Random Average

Randy’s running this low-powered supers-in-Gotham thing. Interesting background. Interesting atmosphere. Running it with Mutants and Masterminds, which is a 3.x d20 riff.

I’ve been feeling a vague hankering for supers stuff. (Dear City of Heroes — go Free to Play. Signed, Me.)

I expressed an interest, came up with a concept, dug around on the internet and found a couple write-ups that seemed to have the powers I wanted, mushed them all into one sheet, sent it to him and said “here – something like this, but balanced to your power level.”

As one does.

Then a couple things happened.

1. I ran into one of the players already in the game and we talked about the schedule for the game.
2. Randy sent me the revised sheet, with all the math done.

These two events raised some concerns for me.

Looking at the finalized character sheet resulted in a strong negative reaction. A gut reaction. It may be fair to say that my penetralia actually cringed — absent any motive will on my part — seeking to drag me away from the computer and the thing on the screen by my very entrails. It’s not that the design of the character was bad or that it didn’t do what I wanted — it’s that the mechanics and game the sheet represents just make me angry. Angry and filled with a helpless kind of dread.

I’m starting to suspect that all those years of d20 gaming actually damaged me. I wonder if don’t remember this because I can’t.

Show me on the character sheet where it touched you...

Secondarily, I’m concerned about (any) games where the schedule is “we start at Xpm, and play to whenever.” That sort of play has historically been frustrating for me. Seeing it posted as the consilii diem amounts to a huge fucking red flag labeled “You Will Regret This.”

Tim may laugh at this, but I’ve developed a huge appreciation for the games I’ve played that have a time constraint on the amount of time available to play. They are, uniformly, the games I’ve enjoyed the most, and which gave the most satisfying results and focused play. TiHE (until we switched from “Monday nights” to “all-day Sundays”). The Wednesday night gaming series. Mouseguard (which is actually time-constrained within the game itself). Dragon Age (sessions that, while on the weekends, have all had hard-stops built in). Most convention play is, I think, stronger for this. It may be the only thing I really miss about local conventions.

Maybe I’m just getting to the point where I’m not willing to give a game a shot if doesn’t meet certain baseline criteria — doubtful it can overcome the deficiency. Once bitten, twice shy?

Maybe.

My reaction to the basic core of the game system, though — like a growling, whining dog in the presence of a vampire — makes me suspect this may be something more/less than the reasoned response of a thinking adult with some significant non-game commitments.

So I’m on my little loremaster last night, just poking at a few quests, and find myself in the Chetwood, seeking out brigands and punishing them for their misdeeds (as one does).

And I notice this elf is following me.

That’s… interesting.

Level… 51? Okay.

A level 51 elvish minstrel, following me around the Chetwood.

Not doing anything, just following me. Closely. ‘Right up in your personal space’ close, but not “I have you on autofollow” close.

Right. Whatever. I have brigands to punish. (As one does.)

So I keep moving, find a brigand, and begin the Parade of Debuffs and Fiery Burning.

And the elf?

The elf whips out his lute and…

… get this …

Plays a fight song.

I don’t mean “plays some kind of minstrel ballad that does anything mechanically significant.”

I mean (s)he [1] played some kind of ‘background fight music’ using the /music command. Like something from a Capcom game.

“So,” I thought. “That’s… weird.”

I continued forward and engaged another brigand.

My high-level shadow whipped out its lute again and, again, played the fight music.

Throughout the Chetwood, various NPCs and 1-morale critters looked up, glanced at once another, and murmured. “Was that… Street Fighter?”

I tried to ignore it. It was late, and I pretty much just wanted to hit level 12, see what new skills I got, and call it a night.

I took down another brigand, another, and another. With each fight, the skirling notes of a digitally rendered lute mixed with the raucous calls of my raven (Quothe) and the “why does it burn?” queries from my brigand foes.

On my fifth fallen foe, I dinged.

The elf tucked away her lute, shouted “Pikachu leveled up!”, and mapped back home.

The end.

Quite possibly the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen happen in LotRO.

[1] — I can never tell the difference. It’s like dwarves, but in reverse.

