Foray of a Feather Snake

PAX

Noteworthy

Clank!
Dire Wolf
The first physical board game designed by the video game studio that makes the digital CCGs Eternal and Elder Scrolls: Legends and is doing the digital port of the board game Lanterns. (In fact, they’re publishing Clank! through the company that published Lanterns. It’s sort of a mirror arrangement.)

It’s a deckbuilding game with a boardgame element. It’s the same general concept as Trains, although designed from the ground up rather than making shallow changes to Dominion and tacking a board game on. Players are thieves delving into a dungeon to skirt encounters, grab treasure, and get back out before the dragon kills them. They need to decide whether to build up their decks with movement, combat, gold, or VP depending on their approach to victory, which hallways they plan to take, how deep they’ll try to go, and what other players do. Some cards give you Clank! points, indicating that you made noise and attracted the dragon’s attention.

Pyre
Supergiant Games
An upcoming RPG from the makers of Bastion and Transistor, with the same attention to art style and amazing sound design. Pyre makes an ambitious choice: the realtime conflict mechanic is closer to soccer than to swords or shootyguns. That’s daring considering how much of the video game-playing public prides itself on disliking sports.

Super Galaxy Squadron EX
Synset
A scrolling vertical schmup from a small indie company. Not innovative, but fun, with a difficulty and a control scheme that were tuned very well to my personal tastes (or maybe I simply picked a good ship option).

Misc.

The American Dream
Samurai Punk
A tongue-in-cheek social commentary first-person shooter, chronicling the early childhood of a boy in 1950s America learning to grow up and use his guns for everything from eating to learning arithmetic.

Super Dungeon Tactics
Underbite
A 1-player tactical game that’s a close implementation of the board game Super Dungeon Explore by Soda Pop Miniatures. 2D square-map-based fantasy skirmish combat, a la Krossmaster or Final Fantasy Tactics or the four D&D boardgames or… Nothing really new, but polished and colorful.

SIX (Seattle Indies Expo)

Noteworthy

Topsoil
The standout title from SIX for me. It’s a simple, elegant, touchscreen-friendly puzzle game of the sort that epitomised the mobile platform when that hardware was still new. You have a 4x4 gridded field. Each square can hold one plant. You receive list after list of random plants and must plant them all, one per square. At the end of each list, you must reap one contiguous group of identical plants. Reaping a larger group scores more points and (more importantly) clears more room for additional planting. Complicating things further, each square has a color. Only groups that are all on one color can be reaped, and reaping cycles the land’s color. You play until you run out of room.

Bring Your Own Book
Do Better Games
Close runner-up for most promising game at SIX. A digital tool for playing their existing board game over the internet with the help of a mobile device. It’s not standalone — you still need a physical book. The app handles the random questions. Once you find an appropriate passage, you take a picture of it with the device’s camera and highlight the relevant phrase so player in the judge role for the round can read your entry from a single image rather than an audio feed.

Ghostlight Manor
Digital Future Lab
A puzzle game that takes the form of a turn-based shooting gallery. Ghostly forms follow a winding path down the screen in strict rank and file, while the player, in the form of a flashlight, takes actions illuminating a column of his choice. The first lighting reveals an enemy’s true form. The second one dispels it for points or some bonus effect. Skilled play comes from dispelling multiple foes in the same column.

Misc.

Friday Night Bullet Arena
A competitive 2-player vertical-scrolling shmup. Both players fly on separate screens facing duplicate patterns of enemies. Performing well builds up combo points that you can spend to spawn extra obstacles on your opponent’s playfield or even temporarily morph into a boss that invades his screen and attacks him.

Rewind
Stubborn Horse Studios
A 3D first-person puzzler involving time manipulation and sending multiple copies of yourself to do multiple tasks simultaneously.

Armour on the Wastes
Reluctant Koala Studios
A simple, top-down, 1-player tank combat sim. Combat against multiple AI tanks, with a basic story about trying to salvage the alien tech that’s crashed in enemy territory. Realtime, but old-school feel and grognardy.

Blizzard released Hearthstone on iOS last week. It’s pretty much pounded the last nail into SolForge’s coffin for me.

