T.I.M.E. Management

There will be no spoilers for the first part of this!

T.I.M.E. Stories had me hooked from the first time a friend at my local game shop started spewing nothing but good things about it. Of course, that sort of hype also had me a little skeptical, and I definitely gave it my best over-critical eye. But overall, I walked away from the table quite pleased with my experience, and very excited to have had the pleasure of playing through what clearly was a work of love from the developers.

The key thing to understand about T.I.M.E. stories is written within the first couple paragraphs of the rulebook. The developers specifically tell you their feel, which is that their number one goal was to capture all the goodness of an old school dungeon crawl.  And they did.

Unfortunately, my group had a rough start.  The rulebook is very confusing; not that there were difficult mechanics, but because the rules don't actually explain anything about what the purpose of the game's mechanics are.  The book was trying to be vague and hidden, shrouded in mystery and wonder, but ended up leaving us having to read it a couple times over when our questions were not answered.  Throughout the game, a large amount of questions came up that required looking on the internet for answers. Luckily, we weren't the only ones, and there's a few places online that explain things in more detail (and people are very generous about spoiler warnings, which was awesome).

Past the lack of explanations, though, lies a wonderful team game.  The core "mechanic" revolves around a "time" count, which is more or less the number of actions the players get each turn.  The idea is to solve the mystery before time runs out, so that means it's a game of efficiency.  What makes it a great 'team' game is that there's two simple dynamics to exploring.  First, you want to spread out in order to cover as much ground as you can in one turn.  But second, you want to stick together on the same spots in order to overcome challenges more quickly.  This creates the engine for all of the discussion and planning that the game brings.

As a co-op game, however, it is just as prone to "Quarterbacking" as all of the rest.  QBing is the term used to describe a single player dominating and directing the game play.  Luckily, the game, it's story, and it's design are just complex enough that I doubt that too many groups will have a problem. It happens though, especially with the puzzle-like nature of the design.  It wouldn't feel very much like a team win if one person consistently blasts through each challenge on their own.

To their credit, the game attempts to mitigate QBing, by calling on classic roleplaying character "roles". There's the fighters, the talkers, and the doers, each with their own unique abilities that at least let the person in control feel like their helping in the way they should.  Even then, almost everyone can contribute to any challenge, meaning when the group's stuck doing a single task, no one is useless (almost).  And, during basic exploration, everyone is encouraged not just to read directly from their secret cards, but to tell the party as they would coming back from a scouting trip.

Let's jump back to the main mechanic: time. Unlike other games that use some sort of time-tracker as a co-op show-stopper (such as Shadows of Brimstone or Mice & Mystics), T.I.M.E. Stories doesn't feel cheap.  With the other mentioned games, the randomness of that timer always feels random and uncontrollable.  This means some games end up in a loss simply because luck would have it that way. But T.I.M.E. Stories is much more predictable. Yes, it has a random die roll as well, but the average is a HUGE bell curve around "2".  This lets the team plan exactly what they can do in the amount of time given.  Of course, just a little bit of random that their die gives actually shakes up the planning quite beautifully. Since there's multiple choices of paths in the dungeon, it can vary just enough to not be certain of failure or success.

The core difference about the time tracker is really that it isn't just an immediate loss.  Instead, you just lose out on going further on your current run.  But the game isn't over! Simply head back, resupply your team, and prepare to go on another run!  Of course, the goal is to beat the game in the fewest runs as possible, but there's no staggering defeat if you fail.  In fact, the game pretty much expects you to go through at least two runs.

Unfortunately, the game's other dice are not great.  Even though I love 3-2-1 dice, the action dice in T.I.M.E. Stories actually boils down to about 50/50 chance of success for any given die.  For scraping away at challenges, this means there's a huge factor in the dice.  While it tends to even out, when it doesn't, it feels like a very cheap way of losing to an otherwise pure puzzle/economic management game.

The game does a good job of minimizing randomness in other ways, however, and often provides you with multiple choices on how to proceed: some risky, some not.  Though the exploration portion of the game is also widely random, all of the outcomes make some sort of logical sense, and the game rarely if ever breaks immersion.  Choosing which space to explore just by looking at the beautiful artwork is actually a very compelling part of the game!

There's two main things I've taken away.  First, is good dungeon design (see more below in the spoilers section).  Second, that to get a really good feel for a "team" game, you have to both have situations where everyone is helping by doing their own thing (spread out), but then also scenarios where you're together (e.g. combat).  I believe Shadowrun actually does this very well, and I have a new respect for it due to the perspective T.I.M.E. Stories has given me.