Depending on which corners of the internet and gaming metasphere you inhabit, you may or not be aware that Wizard 101 is coming out with an expansion pretty darn soon. Celestia is supposed to come out “late summer or early fall”, which pretty much means “the 10 days I’m going to be out of town with little net access around the end of August.”

If you happen to be a Wizard101 player, it’s a pretty big deal: new level cap, expanded pet system, and new content (Atlantis-style underwater stuff, I hear, and lots of new foes and friends).

And I – I am pretty happy to point out – am a Wizard101 player.

“But Doyce,” you may ask, “aren’t you like… old?”

Hey!

“Okay, okay, quite crying and hitting me like a girl! I just mean you’re a lot older than Wizard101’s target audience!”

Maybe.

I’ll concede that I’m older than what people think of as the game’s target audience; I’m not convinced that the perception is accurate, though, and the best way to explain why I think that is to talk about why I like the game.

Not Family Friendly

You know what I think of when I think of the phrase “family friendly”? Wonder Pets. Wow Wow Wubbzy. Dora the Explorer. Little Einsteins. Super Readers. Captain Underpants. Olivia. The Wiggles.

In short, shows that I’m generally fine — even happy — with my daughter watching, but not shows I myself want to spend hours exposed to. Stuff I can’t help but mock (mostly) silently, from the next room over.

Family friendly? Sure. Family entertainment? No.

Family Entertainment is stuff like Backyardigans. Pixar. Dreamworks Animation. The Hobbit. Avatar: the Last Airbender. Stuff that me and my kid(s) can enjoy together, albeit at different levels.

That’s Wizard 101. Yeah, it’s aimed at kids, but you get lots of pop culture references and humor that really only the grups will get.

Sophisticated Game Play… or Not.

Like the humor and the storyline and the presentation, the gameplay — from the interface to the card-duel-like combat to the gear —  is set up in such a way that it can be enjoyably challenging to anyone from a four year old (Kaylee) to… umm… me.

Gear and equipment:

• Me: Whoa. I can wear the level 25 gear now… look at the stats on that robe!
• Kaylee: Ohhhhhhh… this new hat is so cuuuuuute!
• Kate: These new boots are cute… but the stats are crap… so let’s use the tailor vendor to combine the good gear I already have with the pretty shoes I want!

Tactics:

• Me: Okay, first armor up so I can ignore the bad guy for a couple rounds. Taunt the bad guys so they leave Kate and Kaylee alone. Then a buff only to my ice skills, so I can keep casting other stuff. Undertaker for a quick heal… drop a buff on Kate so she’ll hit harder for the crazy Meteor thing I can guess she’s about to cast… and that gives me another two power pips…  generic all-damage buff, a last-minute debuff on the bad guy’s defenses, and finally… ICE STORM.
• Kaylee: I can’t cast those grey cards yet, so I’ll do this shield on… me. Then… I STILL can’t do the good spell yet, so I’ll do a blaster on… that guy. Oh! I got a purple pointy trap spell! I’ll put it on the same guy, and then do the Lightning Bats, cuz they’re Purple too. Got him! Oh! Daddy’s hurt! I need to heal him with a Green Fairy!
• Kate: Fire blast, Fire Sword, Fire Trap, Wild Fire, thank you for the damage buff, sweetie… and what’s this? A Meteor Swarm? BOOYA, BOYEEEEEE.

Housing:

• Me: Look at my cool house!
• Kaylee: Look at my cool house!
• Kate: Look at my cool house!

Not Really that Social

It’s not (easily) a social game the way most MMOs are, though it does have a (spare) frame of socializing tools. I like this for a couple reasons. The most obvious has to do with the younger players — including my daughter — there are serious barriers in place that block most any access to kids.

(This lack of any easy social interface also affects the game play — the game’s core setup is very accessible and friendly to younger or casual gamers — it has to be, because you can’t fall back on an /advice channel to get help from the player base if you don’t understand something.)

The other benefit to the ’social framework without a social network’ MMO is a little more subtle — my wife and I enjoy logging in and just playing with our own characters or with each other — unlike other MMOs we play, there’s no pressure to be ‘on’, socially, when you log in — there’s no guild support in the game, no open broadcast channels for chatting, and only limited ‘friend’ capability, heavily limited by the ages of the players involved.  This is nice — it’s good for some quiet, relatively relaxing alone-time game play, free of forced-smiley chatting — and if we don’t feel like logging on for a week or more, there’s no twinge of guilt for the other players who might have been counting on our tank and healer characters for a Krokotopia run.

