(where Michael deconstructs discontinued franchises, and puts forth ideas concerning hypothetical sequels.)

Overview

I know what most of you are thinking right now: “What the crap is Equinox?”. Released in 1993 as a sequel to the NES classic Solstice, Equinox failed to generate much buzz upon hitting the market. Players derided its intense difficulty level, occasional glitchiness, and unusual gameplay mechanics. It was quickly designated as a sub-par entry into the Super Nintendo’s extensive library, and soon faded from the gaming scene all together.

But a few players managed to overlook some of the game’s quirks to see it for what it really is: a unique, isometric, puzzle-platformer unlike any other game released in its era. Is it unpolished? A little. A bit too hardcore? Definitely. But Equinox is a severely underrated title that the gaming community certainly needs to take another look at.

May 1, 2013 Michael Game Design, Random Thoughts 2 comments

The second edition of Advanced Dungeons and Dragons is often not remembered fondly. The convoluted calculations THAC0 scores enforced (which all too often involved dealing with negative numbers) look arcane compared to the streamlined nature of the modern d20 system. Even throwback games tend to gloss over the bones of this edition, aiming more for emulating the theme of the game rather than the specific mechanics. However, Second Edition is what I grew up with, and I still carry around a dice bag full of nostalgia for the game.

One core rulebook in the Second Edition canon stands out specifically in my mind: the Monstrous Manual. This tome, gloriously illustrated by the likes of Tony DiTerlizzi, contains some of my favourite pen-and-paper monsters of all time. Sure, many are goofy by modern sensibilities (giffs, otyughs, and xorn come to mind), but the Monstrous Manual was the king of set piece monsters. Many creatures lacked direct combat abilities or employed tactics that whole rooms or dungeons had to be designed around. A dungeon master could flip to a random page of the Monstrous Manual and plan out a whole night’s worth of adventuring based on the one creature he stumbled upon.

October 20, 2012 Radiostorm Game Design, Random Thoughts No comments

The Advanced Race Guide dropped last month, bringing a bag full of goodies to the Pathfinder roleplaying game. Asides from the obvious addition of new player races (including tieflings, aasimar, and tengu), the book introduced a slew of new racial archetypes. These archetypes are only available to single races, and many radically alter the base abilities of their corresponding class. Coupled with the wealth of alternative racial traits that were introduced, I wouldn’t be surprised if we started seeing more dwarves, halflings, and gnomes in organized play.

It’d be a tremendous ordeal to analyze every new archetype found in the Advanced Race Guide, so instead I’ll rattle off a couple of my favourites.

Treesinger

As if elves weren’t subject to enough ridicule for being vainglorious hippies, Paizo hands them the prissiest-named archetype in the game. It might as well have been called the treehugger. Joking aside, this arboreal archetype is really quite interesting.

September 26, 2012 Radiostorm Game Design, Pathfinder, Random Thoughts No comments

By all metrics, Pathfinder is the most satisfying pen-and-paper game I’ve ever played. The class balance feels good, the math isn’t overwhelming, and the community support is outstanding. However, it suffers from one syndrome that haunts the creation of every new character: feat taxes.

Many veteran players lament that you need three feats to go to the bathroom in Pathfinder. It’s a cheeky musing, but one rooted in truth. Pathfinder’s feats are arranged in sprawling tiers, often requiring an investment of three or more feats to unlock a single more advanced one. While it’s satisfying to work towards a goal, many rungs on the feat ladder are considered either undesirable or overtly mundane. These are feat taxes.

Below I’ve highlighted a number of revisions to Pathfinder’s feat tree to help ease the situation. I’ve focused mainly on combat feats, arguably the worst offenders. Feel free to incorporate these changes into your own house rules or make your own suggestions in the comments.

September 5, 2012 Radiostorm Game Design, Pathfinder 9 comments

Website regulars have probably already taken note of the fact that I’ve annihilated the old dMetric section of the website. This was for various reasons; the most obvious one being that we haven’t touched the game outline for nearly a year. Sometimes my thoughts still wander to the game though, and last weekend I sat down and attempted to devise a simplified combat system for the ruleset.

