed-out view, the game is a curious mix of results that are very deterministic and results that are very arbitrary and depend very much on the game master, called The Fate in Shattered Moon. For this to work you absolutely need a very experienced game master and players who trust him to be fair. Shattered Moon is definitively not a game you want to use for your first roleplaying campaign ever, nor for any casual campaign. However the advantage of pen & paper systems is that you only need one table full of people who want to play the same thing to make any system work, however complicated and arbitrary it might be. So even if Shattered Moon is not a suitable game for the mass market, I would consider it likely that there are experienced groups of players out there who would very much enjoy this game.

As final part of this review, a word on what bang you get for your bucks. The Shattered Moon rulebook currently costs $19.99 on RPGNow for a pdf with 321 pages which contains everything you need to play. It is basically Player's Handbook, Dungeon Master's Guide, and Monster Manual in one. And while in a perfect world full of honest people every player would buy his own copy, we know that in reality it is likely that a complete group of players just buys one copy of the pdf and shares it. Which makes Shattered Moon a comparatively cheap system to try. There are even free character sheets and player material available at RPGNow. On the downside there is not a lot of additional material available yet, so if you are looking for adventure modules and the like, you are currently out of luck.

As I said before, I cannot give an unguarded recommendation to Shattered Moon. It is a niche product, and as far as I can tell it offers good value for money for a group of hardcore pen & paper players. But personally I am not planning to play this, as I have a far more casual campaign. Plus I prefer rules systems in which dice play a large role to determine outcomes, and there are fewer debates on whether a decision of the game master was fair or not. But all this are factors which depend on the people at your table, so your mileage may vary.

I finished Mass Effect 3 last weekend, and as I didn't have much time this week during the evenings, I only played Anno Online every day. But somehow I was repeatedly wondering what I should play as the next "big" game during the coming weekend. Basically I am wondering whether I should continue playing Dishonored, which I stopped playing somewhere in the middle for no good reason, or start something else instead.

I am pretty certain that if I don't go back to Dishonored anytime soon, I might as well uninstall it, because then I never will. Dishonored is one of those many games which A) have a story, and B) have complex controls which you get used to while playing. Not having played Dishonored for three months, I already forgot a lot about both the story and the controls. Thus it is a bit like starting a game in the middle, which is annoying. But I certainly don't want to start over from the beginning either. Somehow these games are not very "pause-friendly".

That contrasts with games like Civ5, or World of Tanks, or to some degree XCOM, where one "game" lasts only a limited time, and by design you then start the next game. Even if I was in the middle of a Civ5 game when I stopped, I probably would start a new game if I came back months later. In World of Tanks I don't even have the choice, every "game" is just 15 minutes, and you "start a new game" every time you log on. The new SimCity, with its far too small towns, then also ends up in this category, you probably would want to start a new city after a pause.

The other extremes are MMORPGs, which to me seem the least pause-friendly. If you made a pause of several months in a MMORPG, not only do you tend to completely have forgotten what you were doing last and why you are carrying all this stuff in your back; but also the virtual world around you has most probably changed, so whatever you were doing when you stopped is probably not relevant any more today. An expansion pushes that irrelevance of what you were doing before to the point where it actually feels like starting a new game. It doesn't really matter where you stopped in Cataclysm when you come back to Mists of Pandaria. So expansion somehow make MMORPGs more pause-friendly, and usually cause huge numbers of players to come back.

The Free2Play business model has gone from "you can't do that in the West" to one of the dominant business models for MMORPGs in a few years. While it certainly isn't a panacea, it certainly can get more people to try out your product than other business models can. That makes me wonder whether this could be a solution for pen & paper roleplaying games as well. Dungeons & Dragons has a rather unfortunate business model in which every few years a new edition comes out which is largely incompatible with all the books you bought before. The currently worked on edition, officially "D&D Next" is sometimes also called 5th edition, but if you consider that there was an edition 3.5, and some editions of D&D in parallel to AD&D, the total number of Dungeons & Dragons editions is in fact even larger. That understandably pisses a lot of people off. A part of hate spewed on various forums in the "edition wars" is in fact people trying to justify what fundamentally is a good economic decision, sticking with what you have instead of paying hundreds of dollars for a slightly different version which might or might not be "better".

Understanding this it becomes obvious that the attempt of Wizards of the Coast of winning old customers back by making D&D Next play "more like" previous editions, while still forcing everybody to buy new books, is not necessarily going to work. If they look at people's sound economic reasons for not buying a new edition of D&D, it becomes clear that game design is not a solution. WotC has to work on their business model. And Free2Play might just be the ticket.

How would that work? Easy, the basic rulebooks of D&D Next should be free: Player's Handbook, Dungeon Master's Guide, and Monster Manual, maybe with a little booklet on how to play with one solo adventure and one real adventure thrown in, like in the Red Box. Players would be able to download that package as PDF for free from the Dungeons & Dragons website. They could even inscribe themselves on that website to receive a softcover version of the material for just the cost of shipping. For people without internet, game stores would sell pre-paid postcards priced at the cost of shipping, which you fill in, send to WotC and receive your basic D&D Next books.

Wizards of the Coast would then make money by selling everything else at the usual prices: Deluxe hardcover versions of the PH, DM, and MM; all further rulebooks with new classes, monsters, and the like; adventures that come in nice boxes with maps, handouts, tokens and everything else needed to play the adventure; and so on. Just like in every other Free2Play model the idea is to get a lot of people playing your game for free, and then trust that a good number of them will get hooked and pay for your non-free parts of the game.

Of course this would be a rather daring and novel approach in the pen & paper roleplaying business. But it would be a logical extrapolation of previous attempts of making the basic product relatively cheap. Wizards of the Coast could really make a high impact here, beating both their big competitors like Paizo and the various indie RPGs which rely on cheaper online distribution. Ultimately a lot of these products are rather similar to each other, and it could well be the best business model which wins the day here.

