In my upcoming Dungeons and Dragons game, Sands, Serpents, and Scales, I'm using a number of variant rules regarding daily power usage and healing surges. The reason being that with the style of narrative I'm using, it's more difficult to create Extended Rest time periods that conform to the dramatic narrative, which tends to run to the unhappy situation where every even remotely difficult encounter can be rendered irrelevant by dumping a whole bunch of daily attack powers. Whatever-that's not what's at issue here.
What's at issue here is that, reading the Vampire Preview, I find that the mechanics of the Vampire Class are actually remarkably similar to the mechanics that I'm utilizing-very few "daily" healing surges, but the ability to regain (or rather gain) healing surges upon successful attacks. In the utilized system (which can be found at http://sandserpentsscales.wikidot.com/chapter-based-gameplay ; I have the wiki set to open due to the complications of having my players sign up, so please don't abuse the wiki), characters get a certain number of healing surges per encounter. So, what does this have to do with the topic?
Well, in addition to making healing basically impossible when you have 10 encounters per day (or however many), many of whom are more than EL (yes-you level up more than once per "day"), characters are able to use daily powers less often than normal. To allow characters to "Nova" a little bit more often, you'll notice the Finishing Move rules. Once per encounter, a character can use a daily attack power at the cost of healing surges.
Surges per encounter are use them or lose them. That means that, if you're not damaged at the end of an encounter, or if you're damaged only such that one surge (along with the bard's Song of Rest capability-good choice, By the Way) and you have a pool of two surges left over, that's a wasted resource-a resource that, had you used them differently, perhaps you could have prevented someone else from having spent resources.
In a standard campaign, barring the knowledge that certain enemies are more powerful while bloodied (and as thus should be engineered to spend as little time being bloodied as possible), it's natural to unleash one's encounter powers up front, to be sure that you're doing "as much as possible." After all, if you hang on to your strongest attacks, there's a heavy chance you'll have basically wasted them. Daily powers are the same way, except that the calculations are based on whether or not the power will be available this encounter, or available next encounter-so the "Use it or lose it" sense doesn't trigger until the last encounter of an adventure.
Of course, a Killer DM (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/KillerGameMaster) may be a master at setting up "False" final battles for an adventure, perhaps throwing a Purple Worm encounter on the way back home. This distorts how much information a player has for making decisions about when to use powers or not, but that's more an issue of Transparency As It Relates To Game Theory (of which I'm sure there are many books on the subject that I am only semi-qualified to even comment on).
But the interesting point is that we're looking at a binary state of Use or Don't Use as it pertains to being Wasted or Not Wasted. When you have something like the new Vampire Class that can utilize healing surges to power other abilities, suddenly, spending a healing surge isn't just an issue of whether you heal or not-it's the opportunity cost of those options you no longer have. Likewise, with the aforementioned Finishing Move rules, the information about how much those surges costs you changes over the course of a battle.
That's the beauty about having multiple Use it or Lose It resources that can interact together in different ways. Instead of dropping Fireball (a 2 surge Finisher) in the first round because, if you don't, you lose the ability to use a finishing move for that encounter, you wait to see just how valuable two surges are going to be to you over the course of the encounter. So if, as the fight is winding down to a close, you notice "Holy crap, I'm at full health and have two encounter surges left and haven't used my finishing move," you know that the opportunity cost of using Fireball goes from "Healing myself to full or not" to "Jack Squat."
They're called Finishing Moves for a reason.
Showing posts with label Game Design. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Game Design. Show all posts
Friday, April 8, 2011
Overlooked: Dungeon Master Spotlight
http://www.wizards.com/DnD/Article.aspx?x=dnd/4ll/20110405 <- Read that Article. Now tell me, what is Mearls forgetting here?
It's certainly true that balance isn't about how much DPR one character deals compared to another, but about how every character feels that they're contributing equally. But I think what Mearls is overlooking is that balance is not just described between different character classes, but also between the party and the Dungeon Master.
If the Wizard blows up armies, the Fighter has duels, and the Bard talks everyone out of forming armies and starting duels in the first place, then those are "Spotlights" for each of them. And the intensity of each spotlight, and frequency of each spotlight, can be measured against one another (Unfortunately, I'd love to use the word frequency to refer to the "color" of the spotlight to better serve the analogy, but it serves better in terms of "how often" here. Sadness).
