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.

The Case Study & Theory: Gates

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Thinking about how to add on to Over the Next Dune raises the question of whether and how to gate player powers. Of course, that begs the question of what a “gate” is. 😉 To avoid definitional confusion, let’s hammer that out.

A gate is something that controls a player’s access to in-game capabilities. The classic example is mana, as seen in League of Legends or the Final Fantasy games. A player uses up mana each time he or she employs a special ability, and when the mana is gone the player cannot use special abilities until it recharges. Ammunition is also a gate; it limits how much the player can use a certain weapon before having to switch or seek out more ammo.

Gates do not have to be numbers. Many role-playing games, for example, control players’ power via progress through the storyline. As the player explores new areas, meets new people, and learns new things, the player gets new capabilities.

Gates can go one way or bi-directional. One-way gates result in permanent changes. For example, in Burnout Paradise access to new cars is generally gated by completing races. Once you complete the race associated with a car, you have access to that car forever. Mana and ammunition are usually bi-directional gates; you can run out and lose access to a power, but replenishing the resource takes you back through the gate and enables you to use it again.

I believe that that’s a reasonably complete discussion of what gates are. They also have some properties that aren’t definitional but that I feel are worth putting forward:

Gates can be thought of in either direction. This is kind of a weird one, and it’s usually not relevant, but it can be useful. All gates can be described as having something or not having the opposite. For example, in Battletech firing weapons builds up heat. You can think of heat as the gate (too much is bad) or coolness as the gate (not enough is bad). It doesn’t matter, from a theoretical perspective, which approach you take.

Admittedly, this can get kind of silly. You could say that “lack of mana” is the gate, and that a player can use a certain ability because his or her lack of mana has been kept below a certain threshold. It’s a lot easier, though, to say that the player has enough mana.

Basically, this is like flipping an equation to put the variable you’re solving for on the left. It doesn’t really change anything, but if you’re accustomed to a certain presentation it might help you understand what’s going on.

Out-of-game gates are ineffective. Experience has shown that players cannot be limited by resources outside the rules of the game. Money and physical difficulty are two examples of out-of-game gates which have been proven not to work.

Money. If your game is popular, you will have a subset of players who will spend whatever they need to to get a competitive advantage. Magic: the Gathering was originally designed to use card rarity as a gate, on the thinking that players would be limited by their collections. Over time it became clear that tournament players assembled complete collections regardless of the cost. Magic still uses rarity for various design purposes, but not to balance constructed-deck tournament play.

Physical difficulty. It does not matter how difficult a physical task is; if it will help players win, some of them will put in the necessary time to be able to do it reliably. Fighting games often use precise timing as a gate, demanding that players time their moves to 1/60th of a second in order to get the longest combos and the most damage. Many, many players have practiced enough to hit those 1/60th of a second windows routinely.

From here we need to think about whether OtND should use gates at all. I’ll get into that next time.

The Case Study: Updated Print-n-Play & Video In the Works

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A short update today:

– I’ve updated the Print-n-Play file to reflect the changes in the latest set of rules. If you catch any errors, let me know.

Over the Next Dune – Print and Play – 6-27-14

– Part of the reason why this update is brief is because I’m working on a how-to-play video for Over the Next Dune. Have thoughts on what I should include? Leave them in the comments!

Theory: PSA for New Warmachine and Hordes Players

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So you’ve decided to try Warmachine or Hordes. Great! They’re excellent games. And you’ve looked through some of the books and you’ve decided to try a Cygnar gunline. All ranged attacks, all the time. You’ll annihilate them before they even get close! Right!?

Wrong. This is completely wrong. The gunline will not work–and there are solid game design reasons why.

Imagine a universe where a gunline can realistically plan to wipe the opponent’s army from the board before it can get into close combat. In that universe, a close combat-focused army (like, say, many of the steampunk and fantasy armies in WarmaHordes) is unusable. You’re playing Rock, and they’ve got a lot of Scissors. They lose every time–and that kind of lopsided game is boring.

What’s more, if gunlines are successful scenario-based play is pretty much out the window. Experience has demonstrated that all-ranged armies do not move forward. After all, moving forward makes them more vulnerable to being engaged in close combat! Hence, all-ranged armies tend not to push into scenario zones, or capture flags, or otherwise take advantage of all the board’s real estate. They are resistant to incentives to maneuver, and in the process an important part of the game is lost.

Privateer Press knows that Warmachine and Hordes will suffer if gunlines work. As a result, the games are balanced so that they won’t. You must have a close combat aspect to your army, because if the opponent wants to, he or she will be able to get to you.

Isn’t it a cost to have gunlines be weak in this way? Why should all-ranged armies suffer so that close combat can function? It’s because gunlines shut out so many other options and considerations. Scenario-win armies don’t work because the gunline just eradicates them. Close combat units are irrelevant because they get swept off the board without doing anything. Even setting up the board gets reduced to “where are the clear fields of fire.” Unworkable gunlines are the price we pay to keep Warmachine and Hordes interesting.

The gunline doesn’t work. It has never worked. There is no reason to think it will ever work. Please, please, don’t spend your money on one. Spend it on Warmachine and Hordes, they’re great games! But buy a unit of Sword Knights or a Centurion to go along with your Gun Mages.

The Case Study: Updated Rules

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I’ve revised Over the Next Dune’s rules to take the latest changes into account:

1. The rulebook now includes the tracking rules.

2. The turn track and turn counter have been removed from the rules entirely. Since the searcher movement deck is now being used to define the length of the game they were unnecessary.

3. Italics are used more consistently to separate advice and comments about the theme from the formal rules.

These rules do not yet address reducing the number of turns to increase the difficulty, since that’s still in testing.