Like most of my projects, my simple thoughts soon grew incredibly complicated, and I ended up devising a “Point Based Combat System” that is probably too unwieldy for practical use. Rather than let the ideas rot in my notebook, I’ve transcribed the rules breakdown into pdf format for your perusal. Do bear in mind that this is pretty much unedited and has not been properly proofread.

Here’s a quick excerpt for you to check out:

Point Based Combat System V1.0

dMetric uses a simple system to dictate what actions a character may take, and how powerful they are when executed. This system is based upon class-specific skill decks, which contain a wealth of ability cards that allow classes to do anything from launching basic attacks to casting mighty spells.

Although ability cards are diverse and plentiful, they all follow two basic rules:

May 28, 2012 Michael dMetric, Game Design, Random Thoughts No comments

Minecraft has been good to me. I’ve garnered dozens (if not hundreds) of hours of entertainment out of the twenty dollar indie title, making it the most cost effective game I’ve ever owned. Every time I think I’ve tapped Minecraft for all it’s worth, I find myself pulled back into the game.

That being said, Minecraft isn’t perfect. The official release at the end of last year was lackluster and incomplete, and patches to remedy the problems it introduced have been sporadic and unsatisfying. Enchanting and alchemy are still unwieldy machinations, the final boss fight is not worth the time or effort, and dozens of promised and desirable features have fallen to the wayside. Six months after release, Minecraft is still an unfinished game.

This article isn’t going to a testament on what is right and wrong in the world of Notch. I’ll leave that weighted dilemma for the talented community of modders to figure out. Instead I’d like to propose features that would rekindle my own interest in the game.

Ponies

The nether was a brilliant way to make travelling in Minecraft manageable without making the world feel small. Building a set of nether portals is a dangerous and time consuming affair, but one that pays for itself down the road. While portals are a great means of quickly traversing from point A to point B, an option for speedy free exploration has yet to be tabled.

Ponies are the answer. Ponies are always the answer. Given the propensity of wandering livestock in the game already, these beasts of burden seem a glaring omission. They could be tamed in the same method as wolves and cats and mounted to move double the player’s running speed indefinitely. The trade off would be that they would have to be left in the safety of a stable (a fenced off area) when not in use to keep monsters from chomping away at them.

Add in carriages that operate like normal minecarts and storage minecarts, and you have a plush method of transporting goods and other players.

Better Weapons, Better Monsters

Combat in Minecraft is slipshod. In the early days of the game, monsters were considered an obstacle to be avoided, so this wasn’t an issue. But now that there are nether fortresses to pillage and endermen to farm, the cracks have begun to show.

A fresh repertoire of weapons would help make combat less of a chore. Guns and rifles that are powerful but costly to craft ammunition for would be a good start. Axes, spears, hammers, and clubs with varying reach, damage, and attack speed would offer welcome alternatives to the baseline sword. More abstract options, such as bear traps and bolas, could even be considered.

The monsters need a little help too. Although rarely seen, I liked the addition of the charged creeper – a more dangerous variation of the basic monster. Other rare and more powerful versions of monsters would add a little spice to exploring; players would learn to fear plague zombies, blazing skeletons with flaming arrows, and rabid wolves. These foes could drop rare items, such as diamonds or golden apples, to make defeating them feel rewarding.

Custom Patterns

Animal Crossing is one of my guilty pleasures. The series has chewed through almost as many of my idle hours as Minecraft has. One of the features I relished from the Nintendo title was the ability to create custom patterns and apply them to clothing, flags, and wallpaper. Is there any good reason this isn’t in Minecraft already?

For a game that thrives on player made content, it seems like an odd omission. How great would it be to plant a flag boasting your own coat of arms on top of the highest tower of your castle? Or to illustrate your own painting instead of using one of the baffling randomly generated choices. It could even offer an in-game method of creating skins for your character – a long overdue feature. These patterns could be created through a loom, a new workbench-type block (not to be confused with the classic Lucasarts adventure game of the same name).