It’s an elegant game with several good points going for it. The overall mechanics are straightforward, and they’re introduced one by one in a detailed tutorial that has a ton of personality. There’s a great deal of tactical complexity in the totally free order of actions in a turn and the reliable presence of a Hero power. Low-cost cards remain relevant all game. I find it easy to notice play mistakes and learn from them (unlike in, say, SolForge, to bring up another digital CCG). Also unlike SolForge, the huge player base makes it easy to find opponents of your own skill level. (I have about a 60% win percentage in Hearthstone with almost no added cards, compared to under 10% in SolForge after over three dozen boosters.) Finally, it’s polished to a ridiculous degree, like everything Blizzard makes.

How does it work? In a nutshell, take Magic and:

1. Remove mana colors and land cards. Instead, on round N you automatically have N mana to spend.
2. Remove blocking. Let the active player directly attack either the opponent or his creatures.
3. Remove the Attack Phase. Each creature attacks individually and at any time during the turn.
4. Remove tapping. With no blocking and no activated abilities, it isn’t needed.
5. Make creature damage persistent.

It features only synchronous play but it’s still designed for strict turns. You never do anything when your opponent is up — you don’t decide how to block, you never pick targets for her effects, and there are no reactions.

To fit it into the Warcraft universe, every deck must specify a Hero with a class-specific special ability that costs 2 mana and can be used once per turn. Decks must be exactly 30 cards and be comprised only of cards that match the Hero’s class or are classless.

You can field constructed decks against live players or an AI for free. You can also pay in-game currency or real money to enter a pseudo-draft tournament with varying rewards based on your win count. You don’t get to keep your draft deck, but you are guaranteed to get at least one booster as a prize no matter how poorly you fare.

One thing the game isn’t is “generous with free cards”. (Not that it necessarily should be, mind you — they have to make a profit somehow.) SolForge has a standard reward package of one random card or booster plus almost half a booster’s worth of in-game currency, and you can easily get three of these packages per day. In comparison, Hearthstone only gives out entire packs (or the currency equivalent) for a few one-time achievements. Accumulating one booster’s cost in Gold from repeatable actions requires completing two to three daily goals (each of which means playing multiple games, sometimes with specific decks) or winning thirty PvP matches. Particularly egregious is the fact that each Hero has five fundamental class-specific cards that can only be attained by repeatedly playing that Hero to raise its level. That’s roughly 15 games per Hero, multiplied by 9 Heroes… And you can’t get around this last bit with real money.

Other games I’ve dipped into lately:

• Skulls of the Shogun: a game of troop-scale tactical combat with a highly stylized, cartoony Japanese feel.
• Viscera Cleanup Detail. Imagine a raging firefight between Space Marines and Mutant Bio-Xenomorphs through a futuristic science facility. Imagine the poor schmuck who has to clean up the mess afterward. Guess what? It’s afterward. Here’s your mop. Don’t forget the ceiling.

Once or twice, as a young kid, I played an old board game at my grandmother’s house. I recall very little about it except that it involved taxi cabs picking up little round passengers. Thanks to the magic of the internet, I was able to find out its name and discovered copies for sale on eBay. I contemplated buying one for nostalgia, then decided to go for it when I read the rules online and saw they weren’t half-bad. After watching prices for a couple of months, I got a copy at a decent price with a few pieces missing. Some Sculpey work took care of most of that problem.

The game is Cabby! It was originally released around 1938, though according to BoardGameGeek, most existing copies — including the one I have — are from the 1950s.

Players roll dice to move their own cab and police car around a city roadmap. Cabs pick up passengers and run them back to the depot. To expedite this, cabs may do “illegal” things like speed, go the wrong way on one-way streets, and pick up passengers from the wrong side of the road, though this puts them at risk of a rival cop landing on them and arresting them, which costs them all their passengers and sends them to a penalty space. Passengers are worth varying points depending on how far they start from the depot. The player who delivers the most points’ worth wins.

Everyone who played agreed it was a decent game for its era. It was a little slow-paced, and it dragged a bit at the end (neither of which was surprising), but the mechanics were a tight match to the theme and movement decisions were interesting. The squad cars felt a little weak, though I don’t know how much of that is because they have a hard time moving far and how much is because cabs near them simply choose not to break the law much. The latter isn’t necessarily a problem. I suspect a smaller, more interesting map would improve the game more than tweaking the movement rules.

