Yes, Video Games are Art. There. I said it.

This is a common question that's come up over and over: Are Video Games Art? If so, what makes them thus? And so on, and so forth. Typically, the argument is divided by people who don't care for games saying, "No! They're silly kids' entertainment, and cannot be Art!" and people who like games saying something that sounds a lot like, "well, I like them, so they must be Art!" and people who like games, but want to be snooty about it saying, "well, what is Art anyway? And some are Art, and some are not," et al.

But what we're actually talking about here, at a fundamental level is legitimacy: should games be taken seriously as a medium and a format, or not?

And yes, I am using Art with a capital A, because it _is_ to be high-falutin' here. Or some junk. And because I am unable to avoid pretension or fulmination, because I am not as awesome as Shieldhaven. But I digress.

First, we have to separate Art from value judgement. That is to say: whether or not you like something has nothing to do with it's status as Art. There's plenty of bad Art. But the fact remains that movies, books, music, and visual art are all Art, and video games combine these elements with interactivity... thus, Art. But there's another reason too... the economics, the production, and the marketing of video games are all consistent with those for Art of various media.

I shall explain.

Schrodinger's Bioshock Part 3: on Disappointment and Deus Ex.

Because I can't leave well enough alone, I realise I still have things to say about Bioshock: Infinite, somehow, someway. This is because, the further I get from it, the more lingeringly disappointed I am in how it played. And I realised during one of my habitual Long Ass Road Trips with Shieldhaven, that part of why is because I've played (and still need to finish) Deus Ex: Human Revolution. Bizarrely, rather than wanting to continue in the mechanical legacy of its predecessors, it felt very strongly as though Infinite really wanted to be like Deus Ex-- but failed. That is to say: It wanted a Pacifist Playthrough option.

If I Were a CEO #2: 5th Edition D&D and the Two State Solution.

Or D&D Next, as some are calling it. Yes, it's what everyone is writing about these days. What will it do, what will it have rules-wise, why is Monty Cook working on it, OMFG. So I'm going to avoid that right now, and as I have done in the past, delve into the business side of things, at least, from my own limited perspective. Keep in mind, that as with all blogging, this is an Op-ed piece.

First of all, I was disappointed, if unsurprised, to learn that D&D was going to a 5th edition anyway, or at least, just doing a 5th edition. As I mentioned in the previous post, linked above, I don't think that adding another player to the edition wars is going to solve anything. The players who felt alienated when 3.x was abandoned for 4th pretty much either went to Pathfinder, or kept playing with the older material, and were lost as customers. They're not likely to come back in any lasting way for 5th. Also, the 4th ed base, who spent a lot of energy supporting that edition, splintered when Essentials came out, and will splinter further for this one, especially if it renegs on some of the best things about 4e (Economy of Actions, I am looking at you). While a Middle Way, which I think they're trying to do here, might be desirable, it is more likely that it will simply create more strife, because it means that 4e (which has been pretty much dumped for Essentials) and Essentials will no longer be supported at all.

A pause while those who are so inclined cheer over one or both of these things. Schadenfreude out of your system? Good. Let's continue.

As Shieldhaven will say at length, I am not a huge fan of 3.x, or Pathfinder (though I have just agreed to play a Pathfinder game. Another story for another post), because of various issues many of which I describe here (and which are actually worse than I describe, in fact). That said, every edition has both its problems, and its die-hard fans. The correct-- if perhaps difficult from a design manpower standpoint-- option?

The Two (or Three) State Solution: Support All Editions.

No, I mean it. WotC should take a clue from White Wolf, re-release all the material that they've got license to as e-texts, and offer Print on Demand. Potentially offer rules tweaks, new modules, and new content on a limited basis, primarily in an electronic format. And WotC can do this very, very easily. How?

The DDI character creator was the shit. I don't mean the online version, I mean the downloadable version that used to have all the updates. Making this a comprehensive and multi-edition database would be a product worth paying for. And how.

But I talked about all of this in the post that I linked above.

Now, while I know good and well that going back to supporting and providing content for 3.x won't, say, bring back those who defected to Pathfinder and are super happy with it. BUT it will be a more comfortable fit, and potentially get people back into generating sanctioned content for it, and allowing for more comfort with new additions, variations, and the like, as they can be secure that Their One True Edition will still be cared for. Continuing to support 4e and Essentials just means that they fail to lose people who invested in caring about those new rulesets, particularly those who are Less Than Enthused about the design stylings of Monty Cook, and what that means for future rulesets.