Overall 9/10

***SPOILERS AHEAD***
DO NOT READ IF YOU HAVE NOT PLAYED T.I.M.E. STORIES

Welcome, fellow T.I.M.E. agents. I hope you had a successful first adventure (or more if you've continued to play)! No one stood on the pentacle, right?  Please tell me you didn't help summon the demon from hell!  Okay good, that's a relief.

I loved this dungeon.  It brought back the best of memories, while continuing to provide a unique challenge all the way through.  Taking a step back from it after the dust settled, I realized how brilliant the design actually was.  They had all the goodness:

* Multiple clues leading to multiple paths
From the very start, you get clues about the final puzzle, and they're with you all the way through. That type of foreshadowing is excellent in keeping the players hooked and engaged, even when presented with totally new challenges.

* Didn't get overwhelming
At the same time, nothing ever got so drawn out or side-tracked that the players lost sight of their original goal, or the clues that they've gathered so far.  A lot of the rooms had usually ~1 piece of excellent information, 1-2 extra fluff, and 1-2 ways forward (through items).

* Multiple paths that could be accessed from different points
Okay, it was very weird to have the situation markers determine when/where you've been, especially because they aren't very rememberable, but there wasn't that many, so it wasn't a huge issue.  But it was very neat to arrive at the final pentacle two different ways, and seeing how, if you didn't know, you could wander right back into the doc's office!

* Multiple paths leading to the final location
This was so excellent.  On our final run, we had all of the pieces, we had solved the puzzle, we just needed to get there.  But there's options, and they aren't for sure.  First, you can fight your way through the catacombs, but that's risky.  Or, you can follow the path through the doc's office, get the trap door key, and finally make your way down into the tomb, but that's a lot of location switches. Finally, there's the rare but very neat chance of pick-pocketing the key to the front gate off the cooks, allowing you to convince the guards at the gate and let you out into the gardens.  I don't think the last option is actually very viable, but it's at least a very entertaining thought.  We eventually opted to go to the kitchen anyway, getting the meat, so that we could just fight our way down the catacombs (we brought the heavy fighters for our last run).

* False leads, but making them sort of obvious
That guy with the plunger.  Whooooo boy we argued about him for a while.  Thank goodness we decided to write him off haha!  Love it.  Unfortunately, we wasted the end of a run fighting our way through the deepest tunnel, only to come out the other end and... FUCK.

* One of the most straight forward yet incredibly tricky super-side quests.
Taking some theories from the recent "legacy" games, the fact that you could have gotten a next-game-bonus item is extremely compelling, even though it's a little wishy-washy.  Unfortunately, the question of whether we were cheating or not came up a lot, and this is one area were we went: but but but... we could just go back for one more run, no?

The dungeon design was excellent, the story was fun, the clues were great and the puzzles challenging.  The only thing that erked me at the end was that the final puzzle was extremely meta-gaming (read item 19), which broke the immersion of actually figuring out something that the evil characters in the game were trying to figure out.  On the bonus side, they can't (or shouldn't) use that trick again, so we can hopefully look forward to the other stories being more "in fiction".

I'm happy to hear your thoughts and experiences, just please remember to post SPOILER warnings if your posts contain them.  Cheers!

Exhaustion VS Adrenaline

You've been running for an hour.  You've been beat up, shot at, and chased.  You're out of breath, but the imminent danger behind you doesn't let you stop.  You keep going, dodging this way and that, barely recognizing that your legs hurt and your lungs sting.  You cough up some blood.  That's probably not good...

The best part about RPGs is that we can be as realistic or as cinematic as we want.  And that perfect mix of action-movie-badass and realistic human limits is something I want to explore in my current project Hostargo.  The idea of "exhaustion" levels has always intrigued me, but the games I've played don't integrate it very nicely into the rest of their mechanics.  For example, in D&D it's tacked on as its own set of rules, and in Shadowrun your "stun" hit points don't function much differently than your actual "health" hit points.

Currently, I have a system where your stats lower as you take damage.  For example, if hit by a sword, your "Grit" may be reduced by two.  In the setting, there is magical healing, as well as other various ways to recover health, so I'm looking for a way to simulate characters getting "worn down".  Enter Exhaustion, a value that starts at zero and increases as you:

• Physically over-exert yourself
• Fail at casting magic (in this case the spell doesn't fail, you instead gain an exhaustion point)
• Go long periods of time without sleep
• Contract a sickness or disease
• Spend a long time thinking about a stressful problem
• Over-eat?

For each level of exhaustion,
your maximum stats are temporarily lowered.
This means that healing, through magic or otherwise, cannot recover your health (stats) past their maximum level, minus your exhaustion level.

This mechanic ensures that, as an action game with magical healing, conflicts in Hostargo will eventually come to an end, even if it's a hostage stand-off that lasts long into the night.