As always, let me know if you have any comments–either about these changes or about the rulebook in general.

Over the Next Dune – Rules – 6-23-14

Theory: *Stand-In* and Puzzle Pure Co-Ops

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I wasn’t really satisfied with the terminology I used to discuss the types of pure co-ops in the previous post. “Simulation” sounded like it related to the theme of the game. Using that word was going to lead to definitional confusion; it needed to be changed.

I’ve revised the post to use “stand-in” instead of “simulation.” The new term should be clearer that the distinction is between co-ops whose AI imitates a human player and those whose AI does not.

In addition, I’ve added some more examples and cleaned up some wording. It’s an all-around better post now.

If you checked it out before, please take another look and let me know what you think of the changes. If you haven’t yet, try it on for size.

Theory: Simulation and Puzzle Pure Co-Ops

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It’s an article of faith that a great opponent makes a game more fun. A good pure co-op game, then, needs a good AI foe to challenge the players. Designing that opponent requires, first and foremost, deciding what kind of co-op you’re creating: a stand-in or a puzzle. Mashing elements from both types together leads to trouble.

A stand-in challenges the players by imitating a living opponent. It tries to do what a human would do in a given situation. In essence, it simulates the experience of having a human sitting across the table (or on the other side of the internet connection) playing against you.

A puzzle challenges the players by presenting a problem for them to solve. It is not concerned with doing as a real person would do; its only goal is to provide an interesting dilemma, and it acts in whatever way the designer thinks will best achieve that. Puzzles may (should?) have a theme, and they may be good simulations of that theme, but they aren’t trying to simulate an opposing player.

Which category a game falls into has a huge impact on what kind of AI is appropriate. Stand-in AIs need capacities that puzzle AIs don’t. A human will respond to his or her opponent’s actions; to feel “real,” the stand-in needs to be able to do the same. It has to be able to find out what the players are doing, determine what an appropriate response might be, and implement that response.

Puzzles, by contrast, don’t have to care what the players are doing. In fact, they don’t have to do any specific thing so long as they’re interesting. The central question is what the game needs, not how a person would behave, and the AI needs only those capabilities relevant to the game’s particular answer.

Either choice can lead to a great game. Pandemic and Forbidden Desert, for example, are both great puzzles. The diseases to cure in Pandemic and the sandstorm to dig through in Forbidden Desert don’t act like human opponents–but why would they? Diseases and sandstorms aren’t sapient, and it would be weird if they could respond to the players’ actions. Instead they operate in ways that are both thematic for the natural forces they represent and interesting in play. For puzzles, that’s the gold standard.

As an example of a great stand-in I always go back to the Reaper Bot and Zeus Bot for the original Quake. (Wow. I’ve been playing FPS games for a long time.) At a time when a lot of people were on dial-up and internet play with other humans was a lag-filled affair, the Reaper and Zeus Bots were striking for their ability to navigate without bumping into walls, good aim, and consistent connection. Many real players, fighting against 300-500ms pings, couldn’t offer those things. The bots out-humaned the humans!

Designers run into trouble, however, when they mix the two categories. One sees this a lot with “cheating” computer game AIs (which are usually intended for solo play rather than co-op, but the issues involved are comparable). They look like stand-ins but are actually puzzles, and as a result they often end up being unsatisfactory.

For example, players often express frustration with the AI in the Civilization series of games. Civ’s AI promises stand-ins; the player controls one civilization and the others are guided by an AI that has each civilization pursue its own ends–just like they would if humans were guiding them. The goal is to beat the other civilizations, eliminating or outscoring each as though they were separately controlled by human players. The AI-driven civilizations sometimes cooperate and sometimes attack each other, imitating what humans do. It looks like a stand-in, it quacks like a stand-in . . .

. . . but it’s not a stand-in, and at least anecdotally it ends up irking many players as a result. Civ’s AI doesn’t get much smarter as the difficulty level goes up; it just gets more and more resources, far outstripping what the human player receives. Those resources enable the AI to challenge a skilled player, but they undermine the simulation; no human can do the things a high-difficulty AI can do. Ultimately the game becomes a puzzle in which the player must find optimal moves that will allow him or her to keep up with the AIs’ lead in technology and production. Players choose a higher difficulty level looking for a simulation testing their diplomatic ability and battlefield tactics, instead find an optimization problem testing their command of the math behind the game, and walk away aggravated.

(To be fair, some players greatly enjoy the higher difficulty levels. However, they’re usually knowledgeable about the game, know they’re in for an optimization problem, and are specifically seeking that experience.)

Civilization demonstrates–-has in fact been demonstrating for years–-that a really tasty apple is not a substitute for an orange. When designing a pure co-op, follow in the mold of Pandemic, Forbidden Island, and Quake’s excellent bots by figuring out whether you need a puzzle or a stand-in and then delivering fully on that experience. Slipping elements of one into the other is apt to confuse the game’s message and frustrate players.

The Case Study: Questions for the Audience

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Over time I’ve built up some questions about Over the Next Dune that I’d like your input on. Let me know what you think in the comments, or contact me directly!

1. Would a video showing a game of Over the Next Dune be useful, or do the rules as they exist do a sufficient job of teaching the game?

2. I’ve been assuming that a very simple board without art is best, owing to ease of printing. Would you prefer a more attractive board and nicer pieces? Assume you have to pick one or the other–“both” is not an option in this instance.

3. On a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being the highest, how complicated would you say Over the Next Dune is? Is that more complicated than you would like, or do you feel that there’s room for additional complexity, or is it at just the right spot?

4. How often do you find yourself making errors in the basic operation of the game? That is to say, how often do you realize that you forgot to move a searcher or something similar? What errors come up most frequently? Is there something I could do to make it easier to avoid them?