Again, I’m surprised this feature already isn’t in Minecraft. Maybe Notch is worried that too many people will draw penises?

May 16, 2012 Radiostorm Game Design 1 comment

Pathfinder Society Organized Play is great. It allows players to participate in short, four-hour Pathfinder adventures without having to commit to the rigorous schedule of a home game. Overall I’m impressed with Paizo’s handling of the initiative, but in recent weeks my local Pathfinder lodge has been faced with a pressing problem: we’ve run out of low level modules to play and lack high enough level characters to progress to the more advanced ones.

Half of this is our own fault. Our game masters should have discouraged players from wantonly creating new character after new character. Because of this schizophrenic play style, many of our regulars field four or five different characters that all have yet to hit the crucial level five milestone. However, I feel this drive to cycle through characters is a symptom of an intrinsic shortcoming of Pathfinder Society Organized Play.

As it stands, there is no mechanic in Pathfinder Society Organized Play to rebuild an established character. Barring an extreme circumstance such as errata to the core rules, once a skill, feat, or trait is chosen, it is locked in permanently. Put bluntly, this is a draconian measure that only services to discourage players from advancing beyond the first or second tier.

Regardless of skill level, a player will inevitably find him or herself in one of the following two situations:

1. He or she has created a character that is too one-dimensional or weak to meaningfully contribute to the party.

April 30, 2012 Radiostorm Game Design, Pathfinder 3 comments

Last summer I had the opportunity to try out Zombie Cinema, a storytelling game released by Arkenstone Publishing. Nestled in a VHS-shaped box splattered with blood red letters, the game immediately caught my attention. The blurb on the back of the box appropriately reads like a B-movie poster:

Nobody knew when it started, or why. Perhaps the lonely death of a spinster was one too much for angels to bear, or a chemical leak in the ground-water had unexpected consequences. Only one thing is certain: now the dead walk.

It’s common knowledge among my peers that I’m a zombie buff. I gush over films like Zombieland, the Left 4 Dead video game series, and the early issues of The Walking Dead. If a zombie apocalypse were to happen today, I have a foolproof 12-step contingency plan in place to ensure my own survival. Needless to say, I’m precisely the demographic the creators of Zombie Cinema is catering too.

The premise of the game is straightforward. Each player enacts the role of a random civilian during a zombie outbreak. The goal is to survive the play session, whether it be by fleeing or fighting the zombies.

Each player begins by drawing a handful of cards. These cards define your character’s personality, strengths, and weaknesses. In my session, I was dealt a volatile hand: a simple weapon, a position of authority, and a hair-trigger temper. These traits were clear enough to ease me into play quickly but broad enough to allow for creative embellishment. Gordon, the shell-shocked military officer who just wanted to get home to his kids, was born.

Structured play occurs on a small game board. A piece representing the zombies begins on the first square, and the players begin a few squares ahead. If a player’s pawn reaches the top of the board, their character safely escapes disaster; if the pawn is ever bumped into the same square as the zombies, their character becomes kibble for the undead.

The flow of Zombie Cinema is simple. Each player takes turns framing a scene of the story. This player lays out the time, location, and predicament of the players in cinematic fashion. Each player then narrates how his or her character reacts to the situation. After all characters are accounted for, the scene ends. When each player has framed a scene, the round is complete.

What makes the game compelling is how the game board interacts with the story. After every round, the zombie piece advances a single square. The new square the zombies occupy represents not only a closer physical proximity to the players but a heightened level of danger in the narrative. Early squares indicate that the presence of zombies is only implied. Later squares enforce that a full infestation has occurred. This subtle molding of the narrative helps to maintain momentum and dissuade overly conservative play.

Player dynamics similarly play to the game board. If there is a dispute between two characters during any of these scenes – whether it be a physical altercation or a quarrel for leadership – a conflict of interest is declared. Each of the involved players roll a die. The player with the higher number is moved ahead one square on the board and gets to decide the outcome of the dispute. The losing player is moved back one square.  Any peripheral player may choose to ally with one side of the dispute, granting that side an additional die roll. However, that player is subject to the same penalty should their side lose the conflict. Like a game of Risk, success in Zombie Cinema lies on your ability to pick your battles and forge alliances. Backstabbing and chicanery are rampant.