Over the years the regular readers of this blog change, especially when I start writing about different subjects. Thus with me writing more about pen & paper roleplaying these days, it has become necessary to write this reminder about my terms of service, especially the comment moderation part.

This blog is dedicated to the intelligent discussion of various subjects, mostly related to games. As anybody who visits various forums can attest to, discussion on the internet is not always intelligent. Specifically some forms of comments are obviously more designed to shut up somebody else than to contribute anything constructive to the discussion.

I do allow any opinion in the comment section of my blog, whether I agree or not. If I disagree, I will most likely voice that disagreement and give my arguments why I do not agree. But while every commenter has complete freedom of opinion, I do impose restrictions on how that opinion is voiced. Basic rules of politeness have to be adhered to. Thus if you start insulting me or other commenters, START SHOUTING AT ME OR OTHERS IN ALL CAPS, start dismissing every counterargument as "bullshit", or go Goodwin on a comment thread, there is a strong likelihood that this will end in your comments getting deleted.

I do not edit comments. First of all Blogger doesn't have the possibility, and second of all I think that would be a greater attack on your freedom of expression than simply deleting the whole post. Thus comment moderation happens in the form of comment deletion, either of a single comment found to not adhere to these rules, or by a deletion of the whole series of comments, including mine.

My table, my rules, as the pen & paper roleplayers would say.

Electronic Arts just managed to win the title Worst Company in America for the second time in a row. Lots of commentary on that is justified. But I don't think all of it is. In particular I keep seeing one argument popping up again and again, in a replay of last year, that "EA has also presided over poor endings and seemingly rushed sequels to several highly acclaimed game series. Mass Effect 3's final act was so poorly received that fans demanded, and received, a revised ending, and EA was sued for false advertising.". And I don't think that is a valid complaint.

Take for example the 1942 movie Casablanca: If you had asked what ending the audience would have liked to see, it would probably have been Humphrey Bogart ending up with Ingrid Bergman instead of Claude Rains. Not having the most popular ending possible is part of why that film is considered art.

While I didn't like the ending of Mass Effect 3 either, and have already read a lot of people complaining about the end of Bioshock Infinite, I don't think such complaints are valid. I would very much argue that in a video game the gameplay should be more important than the story. But if you only look at the story and accept that telling a story is a form of art, you must accept that the artistic vision of the creator of the story might differ from your own. It is the very core of art that "beauty is in the eye of the beholder", and can't really be judged.

It would have been rather easy for a company like EA to create an ending of the Mass Effect 3 trilogy based on what is most popular with some focus group. Not doing that and sticking to some artistic vision deserves plaudits and not a Worst Company award. After all EA is doing enough other things wrong to deserve this award for things like the botched SimCity launch, excessive milking of their customers, or compromising gameplay with paid-for-by-advertisers DLC. Not making their stories have the most popular ending is one of the few things they actually got right.

Oh man, sometimes this blog makes me feel my age. I simply don't understand the entitlement kids of today. In yesterday's thread several people justified video games piracy by games being "too expensive", a "financial burden" on those poor kids, whose abject digital poverty was described in the following terms:

One thing that frequently annoys me about discussion on the internet is that people tend to avoid arguing the real question, but instead conjure up the horrors of some secondary evil. Talk about drugs, and people will tell you about people committing crimes to feed their drug habit. Talk about prostitution, and people will tell you about "white slavery". Talk about RMT, and people will tell you about account hacking. Talk about always-on DRM, and people will tell you about server outages.

I am not saying that these secondary evils don't exist. But if they were the core of the problem, it would be sufficient to solve those secondary problems and still have the primary feature.

The latest story here is that the next XBox will probably have always-on DRM, that is you won't be able to play anything on that console while not connected to the internet. And of course everybody talks about server outages or people without internet. Or uses the inherent lack of data to claim that DRM never works. And nobody addresses the real question:

Once all technical problems are resolved, should a company be allowed to put restrictions on the use of their game hardware / software to prevent piracy?

Again, this is assuming a working technical solution, and not discussing company double-speak that tries to sell you a restriction as a feature. I really *only* want to discuss the question whether a company has the right to put certain restrictions on their regular users in order to prevent some people playing illegal pirated copies of games.

For me the answer to this question has always been yes, a company making game hardware and/or software has the right to put in restrictions that limit piracy, even if those restrictions inconvenience legit users. Just like a supermarket has the right to impose certain restrictions on their customers that prevent theft. And from that point, everything else becomes just a technico-economic problem: What sort of technical solution can the company find which causes a minimum of inconvenience to paying customers while having a maximum effect on pirates? It is easy to demonstrate that there must be a break-even point somewhere, where the added income from people "forced" to pay for the product exceeds the lost income from people prevented from buying the hard- or software due to the restrictions. It is basically a business decision, and companies have the right to make those business decisions.

That is not to say that things can't go wrong. I am pretty sure that in the specific case of SimCity the overall net effect on EA was negative, with more damage done to the company by their non-working DRM solution than piracy damage prevented. "Always Off" is not a feature you can sell to anybody. But ultimately that isn't different from any company releasing a flawed product and having to deal with the consequences, whether the flaw is non-working servers or horse meat in "beef" burgers.

The important thing is that there is no such thing as a "right to piracy". You cannot go to a court of human rights and claim that Microsoft or EA has an obligation to let you copy their games for free, or that the always-on internet requirement is a breach of your human rights. Saying that Microsoft should be obliged to provide an XBox that works without internet is like saying that Wikipedia should be obliged to provide their product without internet, or any other provider of some service over the internet (including me, you can't read my blog without internet either).