Normally in Hostargo, and assuming you're at full health, as soon you gain an exhaustion point, your stats would immediately decrease due to their new lowered maximum. But in the heat of battle, adrenaline pumps through our veins and can keep us going until the point of collapse.  So while in an "action scene", any exhaustion gained would not immediately reduce your stats.  Instead, exhaustion will only apply to being healed: you couldn't go past your maximum minus your level of exhaustion.

Side note: Exhaustion will be fully healed after a short rest, a bit of food, and some water.

I love the scenes in movies where the hero fights to near death, but powers through their pain in order to win. But once that delicious adrenaline is gone... they collapse, usually waking up hours later somewhere safe and surrounded by loved ones.  Epic.

Let me know what you think of the mechanic! Is it simple? Does it work?  Is this topic even worth considering having rules for?

Roasting the Wheel

I had a hard time with The Burning Wheel.  I will be the first to personally admit that it, overall, was not at all my style.  This was mostly due to the huge amount of effort that needs to be put into learning the game and playing it properly, but also because my game group didn't play more than twice, so it wasn't given what most would consider a "fair shot".

I shake my head though, and wonder why we had so much trouble. Even our GM, who honestly likes the system, was getting jumbled around with the incredibly heavy rule-set and nonsensical jargon.

Jargon, by definition, are special words used to describe things that are hard for others to understand. And like a bad accent, The Burning Wheel is the pinnacle of RPG jargon, at least that I've personally experienced.  The only familiar words in the ridiculous 600 pages were "skill" and "points" (not necessarily together).  For example, "Speed" is what you'd normally consider "Agility", but it also represents "Strength" in TBW, which didn't click for me, since speed as a word does not naturally imply physical muscle.  It's unnecessarily confusing, when a word like "athleticism" would have made a better fit for the mechanical effect.  Beyond that, we were always asking questions like, "what's the mechanical difference between a connection and affiliation again?"

The trouble with trying to review the Burning Wheel, and analyze it for it's mechanics, is that there's so many individual mechanics.  But at the same time, there are so few things that seem to flow, fit together, or otherwise help me in understanding the next rule I needed to learn.

I love the idea of burning wheel, and when you read the plentiful amount of good reviews, it's easy to see what some people walk away from it with.  But the bar is too high.  I consider myself a fairly hardcore gamer (I read more rulebooks than I could ever possibly hope to play), and this is by far one of the hardest games to dig your way through.  And this is coming straight after my play of Fate of the Norns.

Worse, once you're actually in the game, the book keeping quickly gets out of hand, bogging down actual gameplay to a crawl.  There's functions, formulas, and definitions of every little thing, and because of it's progressive skill system, the game requires the players to be on the ball mechanically.  This completely distracts me from the immersion of the game; and it doesn't work for me as a way to get integrated with my character.   When I have to fight for my character's beliefs not only in the fiction, but mechanically as well, I feel detached from the meaning behind those beliefs.

Pace was a huge problem for me.  We got nowhere in our couple of sessions.  Sure, we explored a river, talked to NPCs in a town, and even did a little dungeon.  But that was 8 hours of painfully debating with the GM about each and every skill, trait, and resource we had, and then each skill, trait, and resources that our friends had that might help.  Then once a single action is resolved, we all do a couple minutes of bookkeeping as we compare the difficulty of the task to our dice used, skill levels, and related stats.  

I'm certain that characters will change dramatically over time, which is what the game is built to do. But that time is long.  We're talking real-life long, which, while I can't be a noble knight in real life, I can certainly be 90% of the other mundane characters this system pumps out.

The Burning Wheel does exactly what it sets out to do: match roleplaying with mechanics.  But that left a sour taste in my mouth, almost as if to suggest that I don't like my games mixed with my roleplaying...

Mind-boggling nonsense, is what I'd describe it as.

Burn Out

I know I was going to talk more about the Burning Wheel, but after getting the chance to play it, I'm not sure there's much to say.  This week, I'm taking the easy way out and just leaving you with this:

I believe The Burning Wheel can be used as an example of nearly every "bad game design principal" there is.

Which, actually, is in of itself useful to understand.  But more importantly is that there are people out there that have The Burning Wheel as their game of choice.  I would like to hear from said people, on what parts they actually like.  Perhaps I missed something...

Charred: Starting the Burn

The idea of "Life Paths" is a fairly novel concept in RPGs.  It's the idea that to make a character, you don't just get a single background or description, you basically plot out major chunks of your character's life.  You get to see them grown up, learn skills, and inherit traits: for better or worse.  You pick a number of these paths, and in the end you get a pretty deep character, who has stories to tell about how they got to where they are now.