The amount of fun you’ll have playing Zombie Cinema relies on who you play it with. Like charades or Dungeons and Dragons, strength of personality is the key variable. Although the group I played with was mostly amiable, the experience became agonizing at times because one player tried to wrestle too much control over the narrative. Zombie Cinema isn’t a game for big egos. More often than not, you’ll end up dead, and you have to set your expectations accordingly. Playing with close friends or a regular gaming group is advised.

Zombie Cinema is a fascinating game, but it isn’t for everyone. It definitely isn’t something you’ll play with the folks or pull out casually at a party. But if you’re a zombie film buff and a gamer, Zombie Cinema is an uncanny fit. It’s currently available online in North America through Indie Press Revolution.

Photos courtesy of Boardgamegeek.com.

March 28, 2012 Radiostorm Game Design, Indie Games, Reviews No comments

There’s been a lot of attention drawn to Kickstarter over the past month. First internet darling Tim Schaffer successfully raised 3.3 million dollars to fund the development of a classic adventure game. Then, out of nowhere, Brian Fargo repeated the miracle by securing a sequel to Wasteland – a game that came out in 1988! It appears crowd funding has hit the limelight, and indie developers couldn’t be happier.

To celebrate Kickstarter – and to exploit the site’s popular for the benefit of my own blog – I’m dedicating a feature to current projects I’m following. If this article ends up being popular, it may become a semi-regular set piece at The World is Square. If not, I’ll find another fad to desperately attach myself to. Here goes!

The Banner Saga

Mike would kill me if I didn’t mention this one. The Banner Saga is a tactical roleplaying game project being developed by a splinter group of old Bioware employees. If that isn’t enough to wet your appetite, the game also features lush hand-drawn animation reminiscent of classic Disney movies and a story rooted in Viking mythology. It’s surprisingly well-realized considering its early stage of development

Less surprising is how quickly the game reached its $100,000 goal – it’s attached to the Bioware name for heavens sake. Still it’s only $10 for the complete game, and higher tiers of investment will yield a doubtlessly gorgeous digital art book.

Dwimmermount

The next project hails from my native Canada. Dwimmermount is a sprawling megadungeon, a tribute to the classic deathtraps of Gygax’s era of Dungeons and Dragons. The game employs a modified version of the Labyrinth Lord rule system and has also been adapted to the Adventurer Conqueror King System.

Dwimmermount is well worth a look if you’re interested in classic roleplaying games to any extent. It’ll only run you $10 for PDFs of both the LL and ACKS versions. Although already funded, the team is going to cough up a tantalizing bonus dungeon level if the project reaches its secondary goal of $30 000.

Pure Steam

Are you a fan of Pathfinder? Are you a fan of steampunk? The three of you who answered yes to both these questions can rejoice. Pure Steam is a campaign setting for the Pathfinder roleplaying game entrenched in the anachronistic and generally irreverent genre of steampunk. Steampunk usually isn’t my cup of tea, but promises of “[e]xpanded options for non-magical healing” and a “plethora of pseudoscience wondrous items” caught my attention.

A donation of $15 will land you a PDF of the Pure Steam Core Rulebook, fully compatible with the current edition of the Pathfinder roleplaying system.

March 21, 2012 Radiostorm Game Design, Indie Games, Random Thoughts 1 comment

It’s New Years Eve, 1980. You peer listlessly out of the window of your London flat, clenching a half-empty bottle of wine. The holiday has provided a momentary lapse in your labours as a dockworker. It’s a good thing too – the hum of the thermionic lanterns was causing you splitting migraines, and there’s no chance in hell you can afford another trepanning appointment. The booze will have to do.

