Month: July 2014

Theory: Balance Matters for All Skill Levels

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The common wisdom about game balance–that it only matters for top-level players–is incorrect. It is true that balance is more important to the outcome in matches between highly skilled players than it is when newer players compete. However, balance has a far greater impact on fun for weaker players than it does for stronger ones. Both groups benefit from balance and are hurt by its absence.

“Balance” is a tricky word in game design. It sweeps in a lot of issues and discussions about different types of games that arguably shouldn’t be directly compared. Here, I’m talking about balance in initial choices: between characters in Street Fighter, champions in League of Legends, interstellar empires in Twilight Imperium, and other situations where players select a set of capabilities before the conflict begins.

Players of these games often argue that balance is only important at high levels of play. The argument goes something like this: in games between low- to mid-skill players, the difference in ability between the players decides who wins. Slight advantages in one’s choice of character/champion/empire are swamped by relative skill. It’s only when both players are quite good that those slight advantages matter.

The flaw in that position is that it assumes balance only affects winning. It also plays a role in determining how much fun the players have. For experienced players the role is smaller. With new and less skilled players, however, balance can be the single determining factor in whether or not they enjoy the game.

Top players, in my experience, derive most of their fun from developing mastery. They like exploring the game, understanding it, practicing it, and demonstrating the skill they gain thereby. Whether they do that with this character or that empire doesn’t matter as much as the play and the results.

I can’t think of a better example of this than Mike Flores’ view of Caw-Blade. For those who don’t play Magic: the Gathering, Caw-Blade was early 2011’s dominant tournament deck. “Dominant” can’t be emphasized enough; Caw-Blade won again and again and again, sweeping all competition before it. In its day Caw-Blade was the only reasonable choice for what to play in a tournament.

Mike Flores, a well-known Magic player with a history of tournament success and writer of many influential articles, loved the Caw-Blade environment. He conceded that Caw-Blade was by far the best deck–but, he pointed out, Caw-Blade vs. Caw-Blade games were extremely skill-intensive and rewarded good play. It didn’t matter to him that there was only one valid deck, because that deck enabled players to show their stuff.

Newer and less practiced players, however, often have neither the experience nor the mindset to mitigate balance issues. They don’t know what the good choices are, and if they find out may not feel able to switch to them. As a result, these players can have frustrating experiences when they encounter high-level play.

This dynamic played out very clearly in the old Star Wars miniatures game. If a player did not have a plan for the “Black-and-Blue” strategy, or really wanted to play the Mandalorians even though they were weak, he or she could lose games in rock-paper-scissors fashion even against an opponent of equal skill. High-level players, and those aspiring to that status, took note of the imbalances and moved on; others just got aggravated.

To be fair, the differences in power between SWM pieces was stark. Games with smaller imbalances are less likely to produce these joyless situations. Even small imbalances, however, can build into commanding leads over time–especially in casual games between friends, where everyone involved is a repeat player and streaks are likely to be noticed.

Balance affects which top-level player wins. However, it can also affect which lower-level player has fun. Thus, balance shouldn’t be seen as irrelevant to new players and the lower ranks on the ladder. It’s important to these groups in different ways, but it’s important to all of them.

The Case Study: Player Abilities for Testing

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So far we’ve got one player ability for Over the Next Dune:

Pop a Tire: If this player token is adjacent to one or more searchers at the start of the Sneak Phase, choose one of those searchers to be affected by terrain during the next Search Phase. (Any time during the next Search Phase that searcher’s movement would cause it to enter one or more squares with terrain in them, the searcher must expend two squares of movement instead of one. If it does not have enough movement remaining to expend two squares of movement, it stops moving.)

We need at least four more to cover all five players. I’m going to run through the untested concepts to see if any of them are workable in light of the rules for player powers. Then we’ll come up with as many brand-new powers as needed.

To keep them firmly in mind, the rules for player powers are to include them when

1. the game benefits from a certain amount of something, but no more;
2. the unique ability provides very different game experiences; and/or
3. the unique ability creates new, interesting decisions.