If Microsoft really decides to make the next XBox work only while connected to the internet, I fully support them in as far as they have the right to do so. And I fully support the right of everybody to not buy such an XBox because of those restrictions. How much money Microsoft is effectively gaining or losing due to that business decision will depend on how well the technical implementation is working. And unless you have a parallel universe at hand in which the restriction-free XBox is a reality, it will be impossible to know the real numbers. Everybody will just claim completely spurious estimates depending on whether he is for or against piracy.

My newsreader is full of blog posts complaining about LFR in World of Warcraft, and a lack of healers. Meanwhile Pete from Dragonchasers writes about Defiance saying: "In theory you could set yourself up as a kind of healer but I’m not sure there’s enough there to make that a rewarding career path.". To me the two cases look like two sides of the same coin, with the same core problem. And it is a problem all collaborative multiplayer games with different roles have, even pen & paper ones.

Basically people have favorite classes and play-styles. Thus if you take any population and let everybody play whatever he wants, you get a "natural" distribution of everybody playing their favorite role. But in a group of a given size there is a mathematical optimum for maximum efficiency of the group that depends on the role distribution. That mathematical solution will differ not only for different group sizes, but also for different games, because it depends on factors like how much damage do players deal, how much can they withstand, and how much can they heal. The fundamental problem is that the mathematical optimum is rarely a fit with the natural distribution of everybody playing their favorite role.

The overall effect is that if you take one group of hippies with ultimate freedom, allowing each member to play whatever he wants, and compare them to one military group in which who plays what role is determined by a tyrannic leadership, the military group will always be more efficient. If you pursue maximum efficiency, the needs of the collective beat individual freedom. Which is a somewhat weird concept if you consider that you started out by joining a game to have fun, and not the military to fight for your countries survival.

I haven't played Defiance, and wasn't planning to after reading the first reviews. So I can't say exactly how efficient a healer is in that game. But there is always an optimum solution for efficiency, which could be zero healers, but also could be something higher, depending on group size. Whether that is a "rewarding career path" only matters as long as you let every player decide for himself what he wants to play. As soon as you get some sort of guild structure or similar organization, and players find out that having X healers around is improving their win chance over not having them around, somebody will be "forced" to play a healer. Or inversely, if zero healers is the optimum, somebody choosing a healing spec for fun will be looked down upon.

This is pretty much why I don't play in any guild structure in any game any more. I value my personal freedom very much, especially in a game that I choose to play for fun. I already submit to the greater good of the collective when for example I am at work, or with my family. I find the choice of either playing what the collective needs or spoiling everybody's fun by being selfish to be an unpleasant one.

What is the difference between a game and a toy? The dictionary definition will tell you something about a game being "structured playing", but basically it comes down to there being rules and win conditions. You can "beat" a game, there is a challenge to overcome; but to achieve that you have to live with the downside that there are rules that limit what you can do. Roleplaying games are very much an attempt to achieve the best of both worlds, having both game elements and unlimited freedom. But that can never work 100%: If you have unlimited freedom, you end up with a toy, not a game, and you lose the advantages of games, there being a challenge and a win.

When you read discussions about pen & paper roleplaying, this fundamental conflict pops up everywhere. The D&D edition wars are very much about the fact that 4th edition is more solidly on the game side than previous or next editions. People fight about the use of battle maps with grids on them, and miniatures, because some find those "too game-y". And there are endless discussions on the subject in how far a DM should fudge dice rolls to achieve a desirable outcome instead of a random one.

My personal observation on this is that games work better for a group of people than toys do. In a game, or a game-y roleplaying session, the rules are agreed upon in advance, and the players can rely on them. When you move towards "there are no rules, DM decides all" systems, the balance of power shifts towards the DM. And like all tyrannies that is more likely than not to end badly. Players lose motivation, attendance drops, campaigns crumble to dust.

On the one side the DM is always the ultimate power, the least replaceable person at the table, the one doing most of the work, and the referee. On the other side the role-playing game is only a part of the social relationship between the group of players, and if viewed as a group of friends there is a clear social need for a more egalitarian structure. Having the DM visibly bound by the same rules and the same randomness of dice rolls as the players are create a feeling for fairness, which is necessary for this social construct to work. If whether the enemy is in range of your attack is clearly visible on the table, there is no argument; but if the DM has to decide that question the suspicion can sneak up that the DM treats one or the other player unfairly, and that creates a tension which is bad.

The same egalitarian considerations of fairness make me prefer rules systems which are more balanced over rule systems in which certain classes are clearly better than others. This is why I play 4th edition, the only edition of Dungeons & Dragons where there is a reasonable balance of power between high-level wizards and high-level fighters.

In the heated discussions on the subject of how much power a DM should have, or how much balance a rules system needs, I observe that those shouting most loudly for imbalanced systems are those who then want the position with the most power. It isn't the players who demand that the DM is bound less by rules, nor is it the fighters who demand more power for the wizards. I find that somewhat short-sighted. In the long run the best system is the one which maximizes fun for everybody. If you disadvantage part of the people at the table, the table might well end up empty in the long run. Fairness and balance is more important to the long-term health of a pen & paper campaign than the power trip of some individuals.

I have always argued that subscription numbers of a MMORPG six months after release do allow us to say something about the quality of a game. If people are still playing then, they must be having fun. It is very hard to argue that they got lured into the game by false advertising and haven't found out about it half a year later. But that is subscription MMORPGs, a dying species. If we look at single-player games, it is a lot easier to imagine that people bought a game they ended up not wanting, and thus the sales numbers that state which games people buy aren't necessarily an expression of which games they want.

Case in point: SimCity. It apparently sold over 1.1 million copies over its first two weeks. How many of these 1.1 million players regretted that purchase? How many got the game on pre-order, or bought it based on hyped previews, before the significant flaws of the game became apparent?

