Last night some friends came over and we played some games. First we played Are You The Traitor?, which was a lot of fun. The game is all about table-talk and trying to read people so that you can accuse someone before everyone else does. I recommend it if you’re looking for an easy-to-learn, quick-playing, fun game.

The other game we played did not leave quite so good an impression on me. We played Catan: Cities and Knights; it’s probably the third time I’ve played a Catan game, and it really drove home for me some problems that I had with the game initially. I’m going to say something that might be a little controversial: I think that Catan is a poorly designed game. That might be a little strong; I think there are some poor design choices within the game that can cause the game to be completely un-fun for one or more players.

There are a couple of factors that contribute to this opinion. First is that the game is decidedly not beginner-friendly. As I’ve said, I’ve only played Catan games about three times now, and that’s over the course of two or three years, so I’d still consider myself a beginner. Every time I’ve played the game, I’ve felt like I didn’t know what I was doing initially, and that I was at an enormous disadvantage because of it. The strategies in Catan are not always immediately apparent to a beginner, and this can make for a bad first impression of the game. The first two times I played, I had enough fun that I was willing to play again.

Sadly, I don’t think it gets another chance from me, and this is largely due to the high degree of luck within the game. Now, I don’t necessarily have a problem with luck-driven games. Fluxx is highly luck-driven, but it’s short and you always have decisions to make and things to do, regardless of the cards you get. Last Night on Earth is considerably longer and also has a high degree of luck. In this case, however, I think that the randomness supports the theme well, and bad luck still never robs you of your ability to make decisions. And that’s really the crux of the matter here. A game is only fun when you can affect the outcome of the game. As soon as you feel like nothing you do matters, it stops being fun. And that’s exactly what happened last night.

As I’ve said, I consider myself a beginner when it comes to Catan games, and this means I don’t always know the optimal strategies or the optimal places to put my starting settlements. I placed my settlements last night in spots that I thought were advantageous; I had access to a port that allowed me a 2:1 trade on wheat, and in theory I had access to a lot of wheat. In theory. The problem was, because of the luck of the dice, I almost never got resources. There were entire half-hour stretches of time where I was the only one not getting any resources at all. In Catan, resources are everything. Without resources, you can’t really take any actions, and you can’t really make any decisions. Because of this, I spend most of the game reading the Adventurer’s Vault. I felt completely impotent throughout the entire game, starting around turn 2, and there was really no mechanic to allow me to affect the outcome of the game without resources. Because your access to resources is based largely on your initial placement and (mostly) on the luck of the dice, I literally had absolutely no control over what happened in the game once the initial placement was over. This made for a two-hour game (we ended prematurely; the game could have gone on for another hour at least) that was not the least bit fun for me, and it strikes me as exceedingly poor game design.

I think that, if you’re going to design a game to rely a lot on luck, you need to put mechanics in the game that allow players to continue to make decisions regardless of how luck treats them. I’m not saying that someone who’s extremely unlucky in the game should have the same chance to win as someone who’s extremely lucky; I just think that they should be able to do something meaningful with their turns. On most of my turns, I rolled the dice, saw that I couldn’t do anything, and passed the dice to the next player. Fun, huh? I don’t think I’ll ever play a Catan game again.

Ok, I’ve thought about this idea some more, and I’ve come up with the following.

Each character has a personal quest, some sort of long-term goal that he/she can work toward over the course of the campaign. It doesn’t have to take the whole campaign, but it should be long-term enough that it should last at least until the next tier of play. Now, these personal quests to not grant experience points directly; they may inform adventures that I come up with and reward the whole party XP in an indirect way, but they do not grant XP to a single character, leaving the other characters behind. Instead, any time you accomplish some significant goal that gets you closer to your ultimate goal, you get one or more story points.