A player power should not be used if

1. the power would undermine the game’s mechanics; and/or
2. the game is at a complexity limit.

Comparing the old concepts to these rules, it seems like some of them pass and some of them . . . aren’t good avenues to go down.

“Hey, Over Here!”–When a player token would be captured by a searcher, you may instead center that searcher over this player token. This player token, and any other player tokens covered by the searcher, are captured. Direct the searcher “down,” toward the starting line, just as if a player had been captured normally.

I still like this. It provides a decision (should I take one for the team?) that was previously only available when playing the “wall” strategy. A power that makes the game more interesting for the player using it always has some value.

Unfortunately, this ability has the potential to undermine the searcher-tricking mechanic. The “wall” was dangerous in part because it replaced maneuvering the searchers with constant rescues; a player could use this ability to do the same thing anywhere on the board. A gate is needed to prevent this ability from dominating the game:

“Hey, Over Here!”–Once per game, when a player token would be captured by a searcher, you may instead center that searcher over this player token. This player token, and any other player tokens covered by the searcher, are captured. Direct the searcher “down,” toward the starting line, just as if a player had been captured normally.

That isn’t a very interesting gate, I admit. However, I think this ability is very powerful and that a sharp limit is necessary.

Throw Something Shiny–Once per game, when this player token is adjacent to one or more searchers, choose one of those searchers and point it in a direction of your choosing.

Looking at the rules, I don’t think this makes the cut. First, OtND doesn’t need this sort of redirection. Second, being able to choose a searcher’s facing does not provide a substantially different game experience; the player is still fooling the searcher, he or she is just doing it in a different way. Finally, while the decision behind TSS is new it’s not very interesting–there will often be clear good and bad choices, and players will just pick a good one. This power needs to be replaced.

Coordinator–Once per game, when this player token tricks a searcher, the searcher does not capture player tokens it moves over. If the searcher is occupying any player tokens’ spaces when it stops moving, it captures those player tokens.

I don’t love this one either. Again, there’s no reason to include it. This ability is an easy out for difficult situations. OtND doesn’t need that in any amount. Nor is this a different game experience–the players will approach the game the same way, they’ll just have a “get out of jail free” card. Interesting decisions aren’t in the offing either, since players will be able to bail themselves out of otherwise-challenging problems. Off to the scrapheap with this one.

No One Left Behind–Once per game, when this player token is adjacent to another player token, you may choose to move the adjacent player token along with you for your first square of movement using the same rules as apply when tricking searchers.

Here we go. I’m a big fan of this power, because I think it’s most likely to create a different experience. The player with this ability sees a much different board, one with many more options. It’s fascinating to ask what can be done with it.

This power is so neat that I’m inclined to take the gate off of it so as to encourage its use. While the wording’s changing I’d also like to clear up how this power relates to the searcher-tricking rules. I don’t want this to become an easy out, so people who are in trouble should still be in trouble after this ability is used.

No One Left Behind–When this player token is adjacent to other player tokens, you may choose to move one or more of those tokens along with you for your first square of movement using the same rules as apply when tricking searchers. Those tokens will themselves trick searchers during this movement.

OK, that’s two out of four and a total of three powers ready for testing. Not bad, but now we need to come up with two more from scratch. How about:

Hitch a Ride–When an adjacent searcher moves during the Search Phase, this player token may move along with the searcher, always maintaining the same position relative to the searcher.

It’s common in OtND for one player to want to move backward, usually because that happens to be the safest place to trick a searcher toward. However, that player can end up unable to catch up before time runs out. This ability isn’t complex, but it creates decisions by making it possible to go backward late in the game. I suspect there are also other imaginative uses that I’m not seeing right away.

For the last ability, I’m thinking about this:

Caltrops–During each Sneak Phase you may turn one clear square adjacent to you (at any point during your movement) into terrain.

Terrain is generally bad for the players, so being able to create it forces a different approach to the game. This ability also teams up with Pop a Tire in a way that promotes team play, a general rule for OtND.