Spending four hours pouring over books, charts, maps, and grids is basically my idea of a good time.  But when it's just creating a single character, perhaps there's a lesson to be learned from the sheer amount of content The Burning Wheel presents it's players.

The Burning Wheel gives players the options for literally hundreds of different life paths to choose from.  This quickly becomes tiring as you skim even just the titles of each path looking for something that fits together, something that will lead you to your higher level character concept.  Instead, what I've taken away from the "Burning" process (that's what they call character creation, for whatever reason) is that clearly too many specific examples and options actually detracts from creativity.

But the idea of "Life Paths" is very intriguing; it throws "balance" out the window (see Shadowrun: Run Faster for "balanced" examples) in order to boost the creativity of the players.  Instead of bogging us down with hundreds of examples, however, a game should give us a simple, straightforward set of tools for us to tinker (still for hours mind you), to come up with unique stories and chunks of time for our characters.

It's like digging through a giant box of legos and never actually finding that one perfect piece.

I'd like to take character burning and shake it up, literally, with dice.  What if we give each section of a character's life a gamble - spend X number of years to accomplish Y thing, but risk it all on a die roll that results in different ups and downs for that chunk of time?  I think this keeps the random skill & trait point spread that BW provides, but lets the players be a bit more free in determining what actually happens.  Rather than having to choose specific examples, I picture an Apocalypse World style move for each life path choice:

Gamble X years for X skill points on skill Y:

On a 10+, choose 3 boons, 1 bane

On a 7+, choose 2 boons, 2 banes

On a 6-, choose 1 boon, 3 banes

Boons:

* General Skill Point

* Beneficial trait

* Resources

* Positive Relationship

* Positive Affiliation

Banes:

* Flawed trait

* Loan/Debt

* Flawed Relationship

* Flawed Affiliation

Of course I'm being a little too general here. I'd probably try to make at least a few different types of moves for different types of themed life paths that I'd like to see in my game.  For example, a combat/dangerous lifepath would likely have different boons, banes, and skills than a scholarly or tradesman path.

Well - that's all for now.  I'll be exploring more of Burning Wheel in the next couple of weeks, so stay tuned!

Another Stab at Armor

In my last post about armor, I discussed the possibility of a system where we introduce different types of attack damage, and therefore different types of armor.  This worked in my mind just fine for the players, but once it came to NPCs and monsters, whom I want to generate and track with ease, it quickly became too complicated.  So we're back to the drawing board.

My latest thoughts have been wandering in the direction of armor as a last-ditch roll to save.  Basically, I first have my players roll to "dodge", and then if they get hit, roll again to see if the attack hits their armor.   This means that the players should have an armor rating of 0-100%, representing how much of their body is covered. I have two ideas for how this will protect the character.

First though, we have to define 'how well armored' someone is.  Let's throw out some numbers, like light armor = 50%, medium armor = 75%, heavy armor = 100%, and ultra armor is 120%.

Idea #1 is that, if the armor is hit, then it soaks the damage, completely protecting the character from harm.  The downside to this is that it's slightly unrealistic; any hit should still "hurt" the player, which is what I was going for in my last attempt.  The upside is that it's so much easier to work with, but still embodies what armor actually means to a character, rather than just adding onto a "to hit" value or having pure damage reduction.

Alone though, idea #1 doesn't do anything mechanically that just having a "to hit" value doesn't do.  In fact, being "fully armored" from head to toe would mean that you are literally an indestructible tank. Obviously that's also completely unrealistic, so we need something else.

Idea #2 is that armor itself should take damage, and get weakened over time.   I know some systems do this and most don't, and I want to know how people feel about it.  The way I'd implement it is that each armor material would have a "hardness" that was pure damage reduction.  For example, nonmetal materials like leather or bone could have a hardness of 2, vs. metal armors that have a hardness of 5.  Then, any damage on top of that would degrade the quality of the armor, mechanically lowering the % coverage.  Now heavy armor will always block the first attack, but any subsequent attacks start having a higher and higher chance of actually wounding the character.

This armor system isn't without its share of problems, and I'm on the fence about it.  It is basically like temporary HP, but when you have a system with magical healing, do you also now need magical blacksmithing?  There's also now extra rolls and calculations in the mix, so is it again simply "too much"?  I like a light amount of crunch in my games, so this feels right to me, but I might be missing something.

How do you feel about having armor degrade? 

One important note is that, despite magical healing, it's really really bad to get hit in my game, because the stats you use to accomplish tasks are also the health that gets damaged by an attack.  In this sense, armor as temporary HP is a god-send to the player characters.

As always, I'm interested to hear your thoughts on the matter, so please leave a comment below!