Story points can be used to do a variety of things, both story-related and mechanical, and their capabilities and limitations are largely up to a specific gaming group. I’d like to give my PCs a lot of narrative control without having to use story points, so they’ll be affecting the story in a lot of ways without having to spend these. However, they might be able to use story points to:

• Change an NPC’s disposition toward them. The PC would have to come up with an explanation for this; maybe the NPC is secretly attracted to a PC, or maybe they knew each other a while back and the NPC just remembered this.
• Dictate some loot that will make it into the adventure in the near future, probably in the next session. If there’s a particular magic item that a PC reall, really wants, this is a surefire way to get it soon. It does, however, have to be level-appropriate. I’d also probably say that, if the PC is willing to spend a lot of story points on it, it doesn’t have to be deducted from the party’s treasure parcels for the current level, but it can be if the PC doesn’t want to spend a lot of story points.
• Automatically succeed on a single skill check. Great for skill challenges, not being surprised, etc. This, again, will require narration and explanation.
• Turn a regular hit into a critical hit. This use of a story point would likely be limited to once per encounter, or perhaps every time you use it in the same encounter, it doubles in cost. This would be a nice way to get some mileage out of feats that only trigger on a crit; my PCs tend to avoid those, because you might never get a chance to use them.

Those are just some examples. Another thing about story points is that I’d like to encourage players not to hoard them by giving them an expiration date, similar to action points. My idea is that they can carry a limited number of story points over into the next adventure: 1 at heroic tier, 2 at paragon, and 3 at epic. Any story points above that are lost.

Now, I’m really curious about what other people think of this mechanic, so feedback is welcomed.

I just had a thought, and I felt I needed to get it down before it escaped from my head. I’m short on time, so this’ll be a quick post. In 4th Edition D&D, players are rewarded for completing encounters not only with XP and treasure, but also with action points. Action points allow them to do cool things in combat, they earn them by completing encounters, and they don’t stick around forever so there’s no incentive to hoard them.

A while ago, I was allowing my players to come up with personal quests, little things that they thought were cool and wanted to be part of the story. I awarded them XP for these quests, but quickly learned that that was not an ideal solution, because it created a disparity between the party members’ XP totals, and made leveling more complicated than I wanted it to be. So, why not award them with something else? Story points!

The idea is that story points are like action points in that they are a reward mechanism that is designed to be spent. Instead of providing combat benefits, however, story points would allow players to influence the course of the adventure in small ways. They’d last perhaps until the end of the adventure, or perhaps there would be a limit to how many you can have at one time, in order to prevent hoarding of story points. I’ll need to figure out exactly how they work, but I like the idea. More on it later.

I’ve played a few video games lately that I thought were worth mentioning in one regard or another. Some of these games have been out for a while; I got them through Goozex, a game-trading website that gives you much better deals on your old games than Gamestop does.

Hitman: Blood Money: This is actually the first Hitman game that I’ve actually completed, and I liked it quite a lot. Some of the missions were very difficult for me to complete gracefully, but you can jump into any mission you want to at any time once you’ve beaten it, so I may go back and remedy that at some point. Like its predecessors, it’s less an action game and more a game of patience and problem-solving. You have a target (or, in many cases, multiple targets) that you have to eliminate. You’re rewarded for not killing other people, for not being seen killing people, for not blowing your cover, and for not leaving any trace that you were there (including bullets in your targets’ heads). The best kills look like accidents, and it’s entirely possible in most (if not all) missions to go in with no guns and complete the mission. Again, I liked it a lot.

Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time: I may wind up giving this one back. I liked it at first; I’ve always been a fan of these action/puzzle-solving games, and I like spatial puzzles like those presented in the game, and in the most recent Tomb Raider games. I must say, though, that this game is frustrating despite its time-rewinding feature, largely because I feel like I’m fighting the controls and the camera every step of the way. The camera is obstinate and uncooperative, frequently becoming lodged in places that give me no useful vantage point. The controls are floaty and imprecise, making it difficult to accomplish the precision that the puzzles require of you. All of this may have been better on the Xbox, its original system; I’m playing it on PC, and I’m not having much fun.

Gun: Guess what? I’ve decided I like western games. At least, I like this one. I’m having a lot of fun shooting bandits, riding around on horseback, and layin’ down the law, Eastwood style. It’s great fun.