All in all, all four of us enjoyed it. Thank you, Grandma.

Game 2: Cheapass’s Fish Cook. Players spend the first half of every turn buying fish and other ingredients from a dwindling market of ever-increasing prices, and in the second half they cook those items into seafood dishes for a profit. If you cook a recipe off your own menu, you get bonus money. If you cook one off another player’s recipe, they get the bonus but you might steal the recipe. Whoever has the most money after a fixed number of turns wins.

There was a bit of analysis paralysis on turn 1 as three new players took a long time planning what recipes to buy ingredients for. It’s not a clear game to develop a strategy for, in general, since profit margins are so tight, and this particular round had a weird mismatch of recipe requirements and available fish. Things kicked into gear after that, though.

I ended up winning this one with $211, $3 over another player I was expecting to surpass me. I’m chalking it up to successfully scoring a lot of end-of-game bonuses.

Since they became commonplace, free-to-play games have been criticized as unethical, greedy, manipulative, pathologically damaging…you name it. (And the more famous ones are.) It’s something that I’ve been dwelling on for months, given that for the last year and a half, my job has had me making exactly the sort of game that hits all the low notes: free to play initially, with the ability to pay real money to hasten progress or buy performance-enhancing items. If I didn’t quit my job over it, it’s mainly because I don’t know where else I’d apply and don’t think I could make a living wage as an independent.

But as kneejerk distasteful as I find several aspects of what I’ve been doing, nearly every time I focused on a specific marketing or monetization choice, I saw common sense behind it. Take this example: giving the player one or two free uses of an upgraded game feature that normally costs extra. It’s nothing more than an unscrupulous way to get players hooked, right? It’s like drug dealers do: “the first hit’s free”. Well, maybe, but it’s also unreasonable to expect a potential customer to buy anything from you when they don’t know what it is or what it will do. And the best way to teach that to the customer is to let him try the thing out. It’s certainly better than simply throwing it into your game’s store screen with a brief text description like “This totem pole produces an extra 2 Jujubees a minute” or whatever. If that’s unethical, what about test drives? Demo versions? 30-second song snippets on a music site? Samples at the cheese counter? How skeezy must all those be?

When it comes to making sure your game will make money, the conventional wisdom is that you are, at best, unsavory if you incorporate elements into it that have made other games profitable or that you know from personal testing will increase your own revenue. You are told to go by your internal sense of ethics and your personal expertise as a professional, and not place too much faith the objective measure of what customers pay the most money for because that measurement is so easily manipulated. The methods of hijacking human psychology are familiar, proven, and more widely understood by companies like Zynga every day. Companies are criticized soundly for retaining game elements that they know are used heavily rather than accommodate vocal minorities that call for their removal.

Yet when it comes to designing what players can do within the game rather than what they can buy about it, we find a parallel situation with opposite advice attached. Here, playtesting and player observation are king. The designer who produces a mechanic or a control scheme or a tutorial level purely from intuition invariably creates a bad game. What you think players will want or do is invariably less accurate than what they say they want or will do, which in turn is notoriously far off the mark of what they actually want and do.

Got that? When you’re designing a game, it’s smartest by far to base your decisions primarily off what players do, and less so on what they say they want or what you think is best. But when you’re selling your game, following that exact plan — basing your decisions primarily off what players do pay for, and less so on what they say they want or what you think is best — makes you evil Evil EVIL!

I’m not sure why this is. Possibly it’s because human purchasing behavior is more susceptible to influence than play behavior is. At least, that might be a common first-order explanation. But consider:

• The designer of Canabalt made the deliberate decision to allow the player to jump not only while his feet are on solid ground but also for a fraction of a second after running off the ledge of a building, when he’s technically in empty air and has already fallen a tiny amount. He did this as a result of so many test players mistiming their jumps and getting frustrated at the game for being oversensitive and unforgiving.
• SounDodger and other “bullet hell” games have a convention where only the center point of your ship is vulnerable to collision, which leads to the satisfying feeling that you’re dodging death by the skin of your teeth as you sneak past enemies by mere pixels. (Actually, they’re so close that they’re overlapping you. It’s more like you’re clipping through them than sneaking by, but it still feels like skill.)
• City of Heroes and at least a few installments of the Civilization series had custom random number generators to avoid outcomes that were mathematically valid but felt unintuitive or unfair to people, such as attempting something with a 75% success chance and failing twice in a row.

