Agreed, Geneforge was a masterpiece in a lot of ways. Even on an audiovisual level: sure it's cheap/indie, but it's so iconic that it's stuck in my brain. I can still hear those kids chanting, or the door noises/wind.
The short bits of music at the beginning were enough to get in your mind.
An older... tireder you?
Avernum 4 Remake and Queen's Wish 3
So he's gonna remake A4 before G3?
Picking Apart Baldur's Gate 3, Part 2 (Talkin' 'Bout D&D)
It turns out that game balance was a mistake all along.
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I’ve been doing some thinking and I’ve got some ideas to improve Dungeons & Dragons. One. Whenever Shadowheart’s not in the game, all the other characters should be asking, “Where’s Shadowheart?”
It's always a huge holiday for me when a turn-based, story-heavy RPG manages to break through and be popular with the Normals. This makes lots of new RPG fans. Then I can sell my games to them eventually, much as a catfish eats the scum at the bottom of a lake.
It's also a great opportunity to pick apart a good game's design. Find out what works and what doesn't work and what the state of the art is for RPGs right now. If a game sells well, that means every choice it made was correct, and you should pick over the carcass for ideas to steal with all speed.
Baldur's Gate 3, by Larian Studios, is a huge, sprawling game. It has a real "No wrong answers" feel, where just about every idea made it in somewhere. I want to spend a post or three picking apart the game system, pulling out specific structures and ideas, and looking at them in the light.
This will all be a bit disjointed with lots of small individual topics. But it's worth it, because this is a very interesting game.
Shadowheart should be louder, angrier, and have access to a time machine.
Taking A Wrench To Dungeons & Dragons
Of course, you can't talk about the gameplay without noticing it's an adaptation of Fifth Edition Dungeons & Dragons. (5E for short.)
I've played a ton of 5E over the last few years and find it to be basically well put-together and a lot of fun. I think adapting it to this game was a really smart idea. It teaches people to play D&D, lets experienced D&D players pretend they're in a campaign, and it gave Larian a game design to work with that is already polished, functional, and pretty fun.
Some people are going to yell at me for saying that. Certain people get really snooty and picky, and religious about tabletop role-playing game systems. And hating on D&D is very much the fashion of late.
However, like it or not, D&D is still the dominant role-playing game brand. It’s perfectly adequate. Aggressively perfectly adequate. Most people who play it would be surprised to find that anyone hates it (or that other RPGs exist at all).
Another game decided to use an existing game is Solasta: Crown of the Magister. It is basically 5E D&D, but an indie game, and it's a lot of fun and a big success. And, of course, there are the Pathfinder games.
Consider the possibility that making your own RPG system from scratch is a route for suckers. I mean, I'm going to keep doing it because it's fun and lets me shape the system to work better with the plot. But I still might be a sucker.
Potential results of drawing from the Deck of Many Things, the unquestionable best design in Dungeons & Dragons. Modern designers are biologically incapable of putting something this awesome in a game.
Getting To Rewrite D&D
The designers of Baldur's Gate 3 got a rare and precious opportunity, one to be much envied by generations of gaming nerds. They got to rewrite Dungeons & Dragons. (A full list of changes is here.)
Imagine that. Getting to take a wrench to any rules that are fiddly and annoying, and, if anyone complains, say, "Well, we had to do it to make a video game. LOL. Shrug emoji." It enabled them to slash a lot of stuff that was fine to lose but the tabletop designers would never give up willingly.
(Of course, I' don’t know anyone personally who works on BG3 or D&D. I’m just imagining the scenario that amuses me the most.)
As much as I enjoy it, 5E has a serious case of Modern Tightass Designer Syndrome. MTDS is when the designers are paralyzed with fear of their players having too much freedom. Or fun.
MTDS is when you balance and rebalance and add rule after rule to prevent unpredictability or eccentricity. The terminal case of this is World of Warcraft, where the power of all the artifacts you are questing for has basically been reduced to a single number.