With that we have five player abilities for testing. Let me know if you see any issues right off the bat, or if you get a chance to try these out!

The Case Study: Player Powers, Take Two

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Cooperative games often give each player a unique power: Pandemic makes one player a scientist and another a medic, while Forbidden Desert has one player be good at carrying water while another can dig quickly. Yet, it isn’t necessary for a co-op to do so; Space Alert is a great game, and all of its players are on equal footing. I’ve been interested in bringing unique player abilities into Over the Next Dune, and have even put forward some untested ideas, but before sinking a lot of time into it I want to figure out with confidence whether OtND is in the category of games that benefit from such abilities or the category that doesn’t.

When would one want to add unique player powers to a game? I’ve come up with a couple of possibilities:

1. The game benefits from a certain amount of something, but no more. Pandemic would be easy if everybody had the medic’s ability to cure lots of people in a turn. However, letting one person do that is just enough to keep the players above water when the cards flip the wrong way and disease suddenly spreads all over. A single medic serves as a safety valve without making the game trivial.

2. The unique abilities provide very different game experiences. Playing a Dwarf Trollslayer in Warhammer Quest has little in common with playing a Grey Wizard. Providing such distinctive experiences adds a lot of replayability, since getting tired of one of them doesn’t mean you’re tired of the game as a whole.

3. The unique abilities create new, interesting decisions. Playing the water carrier in Forbidden Desert is neat because in addition to the game’s usual decisions you have to decide how important it is to stay close to oases. Figuring out when it’s safe to go help the team and when you should to stay behind collecting water is tricky. The unique power is valuable in part because it brings that interesting decision to the table.

Looking at that list, I’m struck by the fact that it’s mostly about the powers rather than the game. Do the abilities provide different experiences? Do they create new decisions? It depends on what the abilities are!

We could come at the problem from the other direction. When would one not want unique player powers in a game?

1. Giving players unique capabilities would undermine the game’s mechanics. Diplomacy is a classic game of cooperation (and competition). It’s a wargame where the players’ strengths start out relatively even, so to make progress you have to cut deals. If the players had special abilities they could rely on it might make negotiation less important–and the negotiation is the reason to play.

2. The game is at a complexity limit. Space Alert is played in real-time on a 10-minute clock. Players make mistakes and overlook things, even without having to track the effects of special powers. If people were also trying to manage unique abilities the game could tip from “hilarious barely-controlled chaos” into “impossible and frustrating.”

Over the Next Dune certainly isn’t so complicated that it can’t bear the weight of unique abilities. I’m less certain whether player powers would undermine the game’s central challenge of tricking the searchers. On the one hand, the more tools the players have the less likely they are to take the risk of getting close to searchers to pull them around. On the other hand, it seems like abilities could be created that would increase rather than detract from engagement with the searcher-tricking mechanic.

The best way to resolve that uncertainty is with some testing. How about this as a starting point:

Pop a Tire: If this player token is adjacent to one or more searchers at the start of the Sneak Phase, that searcher is affected by terrain during the next Search Phase. (Any time during the next Search Phase that searcher’s movement would cause it to enter one or more squares with terrain in them, the searcher must expend two squares of movement instead of one. If it does not have enough movement remaining to expend two squares of movement, it stops moving.)

My thought is that this creates a new decision (whether and when to slow down a searcher) and a potentially different game experience (seeking out searchers instead of avoiding them), without adding complexity (players will already know the terrain rules) or undermining the central mechanic (since it increases rather than decreases the mechanic’s use during the game). I also like that, as noted in the first iteration of this ability, it doesn’t empower one player; rather, it helps a player assist the others.

That’s one power, but there can be five players in a game of Over the Next Dune. I’ll be back with more on Monday.

Theory & The Case Study: Gates in Over the Next Dune

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I’ve been considering whether to try out gated player abilities in Over the Next Dune. Gating player capabilities would be a substantial change, and unusual for a cooperative game. On the other hand, gates are a commonly-used, proven mechanic. It’s not a trivial decision.

