In Theory, Out Of Practice

I’ve spent a bunch of time doing shogi puzzles recently.  I change the setting on the site to do 7+ move puzzles.

I don’t do well.

But, I got somewhat better.

There’s just something about chess games that perplexes me.  With shogi, I really had to get used to how pieces are not as well-defended as I think due to drops.  Normally think doing an exchange just leaves no better off, but the exchange with shogi gives pieces in hand that often use a single supporting piece to force mate.

The other thing that was more noticeable doing lots of mating puzzles was just how strong the knight is on offense.

Shadowfist spoiled a new card that seems like it’s a promo card based on expansion symbol, but the card kind of just completes a cycle started when IKG owned the game.  It’s rather bewildering why this card got spoiled at all as it’s highly underwhelming to players, never mind the typos.

The obvious connection is that the card is so middlin’ in nature that I’m not sure whether it’s trash, good for something, or filler.

I should really go mine my old emails for playtest experiences to have good examples of interesting things that come up in playtesting.  But, that requires getting on an old computer.

Horizon LLC is working on a new game.  We have a lot of work to do to make the game coherent.  We did use an online program to run through a playtest, and it was extremely useful for clearing up that we have lots of work to do on core mechanics.

While I’m routinely guilty of theorycrafting rather than actually playtesting cards or whatever, it does drive me nuts having been a serious playtester when all anyone does is theorycrafting.  Now, True Dungeon token development is extremely prone to theorycrafting as it’s not an easy game to playtest by any stretch.  Coop, dungeons vary, don’t know monster stats, party composition matters, player ability matters, people’s collections are very different.

For instance, people love to throw together sample builds using any tokens possible.  But, very, very few people have every token or access to every token.

RPG play is not immune to discovery that some things are much better or worse than they appear.  I didn’t think much of death duels, but they can be brutal.  They can also be a lot more interesting than I thought.

So, for instance, I was in a death duel not long ago with an IR-4 character with one rank in Iaijutsu and one rank of Kenjutsu.  Opponent rolled badly, but the more time I spent crunching numbers in my head not just because of that but because of a death duel another player had in a recent mod, the more that it occurred to me that you could lose the Focus roll by a significant amount and still have a huge advantage with these sorts of characters.  I actually lost Initiative by a single point (out of Void and Luck) and had to survive two attacks before killing my opponent with one of mine.

Sure, it’s trod ground.  But, reminders to be a bit more humble when it comes to analysis are warranted as it’s so easy to be lazy about analysis.  May not be able to mock up something or run numbers or whatever but can try to do things like think about whether some new build component will actually be better than what you can already do or whether there are counters to things or not.

I enjoy guessing too much to want to tediously crunch numbers to try to prove a point much of the time, but I respect the efforts people make to actually run the numbers.

Of course, lose respect for people who not only never do that but ignore people who do and just continue to make unsupported claims.

Not just games where things work differently than expect, but this is a path for me to avoid taking as it not only gets into things I know even less about but is too off topic for this blog.

The other thing that gets bothersome with the dismissive attitude towards so many game build components is that it’s boring to just play the same stuff all of the time.  Whether something is inferior or not isn’t the only reason to try something different out.  Lot of my problem with games like chess is that there seems to be just so few different things to do.  I imagine that if I played a lot of bridge, I’d find it very repetitive … but that’s just theorycrafting without support.  If I can enjoy mahjong still, should be able to enjoy other games with limited options.

More Morals

I think this is going to largely be new ground for me.

I know, how novel.

I am pro morality in RPG play.

Shadowrun and the like may have some sort of rebelling against corrupt or oppressive regimes, but I don’t feel it.  I just feel like committing crime to get rich.

Mercenary play of any type – don’t care.

Save people.  Build better communities.  Protect the innocents.

Because who cares about pursuing riches?  I don’t even do that in RL.  Now, this is nothing new, but …

Legend of the Five Rings is the RPG I play by far the most.  When you study the world, you realize that samurai aren’t the good guys.  Oh, they can be at times.  But, they are xenophobic, oppressive, callous, uncooperative, and quick to lethal violence.

And, yet, you can play as goodly folk … if you have a campaign that doesn’t get bogged down in the many morally nebulous areas of society.  Can just pretend your social inferiors don’t exist at all so don’t get bogged down in why peasants probably hate you for your arrogance, patronizing, etc.

Find monsters, murder them with extreme katananess.

Conan d20 was interesting for how we were definitely the bad guys sometimes, basically just mercenaries sometimes, but actual good guys on occasion in that we protected morally questionable societies from getting enslaved by demons.

It’s been ages since I played in that Feng Shui game, but it felt like we were trying to do good, whatever that means in a time war setting where everyone is trying to control reality.

I find so much about BattleTech really cool, but there are no good … factions.  Sure, there are goodly types in stories but it’s such a moral relativistic setting.  Just can’t escape that the hero of one group is the villain to another.  Mercenaries are held up as heroes and villains, much like ronin are held up as heroes or villains, but they are in a more realistic world that just isn’t idealistic enough for me.

And, I don’t need realism in my gaming.  I want to be the paladin [um, hybrid classed with rogue … as a sea-faring ambassador …].

I had this post idea before today’s Aberrant session.  My caregiver PC decided to murder … an evil, mass murdering dragon.  How often in RPGs does that take any actual decision?  Normally, of course you blow up the heads of your enemies – not only does that do a good job of stopping them from trying to kill you, but decapitation prevents them just coming back as undead to try to kill you later.

New games that don’t have PCs as heroes just doesn’t appeal to me.  Games that punish players for having their PCs try to do good things aggravate me.

While hardly perfect, Honor in L5R should always be something that should be pursued.  I can’t stand the concept of the Scorpion Clan because they aren’t even trying.  I have no interest in the Mantis being the “pirate clan” but kind of like them as the clan of the Thunder Dragon.

When L5R play is about the conflict between Honor and getting stuff done (like surviving), that also gets annoying.  Some conflict between better life and Honor is important as, if there’s no downside to doing the Honorable thing, then you aren’t really being good in any way.  You are still just maximizing utility.  But, when it’s just “fail or lose Honor” repeatedly – tedious.

Adventuring in Conan’s world works because there’s still some concept of being able to do good deeds.  Adventuring in Elric’s world could work the same, but, whenever I think about what a game in that world would look like, I just don’t feel it.  Of course, the world is so subservient to Elric that it has problems being appealing as a game fantasy setting.  Hawkmoon’s world feels similar in being all about a particular metaplot.  And, Corum’s.

Supers should be entirely about making the world better.  And, yet, much like playing rim of the galaxy scum in Star Wars, somehow people want to just bash things rather than actually try to improve the world.

A setting is not what people say it is but how it plays.  If sessions aren’t about doing good things, not actually goodly folk.  A dungeon-crawling paladin who just gets treasure minus 10% tithe is just a power set.

Sure, to have heroic adventuring (which all my play should be because there’s only so much time in one’s life) have to be heroes.

But, it’s just curious to me how little morality matters.  Why aren’t adventures about rescuing the hottie and saving the town and guarding the diplomat that will prevent the war?

I think it’s this lack of doing good deeds that makes my PBP play suboptimal.  HoR is okay.  Iron Empire campaign has me playing a Yasuki Courtier, yet still feel like trying to make things better.  Aberrant too often has a separation of what we are doing from why it’s a good thing – lot of time spent on worrying about mechanics rather than the narrative.

There is another aspect of morality.  So many times, people don’t care a lot about some PC dying.  Well, that’s because the PC was just some character sheet and not a hero.  When a hero dies, everyone should care … a lot.