OF course, it's comparing apples to oranges. A Red Spotlight is not the same thing as a Blue Spotlight, and who knows when the social skills character feels like he's contributed (I'll have an article on that later). But there is one thing that we can look at: the intensity of red, blue, and green taken together, let's just call it white. If each of those lights have an intensity of one, they're balanced against each other. If each of them has an intensity of three, they're balanced against each other. But a white light of intensity one, is not the same thing as a white light of intensity three.
It's very easy to give every player their own "I Win" button, and have them hit it at a relatively fixed frequency. You build a game like that, and every player feels balanced with every other player (at least in theory). But the game isn't just five players-there's also a Dungeon Master involved.
An argument can be made that "If the Dungeon Master wants to win then he should probably be a player, now shouldn't he? The Dungeon Master has to be the one who provides the spotlights, not the one who competes with them." I understand where this argument is coming from, but it's losing sight of the issue. If the balance of the Dungeon Master is rejected entirely, it doesn't matter what the net sum of intensity of balance between the players is. When you account for the balance between players and DM, the overall "difficulty" of the campaign, you have enough information that you can get closer to the "Perfect Game Formula" that we're all striving for.
After all, my redesigns to Solo Monsters aren't intended to rebalance Defenders and Controllers versus strikers-after all, Controllers and Defenders both lost out pretty substantially, and I'd already mentioned that Strikers gain a pretty substantial benefit in fighting solo monsters as is!-but rather in Party/Monster dynamics. It's not enough for the PCs to each be overcoming the same amount of challenges-they have to feel like they're being challenged and, just as important, the Dungeon Master has to feel like he is challenging them.
As a DM with a somewhat "Railsy" style of gameplay, I occasionally hear complaints (from people not in my campaigns) that "If I wanted to follow a linear story, I'd just go play a CRPG." But likewise, if there's no one interested in enjoying the Dungeon Master's side of the story, you really are playing a computer game. And no, Asimov, I Not Robot.
It's certainly true that balance isn't about how much DPR one character deals compared to another, but about how every character feels that they're contributing equally. But I think what Mearls is overlooking is that balance is not just described between different character classes, but also between the party and the Dungeon Master.
If the Wizard blows up armies, the Fighter has duels, and the Bard talks everyone out of forming armies and starting duels in the first place, then those are "Spotlights" for each of them. And the intensity of each spotlight, and frequency of each spotlight, can be measured against one another (Unfortunately, I'd love to use the word frequency to refer to the "color" of the spotlight to better serve the analogy, but it serves better in terms of "how often" here. Sadness).
OF course, it's comparing apples to oranges. A Red Spotlight is not the same thing as a Blue Spotlight, and who knows when the social skills character feels like he's contributed (I'll have an article on that later). But there is one thing that we can look at: the intensity of red, blue, and green taken together, let's just call it white. If each of those lights have an intensity of one, they're balanced against each other. If each of them has an intensity of three, they're balanced against each other. But a white light of intensity one, is not the same thing as a white light of intensity three.
It's very easy to give every player their own "I Win" button, and have them hit it at a relatively fixed frequency. You build a game like that, and every player feels balanced with every other player (at least in theory). But the game isn't just five players-there's also a Dungeon Master involved.
An argument can be made that "If the Dungeon Master wants to win then he should probably be a player, now shouldn't he? The Dungeon Master has to be the one who provides the spotlights, not the one who competes with them." I understand where this argument is coming from, but it's losing sight of the issue. If the balance of the Dungeon Master is rejected entirely, it doesn't matter what the net sum of intensity of balance between the players is. When you account for the balance between players and DM, the overall "difficulty" of the campaign, you have enough information that you can get closer to the "Perfect Game Formula" that we're all striving for.
After all, my redesigns to Solo Monsters aren't intended to rebalance Defenders and Controllers versus strikers-after all, Controllers and Defenders both lost out pretty substantially, and I'd already mentioned that Strikers gain a pretty substantial benefit in fighting solo monsters as is!-but rather in Party/Monster dynamics. It's not enough for the PCs to each be overcoming the same amount of challenges-they have to feel like they're being challenged and, just as important, the Dungeon Master has to feel like he is challenging them.
As a DM with a somewhat "Railsy" style of gameplay, I occasionally hear complaints (from people not in my campaigns) that "If I wanted to follow a linear story, I'd just go play a CRPG." But likewise, if there's no one interested in enjoying the Dungeon Master's side of the story, you really are playing a computer game. And no, Asimov, I Not Robot.
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