The perverse consequence is that probably the *next* EA Maxis game will sell less well, regardless of quality. But somebody who tries to find out "what gamers want" based on sales numbers would think that SimCity was an excellent game to emulate. Even if you don't look at the game itself, but only at the server issues, somebody looking at the sales numbers will conclude that people don't mind buying games with always-on DRM. Because the SimCity server debacle is more likely to hurt the *next* games sales.

Although I am not a big fan of Kickstarter from a customer protection point of view, I would say that Kickstarter might actually better at measuring "what gamers want" than sales of triple-A games. There is less influence of hugely expensive advertising campaigns or lobbying to game journalists on Kickstarter numbers, and more of an explicit expression of desire for a certain type of game.

I find it quite likely that in the case of single-player games the usual economic consideration of the "homo economicus" who buys what is of use to him isn't true. People buy what they *think* might be a great game, lured in by pre-order bonuses, advertising, and hype from game journalism. Quite often they want to buy the game on release, to be playing the game everybody is talking about, to be with the in crowd. By the time they notice that the game they bought isn't the game they wanted, it is already too late. Sales numbers are in, there are no refunds, and beyond not buying the next game(s) from that company there isn't much they can do.

One of my favorite quotes is Sid Meier's "A [good] game is a series of interesting choices", because I very much agree with that definition. I am currently playing Mass Effect 3, which I got for free from EA as compensation for having wasted my money on SimCity. And when I write that phrase, I wonder if "playing" is actually the right verb. I'd need something which is half "playing" and half "watching", because a lot of the time I am either just watching some events, or I am technically in control of my character but whatever choices I make still end up with the same result. Maybe "experience" is the verb I'm looking for.

Now many people will protest and say that Mass Effect 3 is the game that has the biggest number of choices to make during the game, and one of the few games where those choices have an influence on how the story evolves. Which is true, but only to the degree how much you actually care about the details of the story. Do you care whether Ashley lives or dies? Do you care whether the genophage is cured and the Krogan can repopulate and potentially overrun the galaxy some centuries later? If you do care, Mass Effect 3 is the game for you, because you can make decisions that determine those outcomes.

But if you don't care about the details of the story, and just want to play and win the game, you quickly realize that your decisions don't matter. Many, many dialogue choices come down to "Either say something nice, get paragon points, and something happens; or say something intimidating, get renegade points, and exactly the same thing happens". Then of course anybody who ever played any game with an alignment point system knows that it doesn't matter whether you are good or evil, as long as you are consistent and always choose good or always choose evil to maximize the effect of the accumulated good or evil alignment points.

A much smaller number of choices actually effect winning or losing the game. And that ultimately comes down to a single number, your effective military strength, which determines how exactly the game ends. The higher your score, the nicer the end. And so curing the genophage is not just a moral decisions, but also affects that score, because it makes a difference whether you get the support of the Krogans or the Salarians. While the effect on effective military strength is complex (as it depends on what you did in Mass Effect 2, as well as some decisions later), you can "minmax" all your decisions in Mass Effect 3 to get the highest possible score at the end.

Ultimately all dialogue decisions in Mass Effect 3 basically just determine what cut scenes you will get to watch. They don't effect gameplay in the way that the decision "should I wield a shotgun or a sniper rifle?" does. Which ends up being the most interesting choice you can make in Mass Effect 3. The rest of the game plays a lot like Dragon's Lair, you press a button and see what happens in a limited tree of possible outcomes. Overall the course of the main story doesn't change, whatever choices you make, you only get to influence some details and the score for the ending. And doing a lot of side-quests consisting of picking up stuff in missions or doing a boring mini-game of planetary scanning is ultimately having a much bigger effect on your final score than any decisions you can make in this game.

I'll try to "experience" Mass Effect 3 to the end, because it is mildly entertaining, but I'm not a huge fan. Too much passive watching of events, combined with the annoying inability to skip scenes or to save the game when they are running. Not enough interesting choices.

My blog is in its 10th year, which as an unpaid effort is only sustainable by me writing about whatever interests me, and putting any potential audience second. Nevertheless I am aware of my readers, the feedback they give in comments and mails, and the blogosphere community discussions that occasionally evolve. If I write about MMORPGs that is. Whenever I write about pen & paper roleplaying, the echo is very notably weaker. There is less of a community for pen & paper games.

One reason for that is that there are less people interested in pen & paper games. Nobody knows the exact number, as you can play a pen & paper RPG with a photocopy of a book from 10 years ago, and not everybody at the table needs to actually buy anything. Estimates of the number of people playing D&D range from 5 million to 20 million. But even if you believe the higher number, you need to consider that on average people play a pen & paper RPG much less often than a MMORPG. You'd expect a MMORPG player to play his favorite game most days of the week, while an average pen & paper campaign happens maybe once per week.

A second factor is that the people who are interested in pen & paper RPGs tend to be more splintered into sub-groups than players of MMORPGs. There is more discussion between lets say somebody playing WoW and somebody playing EVE than there is discussion between somebody playing D&D 3.5 and somebody playing D&D 4th edition. And that is just the edition wars of Dungeons & Dragons, the splintering gets worse when you consider all the other pen & paper RPG systems out there. There is very little search for common denominators, and very much "if you play something else, you are doing it wrong" attitude, even more so than for computer games. Even the biggest community sites like rpg.net or EN World have relatively few activity compared to MMORPG.com or any official forum for a single game.

But the ultimate reason for the lack of community is that there is no common experience. Two groups of players playing the same adventure with the same set of rules will end up having two very different experiences. On the one side that is the force of pen & paper roleplaying, the infinite variety and freedom. The most linear pen & paper adventure has more freedom than the most sandboxy MMORPG. On the other side that is a weakness, because without a common experience there is not much of a community. The community in a pen & paper game is limited to the people sitting around the table, who *do* have a common experience of the game. But anything you can write about that is only of very limited relevance to anybody who wasn't there.

