On Saturday, I got my first chance to play "Numenera", the new game from Monte Cook. Amongst other things, this is one of three games in a "new wave" of RPGs that purport to do something genuinely new in the area. (The other two games in this "new wave" are "Thirteenth Age" and "Dungeonworld", neither of which I know much about.) So, I was understandably curious to see what all the fuss was about.
First, some peripheral matters:
The session itself was very solid. The game was GM'ed well, as always, by Brindy, and the group of players present was a good one - it gelled well, it had a good blend of personalities. That was all to the good. Some of what follows is rather critical, so I felt it was important to note up-front that any criticisms are aimed at the game/adventure, rather than at the group/GM.
Speaking of the adventure... oh dear. On the face of it, this was a straightforward enough adventure - there was trouble in the town, the PCs have to figure out what it is... go!
Unfortunately, the adventure is badly structured, containing at least two rookie mistakes in adventure design. I appreciate that it was necessarily short, but... I would have expected better from Monte, and I certainly would have expected better from an adventure intended to showcase a new game.
The first problem comes when the PCs try to figure out what the problem is. Here, the puzzle is laid out as a trail of breadcrumbs - go here to get the clue that points you to there, then go there to be pointed to the next place, then go there to do the next thing... The problem with that is that if the PCs don't start by going 'here' then the whole adventure grinds to a halt. There are other locations named in the adventure, but there's absolutely nothing of interest to be learned from them. The only way for the adventure to progress is for the PCs to go 'here'. That's a bad way to structure any adventure, but is especially poisonous for a puzzle or mystery adventure. Honestly, I thought we were beyond this - see "the three-clue rule".
The second problem tied in to the first. At the start of the adventure, the obvious thing to do was go "here". That was fine. But on arrival, the PCs were told, in no uncertain terms, "go away. Come back tomorrow". Fair enough. And the next day, we were told the same.
Now, at this point, standard RPG protocol is to decide something is amiss, and to break into the place to find out what. Except... this was a building belonging to the legitimate authority in the game, and guarded by a representative of that authority. Suddenly, that "obvious" course of action is cast into doubt.
But, fair enough, eventually we gave up on the other dead-ends and decided to break in. At which point, we discovered that, in order to gain entry, we had to find a hidden switch for the trap - a task requiring an extremely difficult roll (18+ on d20 - even applying all available modifiers it was still 12+; that is, a 45% chance of getting to continue the adventure). And there was another instance of just this again at the end of the adventure - make this roll, or you can go no further.
Honestly, is this where we are with adventure design? Still?
So... The Game Itself
I found Numenera to be something of a mixed bag.
The first thing that leapt out at me was that I really liked the setting. It was nicely done, it was evocative, and it had shades of both Vance's "Dying Earth" and of "Gamma World". Lots of good stuff there, and lots of scope for adventure.
I also liked the Numenera themselves, at least mostly. In particular, I liked the use of "cyphers" - one-shot items with a single, specific purpose. I liked that these were readily available, and I also liked that PCs could only carry a few of them. It seems that Monte has learned a thing or two from D&D's potions, wands and scrolls. I wasn't so keen on the "Oddities" - other than humour, they didn't seem to add anything to the game. Then again, maybe humour is enough.
Finally, I liked the core of the system - I liked the use of "pools", I liked the rolling system, and I liked what little I saw of characters being connected to one another mechanically. That was all to the good.
I wasn't so keen on character creation. On the face of it, it seemed really nice - describe your character as "an {adjective} {noun} who {does something}", where each of the three is taken from a short list. Then, look at the effect of each, and that's your character. So, my first attempt was "a strong-willed Jack who wields power with precision". Which sounds pretty good (you need to know what a "Jack" is, but since it's one of three character classes, that's not too bad).
Unfortunately, I quickly found that "wields power with precision" didn't mean what I thought it meant, and it really didn't fit my view of the character at all. So, I had to swap that out for something else, and ended up with "wields two weapons at once" - not ideal, but still pretty good.
Unfortunately, that experience gave me the distinct impression that it would be very easy to create a character who just sucks in this system - some of the {does something} options, and almost certainly some of the {adjective} options, are distinctly tied to specific {noun} options - if you take the wrong one, you're screwed. Which means that you're not really choosing an adjective/noun/verb combination because it describes your character - you need to choose these options based on mechanics. System mastery is still there; it's just hidden (which is even worse than having it out in the open).
(In theory, that can be fixed easily enough. Either provide individual adjective/verb options for each of the three classes, or (better) adjust the effect of the adjective/verb combinations based on which class is selected. That way, any combination should work, and the system then becomes fun rather than a minefield.)