In short…

Don’t discount this game because it’s located in the kid’s section — there’s a lot of stuff a more … ahem … advanced wizard can enjoy.

So quite a little while ago, we started out a Diaspora game. Our schedules have been a little crazy — we did character generation in mid-January and played the seventh and final session last night — and as per normal, playing into the fourth and fifth sessions prompted a few system hacks, but on the whole it’s an entirely enjoyable system. But I’ve talked about the system before, and I’m not going to do that today.

I just want to talk a little bit about synchronicity and constraints and the kinds of fun that comes out of that.

When we did the character and star system creation lo those many months ago, we decided we needed some kind of theme or something to tie things together. I’d been writing a sci-fi novel at the time (still am, actually) and I’d enjoyed naming planets from one section of space after characters in Shakespeare plays — no particular reason, I just liked how they sounded — so I suggested we do something like that. Everyone agreed, so we went with that, plus “the system should start with the same letter as the name (first or middle) of the person who thought it up, and no systems starting with the same letter.”

So…
- Keepdown (Kate)
- Trinculo (Tim)
- Caliban (Chris)
- Dauphine (Doyce)
- Shylock (Kate again)
- Lear (Tim again)
- Achilles (Chris again)
- Orpheus (Me, and I don’t know how I got “O”, except that A was taken already)

Then we came up with personalities for these systems. Keepdown was struggling as an abandoned terraforming colony on a world wracked by hurricane-force storms. Trinculo was luxurious and opulent and self-satisfied. Caliban was privateers and pirate nobility raiding other systems for the resources they’d long since exhausted in their own. Dauphine was the poor exploited system Caliban mostly raided. Shylock was connivers and meddlers and diplomats. Lear was a blasted, nigh-uninhabitable, often betrayed wasteland of ancient ruins. Achilles was a world of science gone awry and angry, carnivorous plantlife. And Orpheus was a world of idealists and dreamers, trying to get back to the imagined ideals of Earth-Long-Past.

Then we came up with characters, and the Shakespeare thing continued.

Miranda was the daughter of the pirate lords of Caliban whose father (we find out MUCH later) died suspiciously. She fled the family and the family business when her uncle took over the family. She changed her name and started a mostly-legitimate business. When they found her again, she liquidated her assets, bought a ship, and hired a crew of misfits and the suspiciously secretive.

The ship’s name was the Tempest. It’s A.I. (helpful and communicative, but otherwise invisible) was named Ariel.

Tim came up with Titus Belliago, the president for life of Trinculo who became over bored with his continued, nigh-immortal existence (and more than a bit annoyed by the occasional assassination attempts). He arranged for a body double to impersonate him, pauper and the prince style, and snuck off to have adventures with one of his would-be assassins. (Phyll, from Achilles, played by Chris.) He took on the name Iago.

It wasn’t all Shakespeare themes. The AI played Settlers of Catan with Miranda on the long interstellar hauls. The ship’s log-software was named as “Spacebook”, in which the crew could comment on and Like/Dislike various updates from other members of the crew. (There were at least a half-dozen NPCs on the ship as well, from the “a bit jumpy” gunnery mate, to the “twitch gamer” comms officer who gave the crew bonuses to intimidation, but only when it wasn’t face to face.)

Things progressed, as they do.

I don’t know if I can explain the tangled mess of the final session without explaining the entire campaign (which I’m not going to do), but I’ll give it a try.

There’s a space station in Shylock system. Many different factions are meeting here for various reasons, and the crew of the Tempest have delivered a Dauphine diplomat there and are acting as liaison and body guard for him while he tries to acquire allies against Caliban predations.

In the course of events… Iago gets fatally wounded (which means, in his case, that he’ll need about a week of bed rest), Miranda is spotted by her uncle and his thugs try to take the Tempest by force (leaving at least half the crew too injured to do anything this session), the Dauphine diplomat is framed for intersystem biological terrorism and murder, and Iago’s pseudo-twin docks with the station on a slow-boat tour of the cluster.

That was the mess waiting for them as we started the session last night.