That might be bad for blogging, but the more artisanal game experience is in many ways superior to the mass-market experience of a MMORPG. It is a lot easier to tailor-make a game for a group of around 6 people than it is for hundreds of thousands, or even millions of players. A lot of the things that are constantly being decried as lacking in MMORPGs are very much present in pen & paper games. While the wider community might be lacking, the smaller community of the game table is a lot tighter. Blogging about my game table is more of an archive, a way to preserve a journal, than a publication of common interest.

In the previous session the players had arrived in Barovia, a domain in the grim parallel world of Shadowfell. This session starts with the players in the house of the recently murdered burgomaster Kolyan Indirovich, with his son Ismark Kolyanovich and daughter Ireena Kolyana, as well as the village priest Donavich. Donavich is just leaving down the path towards the gate, with Ismark watching him from the porch, when giant bats arrive. Ismark tells the players to guard his sister, while he runs after the priest to protect him. But the bats, and two vampires that also arrive appear to be after Ireena and leave the priest and Ismark alone. So battle begins, centered around the porch and the main entrance.

In the second round of combat the players get attacked from behind by a vampire lord, Count Strahd von Zarovich, the master of the domain of Barovia and Castle Ravenloft, trying to kidnap Ireena. The group's cleric succeeds in a religion-based monster knowledge check with a hard difficulty, and thus I get to tell the players the complete impressive list of Strahd's powers. Strahd is a rather fearsome enemy, with lots of regenerative powers making him nearly impossible to beat. So the heroes pull out all stops and manage to kill the two minor vampires and the bats. Strahd dominates the rogue and deals some serious damage, but then transforms into a mist and flees when all his allies are dead. Although they won the fight, the group is visibly impressed by Strahd, which is how it should be.

During the night there are no further attacks, but the characters have nightmares that leave them with psychological after-effects: I am using the despair deck from the Shadowfell boxed set for added atmosphere. After each extended rest each player draws a card with a despair effect giving him some penalty. Those can be transformed into boons with a saving throw after each milestone (two combat encounters).

The next morning there is the burial of the burgomaster, and the group leaves Ismark and Ireena with the priest Donavich. Then they set out to visit the Vistani camp at Tser Pool. The Vistani are travelers, and the only ones able to cross the mist in and out of Barovia, but they explain that this power only works for themselves, and they can't take anybody with them. But because the group helped some other Vistani in Harkenwold, the Vistani leader Madam Eva is willing to help with advice and a tarot card reading (I bought a deck of tarot cards for that and performed a "reading"). The players learn that they need to kill Strahd to escape from Barovia. The are advised that the way how to beat him can be found in a book in the castle. And they hear of a woman at the heart of the story, who in spite of being dead might be able to help them. Finally they get the hint that once they know how to beat Strahd, they can find him under the sky, behind fire.

They proceed towards the castle, and at the crossing before the castle a black carriage is waiting for them, which takes them through the castle gate and to the main entrance of the central keep. There Igor the butler opens the door for them, wielding a huge spoon like a master of ceremonies baton. Igor tells them that they can find the master and his guests in the dinner hall (from where organ music can be heard, Toccata and Fugue in D minor playing on my iPad), but then rushes off to "stir the goulash" in the kitchen down the stairs from the dinner hall. The players find themselves alone in the hallway of Castle Ravenloft, ready to explore, which we then left for the next session.

While the events leading up to the castle were more or less linear (due to the geography of Barovia), the players now have complete freedom to explore Castle Ravenloft in any order they want. They have some hints from the Tarot reading (wonderful tool for DMs), but only the most basic knowledge of the layout of the castle. And no, they asked, there are no signs above the doors telling them which door leads where. :) The main "risk" of open exploration is that I as DM have no control over the sequence, and thus can't mix combat encounters with roleplaying encounters; they could have sessions with only fights or only roleplaying. We will see how that goes next time.

I got a mail today from EA about my Star Wars: The Old Republic login:

Beginning today, April 2, 2013, you are only able to log in to the Star Wars: The Old Republic game or web site with your Display Name – Your email address will no longer be accepted from this point forward. ... These changes increase the security of our game authentication system, which helps to keep the game protected from many security threats including account takeovers.

Which was somewhat funny, because I just recently got another mail from Ubisoft:

The login process for Ubisoft’s Uplay service will undergo a few modifications on April 3rd. Past this date, if you connect to a Uplay Account, you will need to log in using your email address. Using the Uplay account name to login to your game will no longer be possible.

Of course Ubisoft is also claiming that this change will help account security. EA thinks that a display name is safer for login, reversing a previous decision to have people login with their email address. Ubisoft does the reverse, changing from login with a display name to login with an email address.

That pretty much tells me that there is no agreement on which method is safer. And frankly, I believe neither is any good. Both you displayed name and your email address are easy enough to find out, so potential hackers only ever need to guess your password. What would be safer would be a UserID and password for the account, with the UserID being *different* from both you displayed name and your email address.

It turns out that some people miss my April Fool's Day posts when I don't write them. My apologies, with the first of April falling on Easter Monday this year I was busy with family and in addition had a pen & paper roleplaying session in the evening. And I didn't have any brilliant idea for a nearly plausible piece of news anyway.

I finished Ni No Kuni last night, killing the final boss after 55 hours of overall play time. After the end credits you get a chance to save your game and play on in the "post-game". There are a few additional side-quests, and the post-game gives you the opportunity to complete anything you didn't finish before beating the White Witch. But essentially the story is over, you've already beaten the hardest fight in the game, and leveling your characters up any further is rather pointless. The game has come to a natural end. You could start over, but as the game is story-heavy and has about 10 hours of gameplay before you can freely choose your familiars and thus really play the game differently than during the first go, Ni No Kuni isn't ideal for replayability.