My other big criticism was to become apparent quite late in the game. For the most part, the combat system is a good one - quick and fun, with the players making all of the rolls, and plenty of options for actions.
But...
The way damage works is as follows: you roll to hit. If you hit, your attack does a fixed amount of damage, reduced by a fixed amount by armour (and, in theory, can be reduced to 0). There are some powers that can grant an additional point of damage (presumably, more at higher 'level'), and you get extra damage if your attack roll is very high (17+).
Pretty much my character's defining characteristic was "wields two weapons at once". Specifically, he used two light weapons at once, which meant that each successful attack did 2 points of damage... and I had a power that could boost this by +1, for a total of 3. And that was it - barring a lucky roll, the absolute maximum damage my character could do was 3.
In the one and only combat encounter in the game, the enemy were wearing heavy armour, which reduced the damage of any successful attack by 3.
(Fortunately, my character was also carrying a bow which, as a medium weapon, did 4 points of damage, so I wasn't completely useless. Nonetheless, that was very disheartening.)
All in all, I'm afraid I'm really not a fan of the system. It has some nice features, but it also has some major flaws.
Parting Thoughts:
I feel quite bad about being so critical of the game. Physically, it's extremely nice, it's well presented, it's got a great setting, and it's mostly a good game. And I had fun playing - from the point where we'd completed char-gen up to the point where I realised my character's signature move rendered him useless.
But, overall, I'm afraid my impression was more negative than positive. It was okay. But it wasn't really any better than okay, and that was disappointing.
Monday, 23 September 2013
Thursday, 12 September 2013
Lessons from The Eberron Code #3: The Artificer
Before I get started, I think it's really important that I note that what follows is not a criticism of the player of the Artificer character in my campaign. Had he chosen to do so, that player could have destroyed the campaign quite thoroughly; to his great credit, he instead chose to focus his efforts on creating 'interesting' items, rather than going for raw power. So, he highlighted the problems below, without himself being a destructive influence. Which is a good thing.
The Artificer is a character class introduced in the Eberron sourcebook. Where other characters gain their power by feats of arms, or by casting spells, the Artificer gains his power by crafting and using magic items. Basically, he's Iron Man. And this was even more the case in "The Eberron Code", where the Artificer was a Warforged - a new Eberron race that is essentially a "metal man".
(As an aside about the Warforged, at least in 3e - they're also overpowered. In the PHB, the dwarf is quite clearly the most powerful of the races; the Warforged has them beat quite handily. Those immunities are extremely powerful. But I digress.)
I really like the concept of the Artificer. The "Iron Man" concept is a good one. And, in theory, 3e was the first edition to really support widespread crafting of magic items. It seemed a great fit.
"Seemed" is the operative word there.
See, what I hadn't grasped, but what really became apparent very quickly when Mondo started crafting lots of items, is that the 3e magic item crafting system just doesn't work. It looks like it's a solid system, filled with lots of mathematical rigour, and with formulae just under the surface for the enterprising DM to dig out.
It's really not. The guidelines in the DMG actually allude to this, noting that the fomulae given should just be considered guidelines. But it's not clear until it gets heavily used that it's more or less just something that they put together, didn't really playtest, and left well alone.
In fact, I'm now reasonably sure that the 3e designers envisaged the game being played in a very "2nd Edition" style - PCs would mostly be single class, you'd have the 'classic' four person party in most cases, campaigns would stop about 10th level, and almost all magic items would be found following random rolls on the treasure tables - almost no items would be bought or crafted. And, played in that style, you get a very different game.
(I think I've mentioned this before. I'm now convinced that the whole of multiclassing, the whole of magic item creation, and the whole of high-level play was only barely playtested, and pretty much doesn't work right. Which is a pretty damning indictment - that's about two-thirds of the game right there!)
So, the consequence of this discovery was that Mondo Jiwa was a very powerful character. Indeed, with a bit of tweaking that character could have filled pretty much any role in the party, and could probably have done it better in most cases than the dedicated specialist. (Fortunately, he didn't seem able to fill all the roles at once.) As noted above, had the player not deliberately chosen not to break the game, he could readily have done so, simply by applying the rules as written.
As far as I can tell, WotC were only too well aware of this weakness in the rules. In the "Magic Item Compendium", they re-price a whole lot of items to make them a bit more sane. They start to introduce the notion of "item levels", indicating that a certain item is suitable for characters of a suitable level (a concept that would be fully adopted in 4e).