The players wrapped things up in about two hours of play. Maybe less.

In short:
- Iago discovered that Miranda – his Captain – was actually from the Caliban elite, and thus a pirate — a group he despised.
- Miranda discovered that Iago was actually the President For Life of Trinculo (she met his gone-somewhat-to-fat body double).

Armed with this information, and racing against a (player-invented and self-inforced) 45 minute deadline before Iago (who was getting no bed rest at all) bled out, our heroes:
- Snuck onto the Trinculo cruiser.
- Subdued Iago’s body double.
- “Revealed” to the Trinculo cruiser’s crew that the body-double touring the cluster had actually been a diversion so that the REAL Titus Belliago could have a quiet honeymoon with his new bride, Miranda Lafitte, of the Caliban Lafittes.
- Announced this marriage to the public.
- Demanded the release of the Dauphine diplomat (and extended diplomat alliances to Dauphine in general, in solidarity against Caliban).
- Explained that, clearly, the Shylock people the diplomat had been accused of killing had accidentally killed themselves by misusing the (Trinculo-designed) biochemical compounds they’d probably been trying to use on the diplomat in the first place.
- Established ties-by-marriage to the pirate lord families of Caliban, making it very difficult for Caliban to… you know… DO anything about any of it.

In short, they solved the whole problem by revealing their true identities and getting married.

Shakespeare.

(Luckily for them, one of the comedies.)

I call it As you Like it… Whether you Like it or Not.

The End. And a good end it was.

From “Conversations With My Wife As We Play LotRO”: A Disturbing New Trend In Faction Reputation

After a series of scheduling problems, we finally got back to the Diaspora game last night for the first time in… oh, six weeks or something. Been awhile.

In retrospect, I’m glad for the delay, because it gave me time to think about a few problems I felt like we were having with the game, mechanically. As I said over in this post, I’ve been pondering how to tweak the Diaspora system — it felt like we had a few too many get of jail free cards in play (in the form of Fate points), and a little too much cruft on the character sheet that wasn’t getting used.

As I’ve also said before, the designers behind Diaspora have built a hell of a game — they have my admiration for, if nothing else, their free-form stunt construction — but while they are fluent in FATE, it is the fluency of someone speaking a second language. The author’s themselves have said that even now they aren’t wholly comfortable with the way FATE does some things.

Enter Dresden Files.

This is a big, beautiful game from Evil Hat, and while I still don’t feel as though I completely grok everything they’re doing in character generation, there ARE a few things that I saw and immediately wanted to implement in the Diaspora game — solutions to my problems far more elegant than anything I’d come up with. Which makes sense: these are guys who (obviously) grok FATE at an atomic level.

Hack One: Reducing the number of Aspects on Characters

In Spirit of the Century and Diaspora, each of the five phases of character generation yield two character Aspects, for a total of ten. That’s fine in the SotC, which is kind of crazy and over the top and creates characters that are sort of swiss army knives of awesome, but in Diaspora it feels like too much.

Dresden files does it differently. Basically, your character has a “High Concept Aspect” that sort of sums up your character’s idea in a few words. Then they have a “Trouble” aspect that is basically “the thing that’s screwing up your High Concept”. Finally, you get only one aspect for each of the five phases of character generation.

Looking at the hard numbers, it doesn’t seem like THAT much of a change: seven aspects instead of ten, right? In practice, the combination of getting fewer aspects and giving two of those seven aspect specific “jobs” really, really helps tighten up the characters and clarify how they’re envisioned in play. Instead of having more money than you know what to do with, you’re on a budget — constraints are good.  We pared down the Diaspora characters to follow these guidelines (which was easy – the dead wood, unused aspects were easy to spot), and (for me, at least) the result was like walking into the optometrist, getting in the chair, and having him drop that first lens in place that shows you no, you really haven’t been seeing things that clearly until Right Now. The characters came into proper focus, is what I’m saying.

Hack Two: Reducing the number of Fate Points floating around

I’d toyed around with a few changes to the normal system in that previous post, but a little bit before the game I decided to try out — again — something from Dresden Files.

Normally, everyone gets 5 Fate points at the start of every session. It’s too many. Aside from any other consideration, we play on weeknights for three hours — we simply don’t NEED that many Fate points. Anyway.