Also, the one New Book that I suggest for all editions is a DMG 2, much like was done in 4e. I cannot stress the importance of Show Me in how to run specific mechanics within a story.

Bring Back the Open Gaming License

Or at least, create a more wide-open licensing scheme by which people can offer home-brewed content, or small-press content at a nominal fee. This is more a point of Shieldhaven's than mine, but a huge problem with 4e, including DDI Char. Builder, is how hard it is to houserule, or for independent content reactors to actually generate compatible content. This is super good for the company in that it helps generate and spread interest; every interesting module someone makes potentially gets someone else to _also_ buy the core content.


Make it Clear

For my final point, it's less about the way the rules are (though that's important), but about how the information is presented. The biggest problem of all D&D editions up to this point is that the information in the rulebooks is explained so badly, and there's so much cruft, that finding anything is really very problematic. If the staff here spent some of their money on doing organization work on the books of the previous editions, this would go a _long_ way, I feel, to cleaning up some of the problems with them, by making things clear, and actually fixing legitimate errors and conflicts.

To sum up, I have a real problem with the idea that the best way to deal with the problems in the game(s) is to release a new ruleset every few years. I think that it's more a better way to just hemorrhage players, and drive everyone to either sticking with their old products, or going to games like Pathfinder, D20, or others. That's money left on the table, and it makes me super sad that WotC is not really looking into what these people actually want, and supporting that. I fear that they will wind up wasting a lot of time and money on an effective bust.

Arkham City's Social Implications: the Bad, the Good, and the Lazy.

So, Shieldhaven is on the New Game Plus of Arkham City, which is, really, a good enough game to go ahead and play through a second time on, "OH FUCK WE'RE ALL GOING TO BE MURDERED OVER AND OVER BY MOOKS DEAR GOD WHY!?" difficulty. I mean it. It's everything good about, say, Prototype and everything good about Arkham Asylum rockin' it together in a bad-ass package where you even get to play Catwoman!

Which doesn't mean that Well-deserved criticism is not well-deserved.

But I don't really want to talk about the details of how the egregiously gross attitudes of the thugs in Arkham City are wrong, though I'm going to. What I want is to talk about one of the defenses that I keep seeing pop up for this kind of thing. Basically:

"It's not sexism, it's just lazy writing. Which means it's disappointing, but not really malicious."

I also want to talk about the social issues deal that Arkham City does do right, but we'll see if I have enough brain for that.

If I were a CEO: Tabletop Games, #1.

This pair of posts on This blog that Shieldhaven reads and I really should read too, because it's pretty awesome, got me thinking about an idea I'd had on one of the many, many long-ass car rides I go on with Haven and/or Stands-in-Fire (I am pretty sure Stands-in-Fire was there for this one), about how I would run the D&D side of WoC, if I owned it. Also, refined the ideas somewhat through conversations with Four Color Criticism, who understands far more about publishing than I have any hope of knowing ever.

Keep in mind that this is the hypothesis phase, so I haven't thoroughly or crunchily weighed or vetted any of these things, and this can hardly be called a proper business plan. Rather, I am going by impression and wondering if these things would work. But nu, to the stuff:

RoadTrip Inspiration

As may have been mentioned before, Shieldhaven and I go on a number of road trips, usually to Georgia, which involves many hours of natter. And not a little of this natter, of various sorts, is about random design ideas and the like. The chief topic of discussion this time were a pair of branching ideas, stemming from his thinking about how to make martial combat in D&D 4e feel more parry and thrust... have a certain amount of dynamic action, where one can actually respond to attacks in a way that is logical given one's particular class (read: Martial School). One hopes he will expound further on the topic, as it was a really cool idea, and I contend that it is not that difficult, in 4e, to do something like this by adding minor action powers to classes.

However, when he was first pitching the idea, I managed to completely misunderstand what he was trying to do, sticking on the point of, "a purely martial system." Which made me think about, "wait, why no mages? What if there were NOTHING BUT mages?"