The common thread behind all these kludges is that players find games much more enjoyable when they blame themselves, not the game, for failing or losing or dying. Tweaks like the above are all accommodations to avoid the player feeling like the game is buggy, or arbitrary, or unpredictable, or too hard.

They’re also all psychological tricks.

So maybe designing games to be the most fun actually is precisely as unethical as selling them to make the most money. Maybe they’re both laudable. Maybe they’re both reprehensible. They certainly both can be more concerned with being believable than with being honest.

I don’t know. I just don’t. Every time I approach the issue rationally I get results that don’t match how I want to feel about it, and that’s a problem for someone like me who doesn’t want to believe things by fiat. I’m not sure how to evaluate this rationally. I can’t go by other people’s opinions because all possible opinions on the matter exist, and in effectively infinite (and therefore equal) numbers. If, ultimately, it comes down to me needing to decide for myself whether I’m ethical (as, you know, “one of those things no one else can do for you”), well, what’s to stop me from affirming myself the Dalai Lama from the get-go?

TSR originally made Dragon Dice back in 1995, in the midst of a collectible-things-that-aren’t-cards-game wave that followed in the wake of Magic: The Gathering. Wizards of the Coast acquired the game when they bought TSR, then later, on the verge of discontinuing the game, sold the license and backstock to a tiny company in Evanston, IL which has kept it alive ever since. I played a demo of it at PAX and finally decided to pick up a starter box — if nothing else, it’s one more game to look at in my Quixotic quest to find the perfect dice game.

The game makes heavy use of — you guessed it — custom-printed dice. Dice of various sizes and sides represent military units and their magic items. Depending on the custom symbols marking its faces, each die might generate points for manipulating Terrains, causing melee damage, causing ranged damage, preventing incoming damage, or casting spells. The symbol mix varies from die to die. Designing your armies to have specific mixes and using them to maximum situational benefit is the core of the game.

The object is to either eliminate your opponent or capture two of the three Terrains. Each Terrain has a state that determines which attack action can be used by armies there. An army can try to change its Terrain’s state, either to make a new action available for its own use or to deny the old action to the opponent (or both). Changing a Terrain all the way to its final state also captures it. Players distribute their units among the Terrains in any arrangement during setup, and can move them more or less freely during the game.

The Good

The good points are few but strong.

The game is about rolling lots of dice. Brilliant!

The core mechanics are elegant. Plenty of dynamic decisions naturally arise from Terrain adjustments and army movements. Should you focus all your Maneuver-heavy units on a location to keep control of it, or would it be wiser to mix in some heavy armor, thus sacrificing some Maneuver potential for more damage Saves? Should you work a Terrain toward its final state to capture it or leave it on an intermediate value so your archers can keep shooting from it? Should you pull more units into your reserves to cast stronger defensive spells, or will that leave your front lines so thin that your opponent walks right over them?

The Bad

The iconography is confusing. Not only does each race have their own symbols for standard results, but some races have multiple symbols for the same thing. For example, Undead cavalry show a horseshoe for Maneuvers, but Undead infantry use a bony human footprint. Also, on some die faces, each icon is worth one point of whatever it stands for, while others have a single icon worth a number of points equal to the die’s value.

It’s a collectible game. Playing with the contents of a single starter kit is like playing sealed Magic theme decks: it’s okay for scratching the surface, but the full depth of the game requires owning multiples of everything and lots of experimentation.

Lots of funky promo dice with special rules have been produced & discontinued over the years.

There are no explicit and few implicit restrictions on mixing different races in your army, leading to a lot of patchwork min-maxing. Imagine how much more “customizable” Magic decks would be if you could use any color mana for anything. It’s a little like that. (Hint: That’s not an improvement.)

Some dice colors are confusing. Many dice are two colors speckled together. It is difficult to tell whether dice are blue/green, blue/yellow, or green/yellow, especially if you don’t look at them side by side. The fact that different shades of plastic have been used in different production runs over the years makes things worse.