Dresden’s method, super-simplified, is: “take the basic refresh (5, in this case) and subtract however many Stunt Abilities your character has (2 or 3, in this case), and the remainder is how many Fate points you get to start each session.”  (Unless you ended last session with more points than that refresh, in which case, keep that higher total.)

So rather than everyone starting with 5 Fate points, Tim and Kate started with 2 and Chris started with 3. This did a BUNCH of stuff during the session last night that I liked a lot.

• More compels. Compels become a much more attractive and desirable option in play, because you’re more likely to need more Fate points.
• A bit more hording of points. Fate Point totals higher than the refresh actually remain for next session — Kate’s had more Fate points at the end of the session than the beginning.
• More struggle. With fewer Fate Points around, people weren’t piling on as many Aspects on during conflicts. This gave my poor mooks in a gunfight the chance to actually do some damage, and we started to see people actually take a consequence or two, rather than use up all their Fate points.
• More invention. With Fate points in short supply, it actually became much more attractive to take a round “off” during a fight and set up some ‘free taggable’ aspects to use during the next actual attack. Tim did this a couple times, and it worked out well for him. This makes for more interesting, more textured conflicts. (Typing this out, I realize that that’s what I should have had the NPC crew members doing: rather than whiffing attacks at the enemy, they could have been hitting much easier target numbers to give Tim some help. Ahh well — hindsight.)

In short, the Fate points became more valuable, play became more dynamic, and the use of Aspects as fate point generators rose as well. Basically, the FATE core — the economy and mechanics of the system — actually got engaged a lot more. Since it’s a system I like, this was a big win from my point of view.

How about the play itself?

The net result of this was a session that – to my mind – had more clarity. The characters were in better focus. The game system gears were turning and grinding and chugging away and just generally much more present — more able to do what they were meant to do in the game.

Aspects (permanent and temporary alike) are the Killer App of the FATE system.

Somehow, by having fewer Aspects and giving people fewer points with which to invoke them, we actually made them MORE important.

Weird, but true.

Good game.

I don’t listen very well, even to myself.

Short version of that post — following a session of In a Wicked Age, I came to the conclusion that there’s a certain approach to play that Amber encourages in its long-time players that isn’t exactly what IaWA is designed for, or necessarily rewards.

What do I do with that information?

Obviously, I decide to run an Amber game, using In a Wicked Age.

On the face of it, there’s a lot of fruitful overlap; Amber’s got some pulp weirdness elements to it — looking over the Oracles that are part of the ‘vanilla’ game, almost all the elements included fit into an Amber setting really well. Finally, one of the things I find most interesting about a well-known setting is (re)interpreting it through the lens of a different game. In this case, the six ‘forms’ that define each character in IaWA are consistently fascinating to me — when you act in a conflict, you don’t say “I use my ranged combat skill” or “I use persuasion” — you make decisions like “I act ‘With Love’” or “I act ‘For Others’” or “For Myself” — to me, that’s such a consistently compelling filter through which to see a story.

So, given the opportunity to run a one-shot yesterday, I cobbled together some notes on a more Amberized Oracle and ran a game.

The Good
The Oracle – As I said before, the basic IAWA oracles are remarkably ‘on theme’ for an Amber game. “A minor insult, spoken casually, but striking very, very deep?” Oh yeah. The oracle gave us some fun stuff to work with, and as per usual also took things in a some unexpected directions. The end result of our Oracle draw was an abandoned stone tower – the source of some great power – now home to many unsavory birds filled with blood-craving ‘uncouth spirits’. There was another more friendly spirit in the tower as well, and mixed into that was the young man who’d been sent to reclaim the tower as his property, the conjurer who was working with/summoning the spirits inside the birds… and a full-on princess of Amber, involved in the whole mess somewhat parenthetically.

Best Interests – I did better this time with encouraging everyone to make best interests that were all things the characters didn’t have — things they need to take action in order to get, not react to in order to keep. I failed a bit at that in the last session, and it came out better here.

The Bad
The Oracle – Yeah, yeah, I know I had that under ‘the good’, but as useful as it was, my cobbled-together version lacked the kind of focus and clarity I’d have liked. To use it seriously, it would need a lot of work on focus.