Unfortunately, the MIC is one of the most incompetent books they ever produced. Worse, it starts the process of re-pricing items, but it fails to touch any of the items in the DMG (some of which were the worst offenders), and it says nothing about item creation. In effect, it creates a hybrid between two systems, one improperly tested and one half-done, and then walks away from the rubble of your game. The book is still, barely, useable, but only as a source of items for the DM to insert as treasure in his game; for item creation or purchase, it is worse than useless.
Tragically, the upshot of that is that I think the Artificer needs to be removed from any future campaigns I run. Further, the whole notion of item creation needs to be removed entirely - it's too complex to properly fix, and some of the most basic items to create (specifically scrolls) and also the ones most likely to cause problems. It's a real mess - and a huge and fundamental flaw at the heart of 3.5e.
There's also one further lesson to be learned from this. One of the things that I didn't expect was that Mondo's player really enjoyed tinkering with the item creation system, broken as it is. He actively enjoyed working on his spreadhseets, sorting out just what his character would make next, and so forth. The very complexity of that bit of the game was actively a bonus as far as he was concerned.
That was something of a surprise to me, to say the least. To a large extent, I'd written off item creation as just being too complex. And one of my key design goals for "Nutshell Fantasy" was that the game should be vastly simpler - that it should allow item creation, and should do so in a nice, easy manner.
But if the very complexity of the system can be a draw, where does that leave NF? Especially since there's simply no way I could possibly replicate the many thousands of items in 3e and its sourcebooks?
Anyway, that was the third, and final, big lesson that I learned from "The Eberron Code". It was also, probably, the most surprising of the three.
The Artificer is a character class introduced in the Eberron sourcebook. Where other characters gain their power by feats of arms, or by casting spells, the Artificer gains his power by crafting and using magic items. Basically, he's Iron Man. And this was even more the case in "The Eberron Code", where the Artificer was a Warforged - a new Eberron race that is essentially a "metal man".
(As an aside about the Warforged, at least in 3e - they're also overpowered. In the PHB, the dwarf is quite clearly the most powerful of the races; the Warforged has them beat quite handily. Those immunities are extremely powerful. But I digress.)
I really like the concept of the Artificer. The "Iron Man" concept is a good one. And, in theory, 3e was the first edition to really support widespread crafting of magic items. It seemed a great fit.
"Seemed" is the operative word there.
See, what I hadn't grasped, but what really became apparent very quickly when Mondo started crafting lots of items, is that the 3e magic item crafting system just doesn't work. It looks like it's a solid system, filled with lots of mathematical rigour, and with formulae just under the surface for the enterprising DM to dig out.
It's really not. The guidelines in the DMG actually allude to this, noting that the fomulae given should just be considered guidelines. But it's not clear until it gets heavily used that it's more or less just something that they put together, didn't really playtest, and left well alone.
In fact, I'm now reasonably sure that the 3e designers envisaged the game being played in a very "2nd Edition" style - PCs would mostly be single class, you'd have the 'classic' four person party in most cases, campaigns would stop about 10th level, and almost all magic items would be found following random rolls on the treasure tables - almost no items would be bought or crafted. And, played in that style, you get a very different game.
(I think I've mentioned this before. I'm now convinced that the whole of multiclassing, the whole of magic item creation, and the whole of high-level play was only barely playtested, and pretty much doesn't work right. Which is a pretty damning indictment - that's about two-thirds of the game right there!)
So, the consequence of this discovery was that Mondo Jiwa was a very powerful character. Indeed, with a bit of tweaking that character could have filled pretty much any role in the party, and could probably have done it better in most cases than the dedicated specialist. (Fortunately, he didn't seem able to fill all the roles at once.) As noted above, had the player not deliberately chosen not to break the game, he could readily have done so, simply by applying the rules as written.
As far as I can tell, WotC were only too well aware of this weakness in the rules. In the "Magic Item Compendium", they re-price a whole lot of items to make them a bit more sane. They start to introduce the notion of "item levels", indicating that a certain item is suitable for characters of a suitable level (a concept that would be fully adopted in 4e).
Unfortunately, the MIC is one of the most incompetent books they ever produced. Worse, it starts the process of re-pricing items, but it fails to touch any of the items in the DMG (some of which were the worst offenders), and it says nothing about item creation. In effect, it creates a hybrid between two systems, one improperly tested and one half-done, and then walks away from the rubble of your game. The book is still, barely, useable, but only as a source of items for the DM to insert as treasure in his game; for item creation or purchase, it is worse than useless.
