Yes, I now have a tattoo. Yes, it’s a very geeky one.

I recently got Scribblenauts for the Nintendo DS, and I like it. I feel that it’s a deeply flawed game, but I like it despite its flaws.

So that I might end on a high note, I’ll cover the bad stuff first. The single biggest gripe I have with the game is probably one you’ve heard before, if you’ve read anything resembling a review for this game before now: the controls. Everything except for the camera and the ability to rotate objects is controlled using the stylus, and while this works well enough for positioning and manipulating objects, Maxwell (your character) is just as dumb as dirt. I can’t even count the number of times I’ve tried to move a particularly fiddly object, only to see Maxwell jump merrily to his death in a pit of lava or shark-infested waters. Even when I’m trying to control Maxwell, he often fouls things up through no apparent doing of mine. Controlling Maxwell is a very approximate and imprecise, and often you’ll want him to, say, dig through ice with a pick-axe, and he’ll instead jump in place like a spastic mental patient. Which sort of brings me to the next flaw.

Everything is controlled by a physics system; the problem is, the system doesn’t model relative weight all that well, if at all. Why is it that I can set a car down next to a ledge, but as soon as I attach a rope to it, it gets pulled right off the cliff? Why can’t my helicopter lift a penguin? Similarly inscrutable, at least occasionally, is the game’s internal logic. Why, when I try to break a starite out of a block of ice with a sledge hammer, do I break the starite, too, but when I shoot the same block with a machine gun, the starite survives? Why will my vampire attack just about everyone except for a pesky pair of redcaps?

The camera, too, needs some work. Controlling the camera is mapped to the d-pad, and works just fine; the problem is that it snaps back to Maxwell after about a second and a half of inactivity, which is simply inconvenient in a game in which you’ll often want to be creating things and placing them in areas where Maxwell isn’t (presumably so he doesn’t accidentally jump off a cliff or something).

All that said, I find I simply can’t stop playing the game. I frequently curse it, and it frequently frustrates me, but I can’t stop playing it. It’s simply too original a concept, and the basic concept is simply too well-realized, for me to pass up. And for that reason, if you’ve been at least a little bit interested in this game, or if you like puzzle games, you should go out and buy it. And if my earlier negativity has dissuaded you, you should still buy it. Why? Because every copy that gets bought makes it more likely that a sequel will be released, a sequel with better controls, better physics, a better camera, and better internal logic. And because it’s crazy fun, when it works right.

Critical Hits is working on something that I’d really like to see happen, and would really like to be a part of. Go check it out.

The first session report of the new adventure (the first adventure for 4th Edition written entirely by me, and not adapted from a published adventure) is up. Also, there are some new NPCs and locations on the main page of the campaign wiki.

The recent session got me thinking about some stuff. One fight in particular, the one where the PCs were attacked by undead creatures, gave me some insight as far as what is and isn’t fun for solo monsters. I used a solo monster in that fight, a zombie abomination from an RPGA adventure (I got it from the Compendium). I used the monster as written, and I ran into some issues. First, it’s probably important to use a solo that is the same level as the party. This solo was a level behind, and its attack bonuses just weren’t up to par. Actually, I’m not sure why its attack bonuses were so low. It had trouble landing any hits on the part, and at one point it was marked by Chance, but in order to hit him it literally had to roll a natural 20. The abomination wound up being a big sack of hit points, but not really much of a credible threat.

Another issue with the abomination is its Rise Again power; basically, when the abomination is killed, it gets back up on the following round with half its max hit points. It’s not the first time I’ve seen this power; the zombie hulk from the monster manual has the same power. In the case of the zombie hulk, I think it’s okay. The hulk is a standard monster, with 88 hit points, meaning it’ll rise again with 44; a group with two strikers (like mine) should be able to take that out in a round or two, so you get some dramatic tension when it gets back up, but it doesn’t drag the combat out too much. With the abomination, though, has 232 hit points, so it gets back up with 116; that’s a lot of extra hit points. What I found is that the power made the combat drag on a little too long, after the party’s victory was already a foregone conclusion. In general, I think it’s a bad idea to give solos, and maybe even elites, abilities that make them harder to hit or give them too many hit points. You want them to last for a while, but you don’t want them to overstay their welcome or make the combat drag. Solos should also have pretty good attack bonuses, so that they actually feel like a big threat. As it was, I think the forsaken shell did more damage than the zombie abomination did.

I’ve also been reading the new Eberron Campaign Guide, and I’m definitely going to be stealing some ideas from it for my campaign. You may already have seen some of that in the newest session report, in my mention of a druidic sect known as the Wardens of the Wood. In that case, it’s basically just a name I liked, but there are other, more significant things that I’ll be borrowing and adapting for the campaign. Just wait and see.

As, I’m sure, many of you who have run, or are currently running, Keep on the Shadowfell, I modified the adventure as written. I added in a bunch of stuff at the beginning in order to get the PCs to Winterhaven, and I made numerous minor modifications to various encounters throughout the adventure. Mostly it was a monster here and a monster there being replaced with something that I found more interesting, either mechanically or thematically (or both), but nothing too drastic. Even the replacement of a deathjump spider with a more powerful monster, a cave troll, is something I consider a relatively minor modification; it altered the feel of the battle a little bit, but didn’t have implications that were all that far-reaching.

The single greatest modification that I made to the published adventure was in the final battle of the adventure, against Kalarel. In the published adventure, Kalarel is accompanied by some skeletons and a wight, and there’s a trap in the form of the Thing in the Portal, which grabs and draws nearer adventurers who draw too near in the first place. When I first read the adventure, I thought it was a cool encounter, but that was before I had experienced more of the breadth of what 4th Edition had to offer. I do think that, for those who are still undecided about the new edition, taking D&D for a test drive with the adventure as written is perfectly viable, and probably lots of fun. But I wanted to do something different.

So, I completely rejiggered the final encounter. For starters, I created the corpse mound that I talked about before. Then I added a couple of hazards; one represented the darkness emanating from the portal, the other the subtle and seductive call of said darkness. Then I reduced Kalarel’s level a bit and modified some of his abilities so that the encounter’s level was a little more in-line with my party’s level.

It’s a level 7 encounter, all said, but with a lot of potential to be very, very difficult. There are some nasty threats in there, and all of them had at least a couple of levels on the party. So I staggered things a little bit. Initially, Kalarel is involved in completing the ritual, so the party only has to contend with the corpse mound. After a couple of rounds, Kalarel completes the ritual, joining the fray. The following round, the two hazards activate, and every round thereafter the darkness expands, filling more of the room.

Now, I had a way for the PCs to reverse the effects of the ritual built into the encounter, but I’m a firm believer that a big failure should not be a show-stopper, but should rather make things more interesting. Thus, I created a skill challenge that would trigger if the darkness expanded too much. This had the effect of also putting a time limit on the encounter, which prevented it from turning into too much of a slog.

At any rate, here is my writeup of the encounter. The experience per party member assumes a party of 5 characters, and there’s no treasure included in that writeup (I had that in a separate document for some reason). The encounter does use the standard battle map that the original encounter used; Kalarel starts in front of the altar, while the corpse mound appears as a mere pile of corpses in the pool of blood in the center of the room. The darkness, as you’d expect, emanates from the portal once Kalarel has completed the ritual. Enjoy.

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.