The I-Dunno
Between a late start, a couple scheduled interruptions, some wrestling with the oracle results, and my (bad) habit of stopping to explain the rules before/during/after every bloody step, we didn’t get a tremendous amount done. Everyone got at least one scene in, but we didn’t resolve anything significant in that time.

Also, poor Dave ended up needing to throw himself against a bit of a wall with his conflicts — facing off against “The Birds” in an area in which they were particularly strong (direct conflict where their Swarm particlar strength was most valuable, on their home territory). This lead to three series of conflicts against the birds in which – if they managed to get the advantage initially, they really, really kept it. I dunno if that was actually a problem-problem, except that I should have been better about setting up more interesting consequences for failure.

Finally, I jumped into a conflict involving multiple people without having a clear handle on how it should work (sue me: it’s been more than a year since I last ran it), and it got a little wierd. I think it wouldn’t *stay* weird, given familiarity, and it all worked out okay, but it was weird at the time.

The Hmm
In a Wicked Age wants you to throw yourself into the action right away. I don’t mean that every scene should include someone saying “I attack this guy”, but basically the game system doesn’t really care what you’re doing until someone does something that someone else doesn’t want to see happen. (The PG name of this is “the Oh No You Don’t rule”.) To be fair to the game, things are set up during character generation to help ensure you’re being proactive – so long as you’re working toward your best interests.

Amber (the old RPG, not the fiction it’s based on), on the other hand, encourages an intelligence gathering mindset. Let’s see what’s going on. Let’s touch base with our allies. Let’s ascertain the lay of the land. This doesn’t entirely gel with the “get in there and start acting” desires of IaWA. Rather than nag players about that, I just kept going until I got to some kind of concrete action… supply the information they wanted, then asked “now what”, and kept going until someone said something that someone else didn’t want to see happen.

Some of that was people being new to the system, and not having any clue about “this version of Amber”, and so forth. I’d like to go back and play again and see if some time-to-assimilate and the uses of the rules would help this at all.

The D’oh
There’s a rule in In a Wicked Age that gets overlooked too often. Basically, it says that whenever you narrate anything, you also need to introduce some concrete fact into the world — some sort of detail that lends more weight and reality to the setting. This is especially important in vanilla IaWA, because you’re really totally starting from scratch in your setting, but even in this game it would have been tremendously helpful — hell, it’s a good rule of thumb in any game, but it’s NOT a rule of thumb in IaWA, it’s a rule, and I didn’t observe it.

Why’s that matter? Well, say I back Dave’s character up against a big tree outside the tower. In my head, that tree is big, but dead; the bark’s been stripped away, and the wood beneath is the pale gray of driftwood — a mix of bone-dry and swamp-rotted.

But I never said. All Dave hears is “tree”, so that’s all he’s got to work with it. More detail — more concrete realization of the world around the characters — means more stuff to work with in terms of describing the action or investment and understanding of the scene.

Also, Dave should have been on the We Owe list one more time than I counted, and that would have helped him during later conflicts. Grr.

Again?
We didn’t finish the story for the Oracles we drew, and I very much hope we get a chance to do so. IaWA is an interesting game, designed to build a series of (potentially) out-of-sequence short stories. (People call the system the Anthology Engine.) From session to session, it’s possible to play the same character but, as/more interestingly, it’s also possible to come into the next story playing someone else entirely — to explore the setting from multiple points of view over the course of a longer game and, in fact, to swap GMs around every three or four sessions, should the desire exist.

I’d like doing that, provided the system is something people got comfortable with.

In any case, I really do like the IaWA system – there’s a lot more (western, anyone?) I’d like to do with it — it’s a neat lens to look at the world through.

Anyway, just wanted to get this out of my head and onto the screen; all the rattling about in there is distracting.

I know I said I was going to write my next post about games that use “pushing” and “sacrifice” a big part of getting what you want, but not yet. Today I’m going to talk real quickly about Wizard101.

This game has been on my radar pretty much since it came out in 2008, and I’ve poked at it a very little bit before, but my experience with it can pretty much be boiled down to “I know some people who play it” and “I put it on my nephew’s laptop, and he really likes it.”

That was, until yesterday.