The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition: since you can swap between the original graphics and the new graphics on the fly, I can tell you that the new graphics are a huge improvement, though the animation looks strange at times. The voice work is good for the most part, though the game has its fair share of delays between lines. The hint system is great, and it saved me from frustration many times, particularly toward the end where there’s a lot of pointless and annoying backtracking over fast stretches of Monkey Island. Worth the $10; not sure I would have felt okay about it if I’d paid more.

Plants vs. Zombies: Yeah. The title says it all, really. This is a fantastically fun and addictive little game. It gets difficult (especially in the unlockable mini-games), but it ramps up pretty gradually, allowing you to get a handle on what all of your plants can do, and on what all of the zombies can do. Definitely worth the money.

The Sims 3: As many have said, it’s The Sims, with a “3″ after it. Is it more of the same? Yes. Is that a bad thing? Absolutely not. It is more of the same, but they’ve managed to update enough so that it remains fresh and fun. If you like Sims games, you’ll probably like this one; if you don’t, I doubt this one will change your mind. If you’ve been curious about this crazy Sims thing that everyone’s been talking about since you got out from under that rock, this one’s a good entry point into the series.

Batman: Arkham Asylum: I just got done playing the demo, twice. I like the game. The brawling is pretty simplistic, but is very cinematic and makes you fell like a badass. The stealth portions are good and, again, make you feel like a badass. In short, this game makes you feel like Batman, a badass. I liked the demo. I’d like to play the full game when it comes out. Do I want to spend $50 on it? Well, that’s a bit thornier. $50 seems steep for this game; I’d pay $20 or even $30. Maybe I’ll wait for it to come down in price a bit. Or try to get it on Goozex.

So I attended the D&D Canned Food Drive at Days of Knights in Newark, DE, and it was a blast. We played a super-abridged version of the Lovecraftian Last Breath of Ashenport adventure released on D&D Insider with five players. My friend Mike played a dragonborn fighter with an executioner’s axe, while I played the changeling psion. There was also a dragonborn paladin, a pacifist healer cleric (can’t remember the cleric’s race), and an elven two-blade ranger. We played through some role-playing and investigation at first, and I got to make use of some abilities (namely, a +19 Bluff and the ability to communicate telepathically) to good effect. Then we fought some fish-men out in the rain.

I must say, I like the psion’s powers a lot. The power point mechanic works pretty well, and with three at-wills that can each be augmented into three different versions, plus some dailies and utilities, I only felt like I had run out of interesting things to do once, during the second encounter. The second encounter was pretty sloggy, against a tough solo that seemed to have never-ending hit points and high defenses; we were whiffing quite a lot.

The first encounter, though, was very satisfying. I got a chance to inflict someone with lots of psychic vulnerability, then whack them with psychic damage and a big attack penalty. I also got to command someone to jump off of his rooftop perch and attack his ally, which is always fun. Unfortunately, I only got to use that particular at-will twice in the game, since it requires some setup and isn’t much use against solos with no minions.

All said, it was a really fun way to spend the day, and I got to donate some canned food to charity, too. Not bad.

So, tomorrow I’m going to Newark, Delaware to play D&D for charity, and I’m super excited! Here’s how it works: you go to Days of Knights with some canned food during one of the available time slots. For every can you bring, you get to re-roll one die roll during the game. For every five cans you bring, you get an extra standard action to use during the game. It’s a great idea, and I can’t wait.

During the last D&D session, I used a few custom monsters that I put together with WotC’s Monster Builder. They worked out so well that I thought I’d post them here for your perusal and potential use.

Shadow Ghoul
This is really just a modification to the base ghoul in the Monster Manual; I wanted a lurker rather than a soldier, so I gave it a couple of extra abilities: death from above and fade to shadow. To complete the concept, I gave it the shadow origin, and you can play it up even more by describing how the shadows seem to cling to it, and how a cold numbness creeps into the PCs’ veins when it strikes. At any rate, this beastie works really well for harassing defenders and getting to back-rank strikers. The fact that it can leap 8 squares and knock someone prone and grab them means that it effectively monopolizes one PC’s attention for a round or two (assuming it hits), and once they shake it off, it can teleport away and do it again. Make sure you use it in a place with lots of shadows and darkness to make best use of its abilities.