Now, it occurs to me that most of the time, when one winds up talking about any given tabletop game system, one is actually talking about combat systems. There's a number of reasons for this, but the main one is that it is more clear-cut to reduce combat actions to roll something, do something, than the huge and open field of social endeavors that people can undertake.

And then there's magic. Magic, especially in earlier editions of D&D, is pretty much a box of tools a mage can use to fight, sure, but realistically they have a potentially huge number of applications, limited only by whether or not you're the sort of person who would do well in Spontaneous Competitions in Odyssey of the Mind. So what happens in a world where everyone is basically a wily tool-user, and there's none of the beloved hack-and-slashers to stand before our dress-wearing wimpiness and take the damage?

Well, first of all, rather than dispense with the question of why there are no fighter PCs, let's come up with some answers.

You're gonna hear electric music/Solid Walls of Sound.

Deck of Many Things returns this week to discuss a spell. This spell can be found in Monty Cook's Arcana Evolved game. It is called Wall of Sound, and the fucker is broken as hell.

(*Note* there is apparently errata which makes it less broken, but I'll deal with that at the end of this post.)

So, about the circumstances under which I employed this spell for the first time in the campaign. I was playing my Magister, Basel (11th level at the time), who was frustrated with the limited nature of her 6th level spell options. She had memorised Vitrification, Shaped Strike, and Wall of Sound for the day-- nevemind that we were in a field of crystal and fighting crystal monsters, so Vitrification was fair useless. A little bit about these crystal monsters, by the by:

1) They had spell resistance.
2) They were immune to fire and cold (so much for shaped strike, which is a fire spell).
3) They were resistant to Electric Energy (which is one of my energy templates).
4) They could refract damage spells so that they bounced in a random direction, potentially hitting me or my allies (so much for most of my damage-- considering the changes of hitting either of the Large-Size Giants in the party, or the hit-point shy Faen, or the Human who is pretty much the main tank... yeah).
5) ...They were vulnerable to Sonic Energy.

So, after trapping one of them in stasis for a round with Dreaded Freeze, This Rabbit goes and looks up Wall of Sound. According to the original printing, the spell has the following attributes:

1) Simple (which means almost anyone can cast it)
2) Spell Resistance: No (later fixed in the Errata, but that may not matter, depending on what is being resisted.)
3) covers a number of 5X5 squares up to your spell level. (Mine at the time was 13, having cast a Heightened Greater Enhanced Magical Flow)
4) Is not bound by gravity, and need not be vertical.
5) Can be made in about any shape you want.
6) has hit points equal to 50 X your spell level.
7) deals Sonic damage equal to 1 X spell level at 20 feet away, and I forget how many d4 of damage (1d4 X spell level with a limit?) at 10 feet away. Half damage on a fort save at 10 feet, no damage on a fort save (I think) at 20.
8) has a duration of 10 rounds per level.

Sounded fantastic to me, esp as we were fighting 10 foot tall crystal critters. My first thought was to create a ceiling of sound over the one fighting my companions, but could not do so in a way that would not hit my allies. So Bo, the Winter Witch, came up with another suggestion.

"Hey Basel, why don't you box the one you Froze in the Wall?"

Well, why didn't I? I could put the wall entirely around the dude, and I could place it at such a height that crawling under it or jumping over it were both problematic, and so that, even if it did get out, it was going to take stupid damage first. Beating on the Wall, at 650 Hp, wasn't really going to do it much good either. So that's what I did. The crystal tenatacle thing (did I mention the tentacles? Yeah. Crystal Effing Tentacles. WOULD I MAKE THIS UP?) shook to death in a handful of rounds, by which time we'd murdered the hell out of his friend.

At which point, Bo very sensibly says something like,

"Yeah, just wait till that's used on us."

Hm, a valid point. The general rule of AE is that anything we can do, the NPCs can do better. And this spell, used with a bare minimum of creativity, is pretty much a Win Button.

Now, it is 6th level, and it is apparently subject to spell resistance, but I'm going to have to look up exactly how that works to see if that just means you don't take damage from it, or if you ignore the wall entirely. Because if it's the former, then that still means dude is trapped in what is basically a force wall with 650 hit points.

Still not hot, particularly if you have angry bow-fighters and magisters ringed around you, and you have any exposed bits at all. Otherwise... well, you're stuck in a box that will let the party get away long before it fades off of you. Suck.