Yesterday morning, Kaylee and I were thumping around the house, looking out at the rainy day, and I figured “eh, why not?” So I downloaded the Wizard101 install and set it in motion.

(I guess I should stop here and explain that Wizard101 is a charming, free-to-play, multiplayer online game in which you play a young apprentice wizard in a magical school in Wizard City. Combat is turn-based, and you cast spells based on the cards in your deck, most of which summon magical critters to fight for you (there’s some generic wand-shooting cards too).  On the whole, it’s sort of combination of early Harry Potter, Pokemon, Cardcaptor Sakura, and the old, much-loved PS2 game, Legend of Legaia.[1])

Kaylee’s been riding along with me while I play MMOs since… oh, I dunno. Infancy, let’s say. She listened to the sound of City of Heroes in the womb. She’s been providing input on the games for the last couple years, and on several occasions I’ve logged a higher-level guy into Lord of the Rings and let her ride my horse around the Shire where she can’t get into any real difficulty.

Anyway, we got set up and made up her girl. (An ingenious process where you answer some personal questions and the game suggests a good match for you from the various schools — it’s not wholly unlike those online quizzes where you can find out if you’re be Slytherin or Ravenclaw.) We ran around a bit, with her doing about half of the steering and most of the combat and stuff like that. We got up to level 2. There was some celebrating.

A wizard is born.

Then Kaylee and Kate took off for a couple hours and I was left looking at this shiny, colorful game. Sooo shiny.

So I made up an account for myself and, because I’m a big fucking pushover for my daughter, poked around in the “real money” online store and bought both of us a very small cushion of in-game currency to buy cool stuff.  

By the time the girls got home, “Dylan Bearheart” was level 5 and had a pet magma spider named Mister Dexter, and Kaylee’s “Melissa Tale” was waiting for her with a collie-sized baby unicorn pet named Sassy… and a pony to ride around on.

Yeah, I bought my daughter a pony. Sue me.

After lunch and a nap, Kaylee pretty much hit the ground at full-speed “I want to play my girl again pleeeeease?” mode. I had anticipated this, and had installed the game on her clunky old laptop. She sat down with a grin and got going.

I watched for a bit. I gave her a few pointers. I reminded her to just go where the Big Yellow Quest Arrow was telling her to go.[2] And then, because I couldn’t take it anymore, I logged in my guy, got us into the same ‘world instance’ of the game (Wu, in case anyone’s curious), made “friends” and teamed up with her to help her with her quests.

We fought ghosts and skeletons and dark fairies turned evil through the power of necromancy. We did some victory dances. I kept the bigger critters busy while she healed us both.

We teamed up on an MMO.

Those of you who don’t know me super well will probably be like “huh, that’s cool”. Those of you who know me a little better will guess how cool this was for me.

Those of you who’ve known me since I played on The Forest’s Edge MUD back in college… you know. Yeah.

We didn’t play for too long before “follow where the arrow tells you” got to be too much to deal with and we packed the laptop up for the day, but it was a good time. A really good time.

Before I’m accused of painting my daughter as some kind of genius, I want to make it clear that there’s a LOT of stuff she doesn’t get about the game. The storyline is, at best, sort of a rough sketch in her head. Obviously, she’s not reading the chat windows or the quest dialogue — she’s only reading the short words at this point, and all out of order. But the combat system she TOTALLY GETS. And she can steer around and follow the quest arrows.

And (I say with a big dopey grin) she loves playing alongside her daddy. It was a pretty good day.[3]

[2] – Ingenious little direction-to-your-goal indicator that doesn’t just point as-the-crow-flies, but steers through through doors and around buildings and the like. Genius. All MMO quest guiders should work that well.)

[3] – Not just for that reason — there was a podcast interview and playtime down at the Y with Kate, and a trip to “Old McDonalds” and a photo shoot with Kate — but I’m being honest: the highlight of the day was my daughter shouting “Let’s get that dark fairy queen, Daddy! We can DO it!”

There is a kind of magic in sacrifice.

No, I don’t mean literal magical sacrifices with babies and goats and stuff like that.[1] I’m talking about taking one for the team to bring said team that much closer to victory. That kind of thing earns mad respect, right?