Corpse Mound
This guy is a pretty effective soldier. The final battle in Keep on the Shadowfell, for my group, consisted of Kalarel, the main bad guy, and this thing, as well as some traps that manifested later on. The corpse mound (and the ravenous corpses it spawned) did an admirable job of keeping the heat off of Kalarel so that he could focus on completing his dark ritual. Basically, you’ll want to keep it close to as many PCs as possible so that it can get free attacks from its aura, and use corpse missile and corpse burst whenever you get the chance. As with the shadow ghoul above, we see that the combination of being knocked prone and grabbed is extremely effective at getting a PC’s undivided attention.

Well, we wrapped up Keep on the Shadowfell last night. It went really well, I thought. It was a fun night, all of the PCs survived, and the villain escaped, which is basically a win-win for a DM.

You can see pictures from last night’s game, if you want to. Toward the end, you’ll see two things that I picked up recently. One is a very nice storage solution for my Dungeon Tiles and minis: a 9-drawer rolling storage unit that I picked up from JoAnn Fabrics. Also, at a back-to-school sale at Target, I picked up a magnetic whiteboard and some magnetic index cards for it, all of it dry-erasable. The nice thing about these items is that they’re perfect for tracking initiative and conditions. One card per combatant or group of combatants, and plenty of space to write things like ‘weakened’ or ‘dazed’. I just need to find a good way to prop it up for all to see; it was a little unstable last night.

I also ran a skill challenge last night that I’ve been looking forward to for a while. The skill challenge represented the PCs trying to navigate their way through the darkness after the ritual came to fruition. The PCs failed the skill challenge during the first round of checks, but everyone was into the mystique of what was going on, so I extended it a little, calling for a few more checks and such, and adding in more description and requiring more description for how they were to escape. It went really well, I thought.

So, at some point in the indeterminate future, I’ll be running a 4E D&D game for three guys who have never played a table-top role-playing game before. This was supposed to happen a few days ago, but scheduling issues got in the way, so now I need to try and re-schedule for some time in the near future. But that’s not the point of this post.

I feel a fair amount of pressure regarding this. Think about it: if the game goes really well, three new people might join the hobby of role-playing. If it doesn’t, they’ll probably never look at an RPG again. It’s kind of a big responsibility. The good news is, I feel like 4E has taken a lot of the pressure off with some of the things they’ve made available lately.

1. Dungeon Delve. I love this book. I plan on running them through the first-level delve, with some modification, using three 2nd-level pregens. It’s a simple enough thing to modify the delve for a smaller, but somewhat more powerful, group of PCs. A kobold gone here, a kobold gone there, and you’re pretty good. I did want to give them a memorable and iconic D&D experience at the end, though, so I made some modifications with . . .

2. The Monster Builder. What a fantastic tool. I wanted the PCs to fight a real, honest-to-goodness dragon, not just a wyrmling. So I took a few of the kobolds out of the fight, and replaced the white wyrmling with a young green dragon, reduced to level 2. I chose a green dragon because I have a mini for it, and because I really like the 4E green dragon that drips poison from every orifice. Reducing its level was extremely easy with the Monster Builder; a few clicks, and I’ve got a nice printed-out stat block for the game.

3. The Character Builder. I used this tool, which I also love, to create interesting characters for them to play. I got some input from them about what they wanted to play, and wound up making a gnome warlord, a goliath barbarian, and a genasi swordmage. I chose powers with the delve in mind, so that every power would be useful. I chose feats with simplicity in mind, trying to choose only feats that added passive benefits or (in the case of the gnome) multiclass feats that just added new powers altogether (the gnome is multiclassed into fey pact warlock), so they wouldn’t have to worry about what feats did.

Within 30 minutes, I had three characters printed out, complete with power cards, a few post-it notes in the delve to let me know what to take out of each fight, and a printed out boss monster of the appropriate level for them to fight. It was the easiest prep I’d ever done. Now I just need to get the guys together so we can use it.

I just ran my name through the Internet Anagram Server, and guess what one of the first few results was? Yep. Bargain Nerd. So there you go.