Tragically, the upshot of that is that I think the Artificer needs to be removed from any future campaigns I run. Further, the whole notion of item creation needs to be removed entirely - it's too complex to properly fix, and some of the most basic items to create (specifically scrolls) and also the ones most likely to cause problems. It's a real mess - and a huge and fundamental flaw at the heart of 3.5e.
There's also one further lesson to be learned from this. One of the things that I didn't expect was that Mondo's player really enjoyed tinkering with the item creation system, broken as it is. He actively enjoyed working on his spreadhseets, sorting out just what his character would make next, and so forth. The very complexity of that bit of the game was actively a bonus as far as he was concerned.
That was something of a surprise to me, to say the least. To a large extent, I'd written off item creation as just being too complex. And one of my key design goals for "Nutshell Fantasy" was that the game should be vastly simpler - that it should allow item creation, and should do so in a nice, easy manner.
But if the very complexity of the system can be a draw, where does that leave NF? Especially since there's simply no way I could possibly replicate the many thousands of items in 3e and its sourcebooks?
Anyway, that was the third, and final, big lesson that I learned from "The Eberron Code". It was also, probably, the most surprising of the three.
Lessons from The Eberron Code #2: The Spell Compendium
I'm not sure if anyone is still reading this blog, or if there's even a hint of residual interest, but...
Some months ago, I posted the first of me "Lessons from The Eberron Code" posts. This was supposed to be the first of three such posts, but I never did get around to the second or third posts. Well, here goes.
One of the things I like about 3e is that it was intentionally constructed to be easily expanded - adding extra feats, spells, magic items, monsters, classes, and so on was just a matter of dropping them in. But the down-side of that was that the game quickly became unmanageable, as characters would be built with a class from here, a feat from there, and three magic items from those other three books. That was a pain, especially for the poor DM who had to lug all those books around with him. And, unlike with 4e, the technology wasn't really available at the outset to allow this to be nicely gathered and indexed in an online resource. (Of course, that's no longer true, but the only people who have the legal right to do so are WotC, and they've moved on and have no interest in doing so.)
So, when it was released, I was absolutely delighted to see the "Spell Compendium" (and then the companion volume, the "Magic Item Compendium"). I promptly declared that PCs could use any spells from the PHB or the SC, but no other spells from any source. And so it went on, with the book seeing almost no use in-game, up to the point where the player of the Druid in the Eberron Code took a serious look in the book, and then started using some of the spells.
Unfortunately, that was also the point where I was handed a sharp lesson about the contents of that book. Specifically, that the "Spell Compendium" represented a source of massive power creep and, worse, that it was a power boost for exactly those classes that least required it: the Cleric, the Druid, and the Wizard.
See, it has long been known that 3e has balance issues across the classes. Actually, these have been inherent in the game since the outset, but they really kicked into high gear with 3.0e, and got worse with 3.5e. There were two issues: firstly, the Fighter-types have a more-or-less linear progression in abilities (actually, as far as I can tell, it's an n.log(n) progression), while the spellcasters have a cubic progression.
(That is, the Fighters gain power in terms of advanced BAB and hit points (linear), plus they also gain more powerful feats and some extra attacks (log n). Meanwhile, the Wizards gain more spells per day, plus the gain higher level spells, plus all their existing spells become more powerful as they go.)
The other problem, though, is that the Fighter-types have a small and fixed set of tricks available: they get maybe a dozen feats. Meanwhile, the Cleric gets access to all his spells. And, when a new sourcebook is added, the Cleric immediately gains access to all those spells as well. Adding more feats gives more ways to build a Fighter, but generally doesn't vastly increase the power of an individual Fighter; adding more spells can dramatically increase the power level of the Cleric (or Druid, and to a lesser extent the Wizard).
In addition, the "Spell Compendium" really highlights something that I'd been aware of for a long time, but hadn't really bothered with: the designers of the game actively broke 3e as it went along. See, 3e has a limitation on PC power inherent in the 'stacking' rules - if you have two bonuses of the same type (armour +2 and armour +3, for example), you don't get to add both bonuses, only the larger. And, since the DMG included only a limited number of bonus types, this put a hard ceiling on potential power.
The problem with this was that the PHB spells do a pretty good job of "filling in the gaps" - for pretty much any possible bonus type, there are spells in the PHB to give a bonus of that type. What this means is that, when the designers came to add new spells, they found themselves rather stuck - if there's already a spell to grant a +X armour bonus, how do you make an interesting spell that gives an armour bonus? Can't just go for a bigger number, because that would change the spell level, but if you don't then your new spell is redundant.