The rules are often imprecise and unintuitive. The game’s new stewards have spent a lot of effort balancing the game and collecting accumulated rulings, but little on fundamental rewordings or systemic redesign. For example, summoned dragons will fight each other instead of your armies if there are more than one and they’re different colors. But other than their breath, which they have only a 1/12 chance of using, all dragon attacks are worded to apply against armies only. Read strictly, the rules say that most of the time dragons just have harmless slapfights with each other. The interactions of multiple modifiers are likewise a mess of patchwork rulings and balance kludges. Let’s say you’re playing Coral Elves, who can count Maneuvers as extra Saves. A spell that doubles your Maneuvers can produce more Saves for you, but a spell that gives you +5 Maneuvers won’t. That’s because you process all multiplications first, then all racial powers, then all additions.

There’s a line in the action movie Parker delivered by the eponymous main character: “I don’t hurt anyone who doesn’t deserve it.” Here’s the problem with that: he’s also the person deciding who deserves it. With no balance to this check, Parker’s assurance is meaningless. He can hurt anyone at any time because he can arbitrarily decide at any time that any given person deserves to be hurt.

Indie game developer Jason Rohrer stirred up controversy with his latest game, Castle Doctrine. It’s a competitive multiplayer game in which you take the role of a husband with a wife, a kid, and a house full of valuables. If you don’t equip your house with state-of-the-art anti-burglary defenses, burglars will break in, kill your family, and steal your valuables. To afford those defenses, you must break into other people’s houses, kill their families, and steal their valuables.

You might be tempted to think of this as reverse psychology — an artistic treatment of the subject that’s supposed to repulse you to get its point across, namely that the preemptive strike approach to personal safety ultimately results in everyone being far less safe and “the only winning move is not to play”. It's a lesson that real AIs in a real game actually learned when someone left a first-person shooter running for four years with robot players and peace broke out.

But Rohrer says that wasn’t his intent. He says he made a game based on his actual worldview, in particular, that anyone who enters your house without permission no longer deserves to live. “For me, as soon as you stick your foot across my windowsill I just feel like that’s it. You’ve violated the contract, right. I’m not sticking my foot across your windowsill.” He developed this philosophy after neighbors were robbed and a dog attacked his wife.

This stirred vigorous backlash in certain corners of the game development community.

How okay Jason Rohrer is [with] murdering animals and people makes me extremely uncomfortable. How do I have a contract with someone I’ve met twice? Where is the contract? Can I read it? What else can I get killed for?

There’s an article I read recently called “Schrödinger’s Rapist” that exposed me to a very different world view. In the intervening time, I’ve leaned heavily toward the attitude that you don’t get to determine other people’s feelings about you. You don’t decide whether you’re threatening to other people. Only other people possess that authority. Likewise, you don’t decide whether you are offensive, or insulting, or fun to be around. Other people, and only other people, get to decide those things. You may not intend to be threatening. You may even want and try and hope to be unthreatening. But if other people feel threatened, then you have threatened them. Really. They didn’t make it up just to get you in trouble. They may have poor reasons for their feelings, like their parents/society have taught them that Your Kind is dangerous, but their feelings are no less legitimate.

Then I read this article by the large, black, male drummer for a Grammy-winning hip-hop group, talking about how all his life he’s scared people by being a large, black male. Talking about how putting other people’s fearful thoughts of him above his own thoughts of himself has harmed and dehumanized him. And suddenly I was seeing the other side of the story. It sure as hell didn’t sound like the usual, unconvincing counterargument, the one scummy Men’s Rights Activists use about how they shouldn’t have to stop hitting on a girl who “just wants to be left alone” because they’re only trying to be friendly and she’s objectively wrong to view the attention as anything other than a compliment…the argument that your intended meaning is the only thing that matters, and if they read you wrong, it’s entirely their problem (and probably intentional anyway).

So now I’m back to not really knowing.

Sexism and racism — or, at least, their elements — are prevalent everywhere, even in places that aren’t immediately obvious.

Pac-Man was designed around an eating theme (and given colorful, non-threatening graphics) because the designer was trying to appeal to female players, who were an untapped market at the time. He couldn’t come up with a good game idea about dressing up or dating, but he knew girls liked to eat desserts.