Suddenly, there’s a pounding at the door. You freeze; you weren’t expecting visitors. You never expect visitors. The knocking escalates to a hammering, and broken words of English, German, and Shadish leak through the oaken portal. You can’t make them out, but you’re pretty sure it ain’t a singing telegram.

You reach for your ray duster. The sight’s crooked and one of the tubes is cracked, but at least you remembered to charge it this time. The hum of the device causes you to wince as you flick it on. Hands shaking, you aim at the cracking doorframe.

This year’s off to a bad start.

Imagine a universe where World War 2 ended differently. In this world, days prior to what would have been the bombing of Pearl Harbour, Adolph Hitler’s ultimate plan came to fruition. Dedicating millions of dollars and nearly a decade to secret occult research and scientific experimentation, the fuehrer succeeded in opening a portal to another dimension. His intent – use the secrets of the multiverse to rule his enemies as a god.

A pitiful man who, with the throw of a lever, doomed the world.

Nothing remains of Germany save for a crater spiralling into endless blackness. Those who have returned alive from the surrounding countries of Eastern Europe describe buildings torn out from their foundations, barren fields, and shadowy behemoths that stalk the howling countryside.

The United Kingdom now remains the foremost bastion of civilization in Europe. Massive thermionic lanterns keep the creatures of the other world at bay while refugees from what remains of France, Spain, and Italy pound at the doors. An impenetrable fog draws a veil across the North Atlantic; no one has heard from the Americas in almost four decades.

This is the world of Psychopomp. Psychopomp is a pen-and-paper roleplaying game designed in the same vein as Call of Cthulu. It is an alternate history campaign setting with the inclusion of substantial horror and fantasy elements. Although there are rules for basic combat, the game is largely story oriented. Character advancement is skill based, with additional skill points being rewarded to the player at the end of every play session.

Creatively speaking, Psychopomp is the bastard son of my love for Hellboy graphic novels and for Coast to Coast AM. Hellboy pioneered and perfected the history-meets-fantasy subgenre (nobody does occult Nazis better than Mignola) and offered this narrative through a noir aesthetic that causes your eyes to latch on to every page. Coast to Coast AM, while decidedly lacking the same sort of artistic clout, is a brimming reservoir of goofy notions about psychic powers, secret government technology, and shadow people.

One of the principle themes of Psychopomp is appropriating old avenues of science, technology, and medicine that are considered dead ends by modern standards and reimagining them as legitimate pursuits. The foremost field of technology in this version of 1980s Europe is thermionics, electrical devices that employ vacuum tubes. Modern medicine prescribes homeopathic dilutions in place of pharmaceuticals and employs bloodletting – intended to balance the four humours – as the principal means of surgery. Advanced computers run on punch cards, phrenology is used to appraise character, and so on.

Despite magic and the supernatural being an integral aspect of the campaign setting, players cannot cast spells or wield magic in a manner conventional of roleplaying games. Instead, they may opt to learn skills that grant them minor psychic or mystic capabilities. Many of these skills enhance the senses: remote viewing allows a player to visualize locations, items, or individuals from miles away, while psychometry grants the ability to learn about items from holding them. Others include speaking with the dead (channeling) and predicting the future (taromancy). These supernatural abilities are intended to complement mundane abilities rather than be an end in themselves.

Psychopomp’s setting is unique in that it allows me access to a great deal of reference material from the real world. If I should ever choose to further develop the idea, the alternate 1980s version of London will be based on historical maps of London from the 1940s – the turning point of divergence in the alternate universe – that I will expand upon and revise. This benefits me greatly, as I’m only a novice cartographer, but it will also require a great deal of meticulous research.  The historical elements impart the same trade off – my last world history class was almost a decade ago, and I do not recall receiving an impressive grade.

The concept of Psychopomp is one that I’ve been sitting on for a while. I think it has potential, but I’m not 100% sure how to proceed with it. For those curious, the word “psychopomp” isn’t a nonsense fantasy term I made up myself. As defined by Dictionary.com, a psychopomp is “someone who conducts spirits or souls to the other world.” Apt, don’t you think?

December 12, 2011 Radiostorm Game Design No comments