The only thing that gives 5E any wild, anarchic energy is the need to keep design elements from ancient Dungeons & Dragons, 1980s energy, back when everything was overpowered and weird and we liked it that way.
One of the things I love about Larian is that their games never have MTDS. The spells you got in the Divinity: Original Sin games got stupidly overpowered and broken, which made them awesome.
frodo is OP nerf plz
A Good Example of MTDS
The main goal of D&D, of course, is to get lots of powerful magical artifacts so that your character is a badass and can trash bozos.
But too many magic items leads to power and unpredictability, and we can not have that. Because MTDS.
So current Dungeons & Dragons has something called "Attunement." Long story short, your character can only ever own three good magic items.
I linked to the attunement rules. They are delightfully overlong, overdetailed, and deranged, and I suggest you savor them.
To attune a magic item so that you can use it, you have to rest with it for hours. You have to sleep with your Helm of Radiance. Cuddle with it. Smooch it. Whisper sweet nothings to where its ear would be. Give it little tickles. I admit it is hilarious.
How To Romance Your Magic Item
I have sat at a table and tried to explain to people, actual friends and human beings, the attunement rule. "I just got an awesome item!" "You can't use it." "What!?" "Well, you can but you have to get rid of another awesome item." "But I LIKE my other awesome item." "That is how D&D works." "That is stupid!" "Yes."
(“BUt You CAN MAkE Up yOur OWn hoUsE ruleS!” Dude, these books aren’t cheap. Don’t make me design your stupid game for you.)
Of course, D&D is based in part on Lord of the Rings, so there is a precedent in place. Remember when Galadrial gave Frodo the Phial of Light but he had to get rid of it because he had a magic sword AND magic armor AND a magic ring? Yeah, me neither.
But implementing attunement in a computer game would be a confusing pain in the butt. So BG3 got rid of it. And guess what? THIS DOES NO HARM TO THE GAME WHATSOEVER.
Speaking of rules simplification, there’s no need for all those wizard spells. Wizards only need one spell.
A Lot Of Rules Constipation Was Cleared Away
BG3 trims away so much rules junk. They completely rewrote how short rests work, making them far simpler. They got rid of grappling, because grappling has always been stupid. Readying actions? GONE! Strength requirements for armor? GONE! The bizarre inability to cast multiple spells when hasted? GONE! Exhaustion. GONE. The cover system? GONE! (OK, as a lifelong wargamer, that last one hurts.)
Again ... Confusing, time-wasting grappling rules are gone. Ahhhh. When you say it enough times, it sounds like singing.
I didn't miss ANY of it. Except maybe… I really think there should be a cover system, but I played a whole 80 hour game without noticing they'd taken it out, so [shrug emoji].
I'm sure everyone at Wizards of the Coast who works on Actual D&D has played BG3 two times, which is good. I hope they take any rule change as a potential suggestion. There are a lot of changes that simplify things without costing fun or add interesting choices without overly increasing complexity. The only risk is that the players of your fantasy stabby game might actually feel powerful for a while.
Should all of the changes be kept? No, of course not. But it might be good to sacrifice a few sacred cows if I never have to explain to confused newbies any of the nonsense they chopped out again.
My first D&D rulebook had 48 pages for the WHOLE GAME. If you cut 3 or 4 pages out, you’d have the perfect length for the rules to D&D.
But It Won't Happen
It's very easy for a designer to get into a mindset where you don't want to let your players have too easy a time. Sometimes, when I'm writing a game, I start acting like a hardass and tacking on difficulty. But I've learned to, just before release, take a quick pass through all the bosses and make each one a little easier. A little sacrifice to the small gods of power fantasy.
The hardass mindset leads to too many rules. Just as writing is almost always improved by editing it down, just about any game system can be improved by chopping out a few rules. As the old writer's advice goes, "Kill your darlings."
So there. A bunch of rambling about D&D, adaptations, rules, and complexity. A lot more about Baldur's Gate 3 will come over the next few weeks.