The best ways out of this situation, assuming there's no ceiling on it, is to be able to fly, or maybe to dispel magic, so far as I can see. Otherwise, I think I'll be avoiding using this spell overmuch, as believe it or not, I am not a big fan of The Win Button. I like there to be more than one Right Answer possible in the main of situations.

Ask me about 4e Artificers and Magic Weapon sometime, when you've got a few hours.

Semi-weekly maunderings.

So today is (likely) B's Game, meaning that there's been one episode of the same, a Chessenta game, and an Eberron Game since the last time I posted on tabletop. Also a session of mine. And yet, my thoughts on such are all that is scattered and lame. But.

A thing to which I wish to give more thought-- probably aided by intense scrutiny of the monster manuals-- is keeping controllers alive. In my last game, I wound up doubling an encounter because (though they had very good plot reasons to do so), the players pretty much alpha struck the Controller before she could do any of the cool things she could have done to wreck them. On the one hand, this is good-- do the players really need to know how awful the controller's stuff is? This being something that my players ran into in their very first encounter, when they let the Goblin Hexer hang out and do horrible things to them through its allies. Alpha striking necromancers = absolutely the right thing to do.

On the other hand, there's something... I dunno, weak? About the alpha strike being too easy to pull off. There's a balance there, or a right set of additional baddies that are just nasty enough to protect the Controller by drawing off aggro, without just rolling the party hard. As last weekend's LARP reminded me-- if the GM wants dead players, they can always have them. It's not that hard. What's hard is live PCs who feel like they were actually at risk of dying horribly.

Anyway, it's a lowby something to think about, but something I am thinking about RightNowThisMinute.

Are We Having Fun Yet?: The Mirror of Life Trapping.

After the last session of my game, it occurred to me that there were a few things that had happened that I don't think I could have pulled off in my other gaming groups. I am going to see if I can phrase this without giving away any of the things my party did not figure out, as they could still do some stuff in this room. But nu.

Lemme 'splain.

Basically, in one of the rooms there is a mirror of life trapping which, in order for there to be any real intrest or immediacy to the adventure, requires that one of the PCs fall into it, whereupon they are stuck in a small black room with no doors, and only one window-- to the room where they just were, where they can see and hear their party members, but cannot interact with them. Generally, they can't do anything now but wait until the party rescues them. This could potentially go very badly as more members of the party get trapped, which, after the first one, releases one random creature that had been previously trapped in the mirror.

If you are a gamer like my usual team, you are probably thinking, "Oh man, if that happened to my pc, I'd be so pissed off! I might walk out of the session. Sitting there trapped with nothing to do is not my idea of a good time. That would hugely suck. I feel so lame."

And you'd have a valid point. I have gotten hugely upset myself in the AE game upon falling unconcious, when, since I was all but out of spells, waking me up while the combat was going on would have been a serious waste of party time. That's right, I'm sitting there with nothing to do because, the way combat is structured, to do so would be sapping valuable rounds in which damage could be done, because there's no way to heal and do damage on a single turn, and AE doesn't really (as far as I know) have dedicated healers, unless, say, you went hardcore mage on nothing but the Positive Energy Template. But I digress. Being locked out of the action is no fun, and I can't deny that.

Nonethless, the players I have run through this have all really liked it (in the interest of full disclosure, the second time, I trapped a player who was going to be missing the session), and I am going through this here in part to try to suss out why, and also to justify why I thought this was a good idea in the first place. Anyway, here's the skinny on what justifications I can think of for why this might not just innately suck:

1) the puzzle /is/ avoidable.

The first two times, run in 2e and in 3.5e, you had a dex check to avoid looking in the mirror, and a will save if you did look. When I ran it just now in 4e, I had skill checks to avoid looking (with a bonus after the first party member got trapped, since they knew what it did), and the mirror made a +10 vs. Will attack (yes, against 1st level characters-- not looking is supposed to be the best way to avoid this) if you did look into it. After the first person got trapped, most of the party had no trouble keeping their eyes averted-- the Rogue kept covering it and uncovering it as they tried to get the Avenger out, flubbed one roll, and wound up getting caught also. Fortunately, by that time, they had figured out the keywords, and had no trouble getting the Avenger out. The Rogue... well, that's another story.