I was thinking that such a natural end occurs in every game which has some sort of power progression and some sort of story. At some point inevitably the story is over, and your power is at a point where it is either capped, or you are already able to beat anything. Even Dungeons & Dragons has a level cap at 30 (although I'm not sure I want to play my campaign that far, most power progression games develop flaws at the end of the power curve).

I paid 49 Euros for Ni No Kuni, thus ended up paying less than 1 Euro per hour of entertainment for it. That business model works well for this sort of game: At the natural end of the game I feel as if I got my value for money, and the developers are also happy with their one-time payment from me. But if we take a game which should have a natural end and use a different business model, like a monthly subscription or some Free2Play model, the match is less perfect. The devs don't want me to stop playing a MMORPG just because I hit the level cap and finished the story. But at the same time they can't produce new story and new power progression content fast enough to satisfy everybody. So they want you to wait for the next expansion, while continuing to play and pay for the game.

But as the game is already past its natural end, what you keep playing is some sort of zombie version: You get to grind 9,999 dinosaur bones, do the same daily quests over and over, or get to play some sort of elder game, with some illusion of progress that will be shattered when the next expansion comes out and you replace your purples with greens. You do that for a while, and for a few different games, and you start seeing it for what it is: Essentially a money-grab by the devs, and the part of the game which offers less and less fun for the money.

So unsurprisingly many people now play MMORPGs like a single-player game: They start, they play until the game comes to some sort of natural end for them, and they stop playing. Of course if the developer had counted on them paying subscriptions for years, or even made the start of the game available for free in some sort of Free2Play model, this behavior is likely to break their business model. Which I think is why the genre is in some sort of crisis now.

I am currently reading D&D adventure modules in preparation for my campaign after the current adventure. And I noticed something curious: Many of the descriptions appear to be addressed to the DM reading the adventure, but not to the players. For example there are descriptions of what happened in some place long ago which explains why the place is now inhabited by some monster. But what the players will see is just the monster (which they will then presumably slaughter), with no way of finding out those historic events that were so carefully explained to the DM.

Example of a description for the DM from H1 Keep on Shadowfell:

Water Cave History

When Shadowfell Keep was first built, the pool inside this small cave served as the castle cistern. On a normal day, several keep residents, mostly cooks and servants, visited the cave regularly. The passage leading to the pool was open until the fateful day when two children wandered into the area and drowned when they stepped off the edge into water that was too deep for them to wade in. After their bodies were discovered and removed from the pool, the area was sealed off to prevent further accidents. Subsequently, after Sir Keegan went mad and engaged in his killing spree, the keep was abandoned and the cistern stagnated. Over the decades since that time, creatures have used the cave as a source of water.

A few months ago, two hobgoblins came to the keep and requested an audience with Kalarel. They said they were messengers from the Bloodreavers, a group of hobgoblin slavers. Kalarel listened to their offer of payment for the captured slaves, but he dismissed it. In fact, he was so irritated that the hobgoblins had disturbed his research with such petty motives that he ordered his own hobgoblins to drown them in the cistern. Within minutes after the messengers died, something vile crawled forth from the water. A morass of hunger without shape or mind, the form had only an insatiable appetite. The hobgoblins that brought the messengers to the cistern were quickly overcome by the amorphous creature. After several more goblins and hobgoblins died trying to remove this pestilence from the water, Kalarel gave up. The affair disquieted him, and he prohibited any of his followers from entering the area.

 Compare that to what the players will see:

When the adventurers reach the doors, read: These bronze double doors are green with age and stained blue and purple with a thick layer of fungus. Scratched into the fungus in the Common script is this message: “Stay Out. Really.” 

When the adventurers open the doors, read: Fungus-coated stairs lead down into a natural cavern. Much of the chamber is filled with a stagnant pool of brackish water. A patch of land rises from the foul water at the pool’s center. On this little island, bones, spilled coins, and other small objects are visible among the carpet of fungus.

When the blue slime surfaces and attacks, read: The dank water suddenly disgorges a blob of blue slime. The amorphous mass pours forward, extruding long pseudopods that end in appendages of dripping goo.

In all likelihood this room will appear to the players as being some random dungeon room with some random monster. They have no way to find out the history of the water cave, nor will they even care about it, as it isn't central to the adventure in that dungeon.

Now I totally like the concept of having a logical explanation of why a certain monster is at a certain location. But such an encounter always has to be designed with the point of view of the players in mind. The "final product" of a session of pen & paper roleplaying is an interactive story, and that story is only as good as the part that has been understood by everybody around the table. To players a description that behind a door is a room with an ogre is just that. A sidebar explaining in detail how that ogre got there is only as useful as whatever is included in the encounter description that enables the players to learn that history.

All the data I have, from subscription numbers to XFire activity reports, point towards an ongoing decline of the MMORPG market in general that has been going on for over a year. There are blips of renewed interest when a new big game comes out, but those quickly fade. A reader wanted to bet me last year that after three months Guild Wars 2 would have more XFire activity than World of Warcraft, and lost that bet. And I have two different theories to explain this general decline.

One is based on the fact that MMORPGs tend to be rather similar to each other. Yes, the fans can argue for hours about the fine details in the difference of the combat system of World of Warcraft and Guild Wars 2 or Star Wars: The Old Republic. But basically these are all just coats of paint on the same old hotkey-based combat system. You have levels, quests, a level-cap, dungeons, gear-collecting, crafting, zones, and a whole range of other features in each of these games. Write a general enough description of one MMORPG, and it'll cover a dozen different games. Thus the decline of the genre can be explained by people burning out of the same old, same old.