This is startling to read when put so starkly, because in fact, Gary Gygax was not a fan of Tolkien's work at all. Yes, there is a lot of influence in the early editions, but that is due to The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings being pillars of popular fantasy at the time and also enjoyed renewed interest in the 1970's alongside the birth of D&D. But in an article about system design, it seems strange to make such a declaration when the original concept of D&D pen and paper gaming was largely not looking at LotR for mechanical inspiration.
yes. Don't believe Infinitron and his fake news.
I love the avernum 1-3 remake, but i didnt finish avernum 4. It really feel like "been there, done that" feeling and failed to capture the wonder for A1-3. 1 introduced you to avernum, 2 introduced you to vahnatai, 3 take the fight up to the empire. Feels like he didnt know how to escalate from there and the conflict feels flat. I was just like "oh is it gonna be the vahnatai again?" With the mysterious ghoul plot. (I actually didntt know who created the ghouls, i put like 20 hours and got bored)
Man, I remember loving the Nethergate opening music as a kid (only played the demo back then)
Gamer Deep Lore, Exhibit #1. The D&D "Blue Book"
Trying to figure out how to write game rules in real time.
https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https://substack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com/public/images/b55ea964-43aa-47ae-a18e-f00d5dd810e7_4032x3024.jpeg
This book caused more kids to worship satan than KISS and Lord of the Rings put together.
(I am hoping to do these for a while, because I have a ton of olde gaminge crappe, and going through it is a lot of fun. I’ll put them on Twitter and then put expanded versions here. I hope you enjoy these deep dives into the beginning of the medium.)
This was the first D&D book I ever owned. One day in 4th grade (in 1980), I walked into the classroom and saw some boys around a table playing a game with weird-shaped dice. I knew instantly, at a genetic level, that I wanted in.
That night, I begged my perents to take me to Waldenbooks. I spent $12 on the D&D basic set.
The rules were 48 pages for ALL of D&D. Honestly, they could have tightened it to 45 or so.
(Note level 1 clerics don’t get any spells. The book describes level 2 cleric spells, so I’m convinced this is a HIGHLY unfortunate typo.)
Basic D&D was its own separate rules system and went up to level 3. Elves, dwarves, etc. were covered under the same rules as "Fighting men."
The saving throw system was the same as for all of old D&D, but with a lot of weird vague. A "normal man" used the same chart as "Kobold", but there was a different cart for "Hobgoblin, etc."
"Et cetera" is really doing a lot of work here. What, precisely, is the difference between a goblin et cetera and a hobgoblin et cetera? And what is the difference between a goblin and hobgoblin, anyway? Besides 2 hit points?
Also, even though they only had 48 pages, they managed to find room for the asinine "Magic users roll to be able to learn spells" rules. But at least we know how effective your Magic User with 3 Intelligence will be.
I took a long time to learn how to write combat rules in a clear way that people could use. This jumble was pretty much all of the "how does combat actually WORK" section. Every group had their own homespun tangle of ways to actually run a fight. A lot of groups didn’t even uses boards and figures.
Also, combat was insanely lethal. They could not write a sample combat without some poor bastard dying.
Stupid Bruno. What an IDIOT.
Though they only had 48 pages, they still fully indulged D&D's weird fetish for cursed magic items. And amusing utility items that you use like two times and then die in a fight with 4 orcs because Rope of Climbing sucks.
They even fit in a sample dungeon, with the surreal scaling and blockiness common to all old D&D. (It's not realistic. But it PLAYS very well. Realism is dumb.)
And, of course, it was full of the charming, homespun old-RPG art. I love the drawing of the lizards stacked three high.
The second illustration is the only time women appear in this rulebook.
(Note nobody blinked twice about us 4th graders playing with a game book with bewbs in it. Ahhhh ... The 80s.)
(Note also the writing I added. “Rare” both times. For some reason, I decided to copy the monster rarities from the Monster Manual. I was a lonely child.)
Gamer Deep Lore, Exhibit #2. Fringeworthy.
How many hit points does your pancreas have? (Three.)
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My first edition copy, released 1982. This rare collectable is now worth … about as much as I originally paid for it.