That said, if the whole party manages to avoid looking, you're fine. Also, when the party enters the room, I made a random roll to determine which of the 3 mirrors in the room (a heavily modified Mirror of Mental Prowess and a non-4e style Mirror of Opposition) is uncovered; the other two have cloths covering them. Which is a mixed blessing, as poking at the covered mirror may well get you trapped, when you don't know what's under there. But there are ways, such as utilizing the mirror of Mental Prowess, to figure out what is going on with the mirror and even solve the puzzle of it without a party member getting trapped-- if say, the party decides they want to free the other things that are trapped in the mirror.

Which brings us to...

2) There are multiple ways to solve the puzzle.

The first two times I ran this, the players solved it pretty much the same way, which was not even close to the way the 4e party solved it. Using the mirror of Mental Prowess (which worked kind of like an Infocom game in that you had to phrase things in very specific ways to get the results you wanted, but asking enough questions or even regular conversation where the mirror could 'hear' would eventually get you clues to help you out), the party figured out the passcodes to the Lifetrapping Mirror, and only wound up acidentally freeing one thing that was trapped beforehand-- and that one was friendly. There was another way they could have done it-- finding some other living thing (or the creature they'd released, an Orium Dragon Wyrmling) and forcing it to look in the mirror in hopes of releasing the party members randomly, and that option got discussed. Also, if they'd come up with something really neat, I'd probably have let that work. Actually-- well, here.

Because of a number of factors, one of which was that the Rogue was the one who had solved the puzzle of getting the passcodes in the first place, and had tricked the mirror of Mental Prowess into believing she was its master, I allowed the Rogue to make a skill check from inside the mirror to free herself. Doing so was narratively the right choice-- it served the drama of the scene, as for reasons of her own, the rogue bluffed the party into believing that they had actually freed her. One person made their insight roll and is now suspicious, which adds interest to the role play. On the other hand, I can't really claim that this choice was anything but DM Fiat, which topic ought to be another post entirely. But my thought, basically, is that in this case the players trust me enough to realise that if I see them not having fun with this, I am going to do my damdest to make sure they start having fun again as soon as possible. Also--(very tiny invocation of) rule of cool, which in this case is more, Rule-Of-Your-DM-Is-a-Narrativist. Which is yet another future post topic.

That said, I am curious about opinions as to whether this kind of thing is really too risky to run much-- I mean, overdoing the, "oh no, now you're trapped in something and have to be rescued" is no good, but on the other hand, dangers that aren't death seem like a kind of neat thing. Does it fall into the realm of, "This is Not Okay, and you should only do this if you want at least one PC to have a miserable session," "Naw, this puzzle is cool! Do it moar!" or "Well... run right, I guess this might be okay sometimes in moderation," as far as things that might actually ruin a game.

I suppose that part of the reason that I am wondering is because this is not a question I'd even ask myself in 3.x or earlier. I'd say, to any player that whined about it, "don't lawyer me, suck it up and deal. "Having played more 4e-- and just more, with more power-type gamers-- I worry about mechanics screwing things up a lot more, as I like the players knowing how the world works and how to use the tools they have to fix problems-- hence, my love of skill challenges. I've been very fortunate in having players that enjoyed 'stuck in a box' rp-- and man, the poor Avenger has been running foul of every trap in the dungeon, coz she doesn't like to check things out before she messes with them. Whoops. Anyway, I can't help worrying if this sort of puzzle is actually a Douchebag DM Trick(tm) that's squeaked by because I have players who have the patience for it and don't know better, or if it's really all right, and I've provided enough outs.

Anyway, tis something I am thinking about right now.

Also, I will add that this is something you should NEVER do in say, a LARP. Taking agency away from characters when they do not have the option to, you know, go get a snack or go to the bathroom or make snarky commentary around the table, and they have to be in character is a recipe for lameness all around. Also, your resources are very limited, so back up plans to salvage the situation are probably going to look even dumber. But LARP mechanics and Tabletop mechanics are two very, very different things. Well, obviously.

Yes, this is a reference to something that happened at Eclipse this weekend, though not to me. Still, it was a thing which reminded me that I wanted to make this post in the first place.

B's Game tomorrow, gaming schedule-wise. Delicious 12th level assassin antics.

Fun for all.