The other theory is based on the fact that there are differences in the details between games. Some games have player housing, others don't. Some games have auto-targeting, others have a more action-oriented manual targeting and slightly faster combat. The way you gain new powers with level, and the talent trees vary between games (and sometimes even between patch versions of the same game). Thus when you create a complete feature list of a MMORPG, there are millions of possible combinations if you consider each presence or absence of a feature, and each possible variety of a feature. In this theory the decline of the genre would be caused by us having evolved certain preferences for certain features, and no game offering EXACTLY the right mix. So maybe you like the graphics style and setting of Neverwinter, but hate that it has action combat. Or you love Wildstar housing, but can't stand the WoW-like graphics. You'd love a game that has the trading of EVE, but would want it to be fantasy instead of sci-fi.

How about you? How do you see the upcoming MMORPGs, like Neverwinter or Wildstar? Do they bore you with being not much different from all the games we already have? Or do you love certain features and hate certain others?

Syl, who by the way stopped being a Raging Monkey and is now apparently a MMO Gypsy, is writing an excellent post about MMO housing. His key point is that housing in a MMORPG needs to be significant, that is have some sort of function. But while everybody is excited about player housing being shown in the Wildstar trailer, I still haven't found anybody who even had a concept of how to make player housing significant without causing trouble for other players.

In Ultima Online housing was significant. You needed your house to store your stuff, and you could use it to sell your crafted items to customers passing by. But because there were a lot less housing spots than players, and the location mattered a lot for the houses significance as sales spot, housing in UO was also a source of constant annoyance. Star Wars Galaxies did somewhat better, because it had much more territory, and thus sufficient space for everybody to build his house on. But in the long run I wouldn't say housing was a success in SWG, because people tend to leave MMORPGs sooner or later, and thus people found themselves in dying neighborhoods. When player houses are created in the open game world, they always negatively affect other players, either by "taking their spots", or by the negative effect of neglect on a neighborhood. This is also a typical problem in A Tale in the Desert, albeit less so because that game regularly resets.

Since then most games I've seen used instanced housing, or the LotRO hybrid of instanced neighborhoods. In EQ2 you could craft in your house. But I haven't seen any good social activity implemented for player housing in any game. There are more or less good systems to decorate, but most players would balk at the idea of inviting their friends over to show them how they decorated their virtual home. And even if they did, it isn't something you can do regularly as a group activity.

So I was wondering why everybody is always so excited about the idea of player housing. What exactly do you want to *do* with that house? Do you want your house in the open world, or do you want it instanced? And apart from solo crafting or the like, what *group* activity do you think MMO houses could be good for? What would make player housing significant for you?

Some people believe that Earth is only a few thousand years old, and that God created a kind of fake history by sprinkling dinosaur bones everywhere. Creators of lesser worlds, like the Dungeon Masters of their own D&D campaign, frequently do the same: Creating a fake history for a virtual world for their campaign to play in. Just recently Chris Perkins from WotC presented his historical campaign notes. But every time I read such campaign outlines, I ask myself "why bother?"

For me the main problem is how my players come into contact with all that history. I'm sure not going to start the campaign with a 4-hour history lesson, my players would be bored to death. A far more likely scenario is something like "Seeing the ruin, you succeed your history check and know that it is a remnant from the Nerathian Empire which fell over a century ago". For that I don't need a complete list of all the battles, emperors, and major events of the Nerathian Empire.

A secondary problem is that I don't plan my campaigns for 30 levels ahead. My current campaign is just over one year old, and the players are level 5. And I know what adventures I want to play for about the next year, up to level 10, but not beyond that. After all, D&D is interactive story-telling, and you never know how things evolve. So by making up my campaign as we go, I prefer to have a maximum of freedom. I create history when I need it for the adventure, instead of creating history at the start of the campaign and then running into conflicts between the history I told in advance and the history I need for a specific adventure.

Ultimately all this is a question of scale. My campaigns tend to work bottom-up, being created in mind with what the players see from their perspective. Given that this is medieval fantasy, it is only logical that this perspective is limited. Apart from some sages, people tend to know only local and recent history, and not be aware of the rise and fall of empires centuries ago. A top-down approach, where you spend hours creating a huge world and its history, most of which the players will never see, often leads to a waste of time. And risks forgetting the parts that the players actually care about. It is easy to create a fantastic world at a high level and end up lacking the detail that the players actually encounter.

So personally I don't even bother creating worlds. I take pre-made campaign worlds like the Forgotten Realms, and then fill them with my campaign. Sometimes I use the history of the Forgotten Realms if it fits, sometimes I modify stuff to fit my campaign. For example my campaign early on had the players encounter an avatar of Selune, an event which gave the campaign its name "The Favorites of Selune". So in consequence I turned the evil twin sister of Selune, Shar, into a major adversary for the campaign. Lore and created history has to serve the campaign, not the other way around.

Being German it is somewhat scary to see German flags burned in several countries on the TV news. There are numerous references to Hitler, with Angela Merkel regularly being shown with a Hitler mustache. So for my American readers, who might be baffled by the events, maybe some explanations are in order. For the full historic overview you might want to read The New Statesman. But here is the shorter version.

So, are German armies about to overrun several countries of southern Europe? No, not at all. What is rolling southwards aren't German tanks, but German money. And the German "crime" against which everybody is protesting is that the Germans insist on certain guarantees for their loans, just like any bank would. For example in Cyprus the condition was that Cyprus should come up with 7 billion Euros on their own as condition for receiving 10 billion Euros from Europe, largely financed by Germany. That is a bit as if you want a mortgage on a $170,000 house, and the bank asks you to come up with $70,000 on your own as condition for receiving a $100,000 mortgage.

Protesters in Cyprus claim that having to come up with 7 billion Euro is ruinous for the country, and they want Germany to give them the whole 17 billion without conditions and preferably without interest. But maybe the realization that they can't even afford 7 billion should have come before enacting policies which required a 17 billion bailout package. What the critics are saying is that Germany will earn money from lending money. Just like a bank does. But the fact that you have to pay an interest on a bank loan doesn't result in a moral obligation for the bank to give you a loan under any conditions. In fact a bank has a moral obligation to only lend money responsibly, because giving out loans that have little chance of getting repaid would be a disservice to those who paid money into the bank, in this case the German taxpayer.