This is my first edition copy of Fringeworthy, out in 1982. It was one of my favorite games, the first alternate world RPG.
Basically, each character was "Fringeworthy," so you could travel to alternate worlds. Where Hitler took over the world, or you had to marry a catgirl, or Cheetos were blue, or something like that.
This svelte blue book contained the entire game. I love short rules. We should bring those back.
Be sure to savor some of that tasty 80s game art.
It’s so rare that I feel truly represented in an RPG.
As short as the rules were, they had room to provide a comprehensive lesson in proper Game Master style. This advice is all pretty terrific.
You know those clickbait D&D Tweets with insane questions people ask all the time? "Is it OK for a DM to fudge rolls?" "One of my players stabs the other players in the arm with his pencil, is this ok?"
Believe it our not, people in the 80s weren't drooling idiots. We knew how to play well with others. We'd answered all those questions pretty much immediately.
(Also be sure to enjoy the art. It’s full of ups and downs, twists and turns. At the top, our hero enjoys a laser high-five with a cat girl. At the bottom, he’s going to fight an evil gumby with only a fire extinguisher.)
To provide tension to your Fringeworthy adventures, meet the Klingon of this universe: The Mellor. They start out as little zergs and grow up to be shape-shifting supergeniuses.
40 years later, they are still completely hilarious.
But let's get to the awesome part, the MEAT of Fringeworthy. The combat!
You ever hear a gamer say how fighting in RPGs should be more REALISTIC? Like, he took a fencing class and now he wants melee to have 73 different wrestling options or whatever?
Yeah. We tried that. Fringeworthy wanted to have the most realistic combat damage system EVAR. There are page after page of loving, insanely complex stats for every possible weapon. It goes on forever.
The Fringeworthy damage system is AWESOME. Suppose you get shot for 7 points of damage. You roll the exact location where you get hit. And then you apply that damage to skin, then bone, then organs, with each location saying the exact thickness of what you hit.
So every gamer wonders, "How many hit points do my genitals have?"
But only Fringeworthy has the COURAGE to answer that question.
(The answer is: 1.)
The problem with realistic combat is simple: If you get in a fight in Fringeworthy, you just die. You take 2 points of bladder damage, you can't pee anymore, and you DIE.
Which means a realistic combat system rapidly reduces to no combat system at all. Nobody wants that.
To see what I mean, here is a Fringeworthy sample adventure. Basically a one page frame for a role-playing session. (Yes, we had games like that in the 80s too.) It's neat and all, but not what most people want.
(And be sure to savor that cheapo line-printer font, beloved of low-budget 80s games everywhere.)
Avernum 4 sucks so much because Jeff could either rush it out or go bankrupt after Blades of Avernum flopped. The 3 shades holding cities hostage are just the fucking Shadowlords from Ultima V. According to playtesters and Jeff himself, Avernum 4 was a pilot for the new engine so story and gameplay came second and many testers guessed the "plot twist" around Formello but couldn't believe it because "Rentar-Ihrno returns for revenge!" plot was such a cliche in the Blades of Exile scenarios at the time.
Ditto, but I'm in the minority in thinking Resurrection is better. OG Nethergate is too rough around the edges, skill system is a mess (dexterity gives you more max HP than endurance, it's possible to stack so much dodging nothing can hit you in melee, javelins/slings are totally useless, berserk skill doesn't increase damage), combat is a mess (during endgame, the same goblins you fought at the beggining now die in 2 hits instead of 3, 95% of the time you fight spiders, goblins or fomorians, fights are either trivial or frustrating depending on if enemies can sling damage spells at you), equipment is a mess (many magic items don't work, armor is almost useless past early game even for Romans), magic is a mess (many spells are bugged and don't work, Romans make better druids than Celts as they can get the ultimate buff much earlier), XP is a mess (character traits have almost no effect on xp gain so get them all for everyone). Remake changes some things for worse but most things for the better. It helps that Nethergate was designed for the engine in mind, so you avoid the Avernumification decline that happened to the Exiles.