So they cheated. They designed loads of new spells by introducing a huge range of new bonus types. The consequence of this was obvious: the game grew more complex, and characters grew much more powerful as they stacked the new spells on top of the old. Huzzah!
(Which means, by the way, that when the team introducing 4e commented that 3e was 'broken' and 'over-complex', they weren't wrong. But the reason 3e was in that state was that those same designers had made it that way! But that's another rant.)
The bottom line of all of this is that, while I really like the concept of the "Spell Compendium", the effect on the game overall is a shockingly bad one. Much as I would prefer not to, I think I'm going to have to remove it from use from any future games that I run. Assuming, that is, that I ever run 3.5e D&D again...
Some months ago, I posted the first of me "Lessons from The Eberron Code" posts. This was supposed to be the first of three such posts, but I never did get around to the second or third posts. Well, here goes.
One of the things I like about 3e is that it was intentionally constructed to be easily expanded - adding extra feats, spells, magic items, monsters, classes, and so on was just a matter of dropping them in. But the down-side of that was that the game quickly became unmanageable, as characters would be built with a class from here, a feat from there, and three magic items from those other three books. That was a pain, especially for the poor DM who had to lug all those books around with him. And, unlike with 4e, the technology wasn't really available at the outset to allow this to be nicely gathered and indexed in an online resource. (Of course, that's no longer true, but the only people who have the legal right to do so are WotC, and they've moved on and have no interest in doing so.)
So, when it was released, I was absolutely delighted to see the "Spell Compendium" (and then the companion volume, the "Magic Item Compendium"). I promptly declared that PCs could use any spells from the PHB or the SC, but no other spells from any source. And so it went on, with the book seeing almost no use in-game, up to the point where the player of the Druid in the Eberron Code took a serious look in the book, and then started using some of the spells.
Unfortunately, that was also the point where I was handed a sharp lesson about the contents of that book. Specifically, that the "Spell Compendium" represented a source of massive power creep and, worse, that it was a power boost for exactly those classes that least required it: the Cleric, the Druid, and the Wizard.
See, it has long been known that 3e has balance issues across the classes. Actually, these have been inherent in the game since the outset, but they really kicked into high gear with 3.0e, and got worse with 3.5e. There were two issues: firstly, the Fighter-types have a more-or-less linear progression in abilities (actually, as far as I can tell, it's an n.log(n) progression), while the spellcasters have a cubic progression.
(That is, the Fighters gain power in terms of advanced BAB and hit points (linear), plus they also gain more powerful feats and some extra attacks (log n). Meanwhile, the Wizards gain more spells per day, plus the gain higher level spells, plus all their existing spells become more powerful as they go.)
The other problem, though, is that the Fighter-types have a small and fixed set of tricks available: they get maybe a dozen feats. Meanwhile, the Cleric gets access to all his spells. And, when a new sourcebook is added, the Cleric immediately gains access to all those spells as well. Adding more feats gives more ways to build a Fighter, but generally doesn't vastly increase the power of an individual Fighter; adding more spells can dramatically increase the power level of the Cleric (or Druid, and to a lesser extent the Wizard).
In addition, the "Spell Compendium" really highlights something that I'd been aware of for a long time, but hadn't really bothered with: the designers of the game actively broke 3e as it went along. See, 3e has a limitation on PC power inherent in the 'stacking' rules - if you have two bonuses of the same type (armour +2 and armour +3, for example), you don't get to add both bonuses, only the larger. And, since the DMG included only a limited number of bonus types, this put a hard ceiling on potential power.
The problem with this was that the PHB spells do a pretty good job of "filling in the gaps" - for pretty much any possible bonus type, there are spells in the PHB to give a bonus of that type. What this means is that, when the designers came to add new spells, they found themselves rather stuck - if there's already a spell to grant a +X armour bonus, how do you make an interesting spell that gives an armour bonus? Can't just go for a bigger number, because that would change the spell level, but if you don't then your new spell is redundant.
So they cheated. They designed loads of new spells by introducing a huge range of new bonus types. The consequence of this was obvious: the game grew more complex, and characters grew much more powerful as they stacked the new spells on top of the old. Huzzah!
(Which means, by the way, that when the team introducing 4e commented that 3e was 'broken' and 'over-complex', they weren't wrong. But the reason 3e was in that state was that those same designers had made it that way! But that's another rant.)
The bottom line of all of this is that, while I really like the concept of the "Spell Compendium", the effect on the game overall is a shockingly bad one. Much as I would prefer not to, I think I'm going to have to remove it from use from any future games that I run. Assuming, that is, that I ever run 3.5e D&D again...
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