The "threat" from Germany is not German bombers, but simply the Germans withholding loans. Which would be no threat at all if the countries in question would run their economies in a way where they could get loans from regular investors. The money that is flowing from Germany via Europe to these countries is in fact cheap compared to the prohibitive interest rate they would have to pay on the free market, in addition to the fact that there aren't enough free market loans available for these countries due to their existing debts and deficit.

In the end, if somebody has large debts and still spends more than he earns, that doesn't give him the moral right to protest against the evil banks who at some point refuse to lend him even more money. People do understand what a "credit rating" is in their personal finances, and that their loan application can be denied by a bank. We just need to get to the point in Europe where countries understand that same concept.

Of all the games in the world, on which one did you spend the most money overall? (Not counting indirect costs like buying a new PC to play a game)

Now for some people the answer to this question will be World of Warcraft, which costs about $200 per year including expansions. But for me the answer would be Magic the Gathering, because I spent around $1,000 per year for a decade on that game. And I didn't even play competitively, except for a few sealed deck tournaments (some of which I even won). My main contact with competitive MtG was being a level I DCI certified judge, which translated for those of you who weren't into tournament Magic means that I knew the rules of the game extremely well. I even judged during a World Championship, albeit not the main event. Anyway, I was fascinated by the myriad of options of deckbuilding, and thus bought thousands of cards, hence the high cost.

Due to that experience I have already repeatedly mentioned in the past that I think that MMORPGs missed out on the optimal business model. To get a maximum amount of money out of their players, they should have used the business model of trading card games, selling character powers in the form of sealed boosters with random rares, uncommon, and common "cards" to build a personalized "deck" from them. While nobody has followed that advice of mine, Blizzard now at least is looking into trading card games, and announced the online card game Hearthstone at PAX East. Actually "trading card game" is the wrong expression, as there won't be any trading in this game. Which is just as well, because the Magic Online experience has shown that online trading of cards is a sharks' game, and quickly degenerates into something ugly.

But even just as a collectible online card game, Hearthstone should be interesting. I think we can count on Blizzard to make the rules of the game more accessible, because having studied the Magic the Gathering rules I can attest to them being too complicated. Which didn't matter very much for a physical card game, as people just happily played the game "wrong" or with house rules (but a nightmare for judges when these players turned up at their first tournament). The complete MtG rules I had to study for the DCI exam was a 200-page document. The interrupt rules were also a headache for all computer implementations of the game, as the game needed to constantly stop and ask you whether you wanted to cast an interrupt spell. Hearthstone is more likely to be designed as an online computer game from the ground up, and not a computer implementation of a physical card game.

The biggest worry of some people regarding collectible card games is in how far they are "pay to win". In my experience that depends very much at what percentage level of the optimum you are willing to play. That is a bit like World of Warcraft: If you want best-in-slot items, you need a huge effort; if you can live with 90% of the BiS power, the effort is a fraction of that. Magic the Gathering is quite a fun game if played only with commons, and I've won games with a commons deck against decks stacked with rares. But any additional card in a collectible card game always increases your options, and thus to have all the options you need all the cards, which comes at a high cost.

On the other hand what I like about that business model is that your level of engagement with the game determines the cost. Playing casually is very cheap, playing at the highest competitive level is very expensive, with everything in between being possible. That appeals to my sense of fairness, and is much better than a game like World of Warcraft, where the casual players subsidize the heaviest users.

I find myself in the curious situation that I have a vast library of video games I bought, but sometimes find myself bored and unsure what to play. And if anything, this is getting worse with time, as cheap iOS games and Steam sales make me impulse-buy more games than I can play. But ultimately the problem is one of two psychological effects: A barrier to entry into a new game, and a barrier to exit from an old game.

The barrier to exit from a video game is well described here, as the Zeigarnik Effect: The human mind is programmed to remember tasks we started but didn't finish. Not finishing a video game thus leaves a nagging feeling in our mind, even if we are already past the "are you still having fun?" point. Although it is known that most people do not finish video games, it is a long way from just stopping to play to actually deciding that you are finished with that game and uninstalling it from your hard drive. Sometimes you install a game, play for some hours, and in spite of the game not grabbing you very much, you somehow feel that you will continue playing it. Only then you never actually do.

The barrier to entry into a new game is a different story, one which also in part explains why we have so many sequels on the market. If you start a completely new game, at first by definition you are a n00b. There is a certain effort required to learn how the game works, and how to play it well. Sequels and clone games help, because if you played some games from FIFA 95 to FIFA 12, chances are you don't have to learn much to play FIFA 13. But if you never played let's say a Paradox game and then start a game from the Europa Universalis series, you're likely to be put off by a steep learning curve for a very complex game. The more you switch between platforms and genres, the more you need to readjust every time, because the conventions on how a strategy game is controlled are different from an RPG or a shooter, and they are different on a PC, a console, and a tablet.

Syp has a project currently running in which he plays 10 games in 10 days. The games all being PC MMORPG, and Syp being an expert of that genre, lowers the barrier to entry. But still I am not sure if such an exercise is psychologically satisfying, or whether it leaves you with a lot of regrets of not having explored each game more. Plus constant problems because keybinds are different in each game, or similar issues of adjustment to a new game every day.

Me, I ended up not playing any new game this weekend. I played a bit of Anno Online, which is a game with a slow rhythm, one you log into a few times a day to play 10 minutes each time. And I played many hours of Ni No Kuni, which is a huge game in which sometimes you just hunt Pokemon familiars for several hours and grind levels in the process, and still have fun. But as I also bought some games in last week's Steam sale, and an iOS game or two, my list of un-played games is getting ever larger. How about you?