Let’s start at (what I think is) the beginning. Why would one ever use a gate, instead of just letting players deploy their capabilities whenever they want? I can see two reasons:

1. The gate leads to interesting decisions. Mark Rosewater likes to say that “restrictions breed creativity.” Limiting the player’s access to a capability forces the player to think about when to use it, and to find alternative solutions when the capability isn’t available or shouldn’t be employed.

As a quick example, think about Barrier in League of Legends: a protective shield that isn’t available for a few minutes after being used. Since access to the Barrier is limited, players have to make tough decisions about precisely when it will do the most good. They also have to find ways to conserve the Barrier for those key moments, and to protect themselves when the Barrier is “on cooldown.” If players could just throw up the Barrier all the time, those decisions would be lost–and no other decisions would appear to replace them.

2. The gate prevents an ability from dominating gameplay. In some ways this is the inverse of the previous rule: the gate is in place because unlimited use of a player ability makes the game less interesting. RPGs often use gates in this way; powerful abilities would make the early game trivial, so players can’t access them until later.

(There’s also a third reason–to help monetize the game. However, that opens up a can of worms that I’m not looking to address right now.)

Those both seem like good reasons to include gates. Yet, they aren’t universal in cooperative games. Pandemic‘s Scientist doesn’t need to do anything to be able to cure a disease with four cards instead of five; that ability is always “on.” Shadows Over Camelot‘s Sir Bedivere can trade cards in for new ones without earning the privilege. Clearly, gates aren’t for every power or every game.

What considerations, then, militate against gating player powers? Ironically, I find it much easier to think of why a designer would want to limit powers than why the designer wouldn’t. Perhaps that says something about me. 🙂 Here’s what I’ve come up with:

1. The game is unplayable when the ability is not available. Most RPGs don’t limit your capacity to walk around. In fact, I’m not aware of any at all that do. That’s not surprising, because if the player can’t move around the world in an RPG the player can’t do anything at all. Limiting walking would tend to destroy people’s ability to play the game.

2. The game needs something, and the ability provides it best when it is constantly available. League of Legends needs a way to ensure that games move toward their conclusions. A big part of ending a game of League is damage output; players and teams need damage to destroy the opposing team’s defenses and ultimately the enemy base. Thus, the game needs to ensure that teams have reliable access to damage output. If no team can damage objectives, the game cannot progress (setting aside really grindy strategies like letting minions do all the pushing–let’s not go down this road).

League’s need for guaranteed damage is met by “auto-attacks.” Every character can punch, swing a sword, fire arrows, or has some other freely available mechanism for inflicting damage. Since they’re costless, auto-attacks guarantee that the game cannot stall completely. Regardless of the team composition or overall situation, both teams have the theoretical ability to bring down objectives and end the game.

3. You want to encourage a behavior. If players should be doing something in a game, designers can incentivize it by letting players do it no strings attached. Ikaruga, for example, is a “bullet hell” game in which the player(s) can switch colors to absorb enemy fire. The color-switching mechanic made the game an instant classic. Having no limits on switching colors was a good design move, because it encouraged players to try the mechanic out early (desirable because color-switching was the game’s innovative feature) and to do it often thereafter (important because it helped players progress and kept them hooked).

So, two reasons to use gates and three not to. What do they mean for OtND?

To date players have three capabilities in the game: moving, tricking searchers, and rescuing other players. Moving should not be gated. The game is unplayable if players can’t get around the board.

Tricking searchers also should not be gated. It is, at least arguably, the most interesting aspect of the game. Keeping it freely available encourages players to interact with this important mechanic.

Rescuing is already gated by the need for several players to work together. That proved necessary to stop rescuing from dominating gameplay. However, the current limitations appear sufficient; I don’t think more are needed.

What about additional player abilities, then? Things like Pandemic’s Scientist and Shadows’ Sir Bedivere, that are outside the core rules of the game? Do they need to be gated? Should they exist in OtND at all? Let’s take that up next time.