I’ve already covered how EverQuest is endemically racist by having black people and humans as separate races, just like how Huck Finn thought the real world worked until Jim bled red.

Portal and Portal 2 are both lessened by multiple instances of the antagonist insulting the main character about her weight. This kind of talk is, at its heart, objectifying, as it is founded on the harmful notion that the main responsibility of women is to be physically attractive.

Someone threw up a red flag at the racism in Ridiculous Fishing. In that game, upgrades are bought from a boat merchant in a coolie and robes. In a brief blog exchange, the lead artist defended his decision by stating he thought boat merchants fit the game and were neat in general, and that image-searching showed Vietnamese boat merchants still wear that getup (especially the hats, which are quite functional). Other posters with more first-hand experience in that region begged to differ on the robes. They also pointed out that regardless of whether that attire is accurate in isolated instances, it perpetuates an unflattering stereotype, and thus the mature thing to do would be to realize the error, apologize, and change the art in the next patch, not defend it.

Then there’s Antichamber, a sexist first-person shooter. “Wait, no,” you say. “Antichamber isn’t sexist at all. It’s an abstract 3D puzzle game. There aren’t even any people in it!” To which I reply, a) it’s done in first-person view, b) you shoot out (and draw in) puzzle cubes with your puzzle cube gun, and c) look at this spoiler-free compilation of most of the wall signs you encounter in the game:


So there are people in it. Lots of them. And notice how nearly every time the designer wanted to depict a human, he drew a man? That mentality — that men=people and women are exclusively women — lies at the heart of a lot of sexual inequality. Oh, and it sure doesn’t help that the only situation with a clearly female character involves physically rejecting flirtatious advances at a singles bar until being mollified with flowers.

Of course, if those examples feel too contrived for you, or you feel I’m more of a kook or a radical than someone with a legitimate reason to believe what I believe, I could pick the low-hanging fruit that’s lighting flamewars right now: Dragon’s Crown, and how all the oversensitive feminists are making a big deal out of one character being exaggerated in sexual ways in a game where all characters are exaggerated in some way or other and the art overall has an undeniably high quality.

I mean, in any creative act, there is exactly one entity in the whole universe who has even the slightest iota of legitimate input into what gets created or how, and that’s the creator. Anything else is censorship, right? Art exists to say what the artist wants to say, not what the viewer wants to hear. It doesn’t matter whether X hurts you; it’s still wrong to say, “Hey, maybe people shouldn’t do X so much.”

I’m having a hard time buying that, though. Maybe I’m not educated enough?

I spent most of the last week of March in San Francisco for the 2013 Game Developers Conference. Three coworkers and I flew out Sunday morning, early enough that I had the alarm set to 4:15 am. The flight was uneventful.

Our hotel was several blocks from the convention center, and about a third the cost of a closer one. There’s a good reason for that. We were near the Tenderloin, a famously dirty and dangerous low-rent neighborhood. It didn’t help that San Francisco has long city blocks.

Sunday was a tourist day. After an ersatz dim sum breakfast in Chinatown, we walked toward the waterfront. Two of us broke away from there to head toward pre-convention meetups, while my boss and I headed toward Fisherman’s Wharf another mile or two away. Although the views of Alcatraz and the sunning sea lions were enjoyable, Pier 39 — which is where Google Maps sent us — is ridiculously tourist-trappy, to the point where it doesn’t even have water fountains so you’re forced to buy a $4 soda. Thankfully, my boss’s sister and her boyfriend were able to join us briefly and show us more of the wharf, including a vintage arcade and nickelodeon museum. The night ended with a pre-event dinner at The Stinking Rose. True to its name, every main dish and appetizer was chock full of garlic. (Two thumbs up. Would do again.)

Monday was a lightweight day. The conference was open, but our booth’s room was open only Tuesday through Thursday, so our agenda for the day consisted of just registration and panels. The next three days were much the same as each other: wake, gather, eat breakfast, staff at least two people at the booth at all times from 10:00 to 6:00 while the others eat, rest, or attend panels, then break for dinner and afterward try to get into meaningful networking parties.