You see this in all kinds of media — the guy who grimly deals with all the horrible stuff happening to him and voluntarily takes on more pain because it’s the only way to win — in film, Harrison Ford basically made a career out of it; Bruce Willis too, for that matter. In fiction, you’ve got your Frodos and Sams, your Celanawes.[2] In gaming, you’ve the Grey Wardens (Dragon Age), the Mouse Guard (Mouse Guard), or the game I stole this post title from, Shadows Over Camelot.

I’ve talked about Shadows Over Camelot before, so I’m not going to rehash the gameplay, and really this isn’t about the gameplay except for one small part of it.

SOC is a game where you work with the other players cooperatively against the game itself (yes, there’s a chance that there’s a traitor in your midst, but that doesn’t change the basic framework). During each person’s turn, something bad happens, and then you do something good. Something heroic. Just one thing.

However, if you choose to, you can take an additional action on your turn.

All you gotta do is bleed.

You’ve got a few life points (default is 4) and if you take a hit to that score (which, at our table, is referred to as “bleeding”), you can take another action.

We played this game this weekend, and I observed something during play that I’ve seen every single other time we’ve played — a grunt of acknowledgement and appreciation when someone chooses to do this. A respectful primate chest-thumping, if you will.

Strategically, there are good and bad times to do this — it’s pointless just to get around the board more quickly, but if you can join a quest and then ‘bleed’ to save said quest from failure (good) or complete it (better), well… you’re awesome. That particular game is, to me, very much about those kinds of sacrifices and hard choices — where do I fight when there are seven fronts in the assault on Camelot? Whom do I help? What should I save?

And you know what? Something else I’ve noticed is that some people really don’t like that game.

Now, I like games where I can lose. It would be really easy to make a cooperative game like Shadows Over Camelot that is, once you grok the rules, easy to win — I’ve heard there are games like that on the market. I wouldn’t consider that a good investment of either time or money, frankly, because in the time it takes to play a game like that, I could play something else where the outcome isn’t a foregone conclusion.

So part of the dislike is the fact that the game can be lost by everyone at the table – that no one might win? Maybe.

However, more than games I can lose, I like games where I have to bleed to win – where I have to weaken myself to strengthen The Cause. In the most recent SoC game, I was the traitor, and I still found myself bleeding (ostensibly) for the cause, simply because I find that compelling as a player.

I wonder if that’s part of the thing people don’t like about such games, because there ARE people who don’t like such games. Or movies. Or stories. Mouse Guard is a very heroic game to me, but it’s not heroic in a “super” sense where you’re all shiny and victorious and never really get touched by the dirt of the world; it’s heroic because the characters suffer — get hurt, get tired, get angry, get pneumonia — and keep struggling toward their goal anyway – they are little mice in a Great Big World That Will Eat Them, and still they battle on.

"This ends in death."

Just writing that gives me goosebumps — that’s how much I like it. When you can play a game like that and win? Oh man, the grin on my face (while my character cradles his broken arm and hobbles along on a crutch).

But I’ve played with no small number of people who find the whole Mouse Guard-like experience terribly frustrating — that you might win the day and be worse off, personally, than if you’d just stayed out of it? Grrrrrrr.

For me, it’s magical, that they struggle on in the face of such adversity.

That the knights continue to strive for Camelot even though Camelot is (we know) ultimately doomed (and, sometimes, doomed within the scope of the game we’re playing).

That the Wardens do what they do, knowing the price they pay.

That kind of stuff is pure magic. For me. It’s something I’m always pleased to find in a story, or movie, or game.

So much so that I have a hard time seeing when it’s not fun for someone else.

Or even, after the fact, figuring out why.

[2] You know, I was trying to think of an example of this kind of behavior in the most recent book I read - Until They are Hanged – and it’s not there to be found. The series is kind of noir fantasy, and that kind of self-sacrificing behavior just… wouldn’t quite fit. Which isn’t to say that people don’t bleed for a cause – they totally do – but they don’t manfully say “I’ll take this hit to save the lot of you,” because, well, it’s noir. People don’t want to get hit if they can help it, and in that setting there’s no guarantee that such a noble sacrifice would mean victory — it might just be a meaningless death, and who wants that?  People who act like that in the story (and there are a few) usually die. Quickly. And unmourned.