As it was a work trip, my panel attendance wasn’t as open or as free-range as I might have liked. After all, this is one of the premier annual professional conventions in my trade, and this is the first time I’d been to one. If I’d been there on my own time, I could see myself sitting in on three times as many and not focusing so much on how to make or sell free-to-play games. I’d have actually gotten to play a few of the International Game Developer Association award entries and tried one or two of the board games designed by video game designers. (Alas, Armada d6 was not one of them.) I did get to see the panel Ian Bogost helped give on the popular public view of video games and their scapegoating for violent behavior, but missed what turned out to be a powerful talk on the state of the games industry in regards to women.

Friday was another oh-dark-thirty ride to the airport for the flight back, equally early and equally straightforward. Light rail took us back to our downtown office in time for lunch, but we didn’t stay long after that. We were all bushed and ready to head home.

I briefly considered reorganizing my RPG shelf Sunday. The only thing that came of it was a brief perusal of the Jadeclaw book I own. I haven’t browsed it in years and I wondered if its dice mechanic was as bad as I remember it.

It was.

In brief, to test whether your character succeeds at some effort, you gather a die for each of his or her relevant skills, traits, training, and base stats (possibly 4-, 6-, 8-, 10-, or 12-sided, depending on how high the attribute is), roll them all, take whichever one die rolled highest, and compare this single number to a similarly-generated number that the GM rolled for the opposition. The side with the higher number succeeds and the other fails. If the difference is 5 or greater, it’s a critical success and failure.

That’s simple enough. Here’s where things start getting janky.

If both sides roll the same number, it’s a tie…unless one side has a higher “Quality” in the relevant skill. Then that side wins.

Rolling all 1s is an extra-critical failure. It may or may not be worse than a standard critical failure. An extra-critical failure does not automatically grant the other side a critical success. Both sides may extra-critically fail, which may be a double disaster or an ordinary tie depending on GM arbitration.

If you’re trying to do something related to a narrow field of your character’s expertise, you can reroll a single 1 for free.

Here’s more complexity: damage rolls work differently. The attacker still rolls several assorted dice based on stats, skills, gear, and training, as does the defender, but this time both sides keep all their dice and pair them off highest to highest, next-highest to next-highest, and so on. (If there are more attack dice, pair the excess with imaginary 1s.) Each attack die that exceeds its counterpart produces one hit, or two if it exceeds by 5 or greater. If the defender rolls an extra-critical failure, the attacker deals one extra hit.

There are also special rules for extra-lethal and nonlethal damage.

But here’s the worst part.

As in pretty much any RPG, rolls can have bonuses and penalties. Their effects in Jadeclaw are complex and not symmetric. Fortunately, bonuses and penalties cancel each other out; you apply only uncancelled ones. That simplifies things, but there’s a lot more that isn’t simple.

Each bonus increases all your dice by one size before you roll. d12s can’t increase, so increase the largest other die instead, or add another d4 if all your dice are d12s.

On damage rolls, each penalty removes your smallest die before you roll. On skill rolls, each penalty forces you to make a complete additional roll, and in the end you use only the worst final number.

Therein lies a big problem with the game’s dice system: bonuses and penalties have complex, opaque, inconsistent effects on the characters’ chance of success. Let’s say you want to sneak into the warlord’s camp. How much more likely are you to avoid capture if you wait for nightfall? If you don’t have a custom-made Monte Carlo simulator at your elbow, you have no idea. It might matter a lot, or it might not, and your best estimate will be a wild guess. Not what I’d call a good system.

I understand that the game’s predecessor, Ironclaw, has been revised to address this. In the new edition, a bonus gives you an extra die to roll, and a penalty gives your opponent an extra die.

Some explanation on my last post. It’s a bit of a rant about how mainstream game design has become so rote in the wake of Zynga’s social “game” experiments. As someone who designs games for a living, I find less and less of my time on a project is associated with designing the game and more of it is in managing the integrated marketing factors. Some of that is to be expected at a company as small as mine, where the designer on any project is also the producer. But the other side of the coin is that an increasing percentage of my job is just going down a checklists of best practices. Not that there’s anything wrong with best practices. It’s nifty that people before me have tried different things, discovered what worked well and what didn’t, and recorded their findings for others to use. But going down a checklist doesn’t take a whole lot of skill and it isn’t satisfying, and there’s only so much time I can spend on a project.