Initiative in the Computer Age
By The Warden
This hobby is built on imagination and the limitless potential our minds can exact with nothing more than an idea and the right words to describe them. Without imagination, the role-playing game would be nothing more than a miniature wargame or even worse, a figment of the past.
Yet imagination alone does not make for a successful role-playing game. As much as we dream of a cohesive experience, we’re no more evolved than children in the schoolyard when it comes to how we imagine ourselves as truly awesome heroes. For that, we need rules and, for the purpose of this column, we need mechanics. Without them, our games would be a non-stop parade of “Nuh-uh, your bullets are no match for my psychic energy shield of Infinity.”
Mechanics play an interesting role in our games, but what has always fascinated me is the interpretation of mechanics. Your typical RPG contains hundreds of pages of material on character creation, combat simulation, enhancements, antagonists, and more, yet regardless of how many hundreds of thousands of words a designer pours into her mechanics, there are dozens of translations and questions of uncertainty spawning that most dreadful of inventions, the errata. As RPGs have grown up with us and diverged into thousands of offshoots derived from the original (and infamous) Dungeons & Dragons, we as a population have made our games so complex and diverse between each group playing the same game. One player’s view on a game varies greatly from another player at an adjoining table in the same con, only to get into furious debates with fans of previous or later editions, other publishers, rule sets, and more, spoken with such fervor as if they were at a political rally. These differences in opinion built from the same words are what drive me to write this column.
Who am I? You can call me the Warden for the sheer reason as it’s much cooler than my real name and cyberspace is no place for reality. I write this column for all the RPG geeks out there with more dice than they could possibly use in a single game pursuing the same goal as mine: to design the latest, greatest role-playing game. For the past year, I have been working tirelessly (in my opinion) on creating a new universal RPG system and some of that process involves the study of what came before me. Through the course of this past year, I’ve also paid attention to the reaction of its fans and found myself amazed at the variety of opinions and applications from those playing the same game. This ability to create hundreds of unique games using the same text is what makes a role-playing game truly unique in any genre of entertainment, both good and evil. For every positive note, there is an equally negative remark. Countless hours of our personal lives are spent away from the table debating the merits of a game’s accuracy, versatility, and expansion through blogs, forums, even entire books on the subject, some of which result in terrible name-calling and insults as if someone referred to their mother’s fat ass.
That’s what “Under The Hood” is all about: a look at the mechanics of role-playing games and their impact on the community as a whole, be they individual games or the entire concept of role-playing in all its forms. By its very nature, this column may invoke criticism, but that’s not the reason why I’m writing this. A writer must know his audience and, to me, that’s exactly what I’m attempting. It will never be my intention to provoke or belittle, only to engage. Everything you will read in this column will not be the same experience as your own and that is exactly the point. This column is about the interpretation of mechanics and how they have impacted the industry over these near forty years. More importantly, it is an editorial on the role of mechanics in RPGs and should be taken as such. My experience in writing this column comes as a fan of the genre rather than as a publisher (no matter how minor a role my work has played in the greater picture and I can assure you, it’s minor). It carries as much weight as everyone else who enjoys the idea of playing unlimited characters.
Let’s begin, shall we?
PATHFINDER GOES MMO
Just over two weeks ago, Paizo Publishing announced the formation of a new company, Goblinworks, and its flagship product, Pathfinder Online. The Pathfinder community was all atwitter with tweets and with very good reason. Over the past couple of years, Paizo has done what may have been considered foolish or risky in taking an existing license and making it their own. What started as a magazine publisher working in co-operation with Wizards of the Coast and the D&D brand became a powerhouse in its own right. With the unveiling of the Pathfinder MMO, they are now a truly independent force to be reckoned with.
There’s no denying the impact of computer games, particularly MMOs, in comparison to tabletop RPGs. While the standards of nearly all computer games rely on the traditions set down by games such as D&D – hit points as the prime example – these games are viewed as the majority in today’s market. If I tell people I’m playing a RPG this weekend, they assume Skyrim or WoW. Taking your tabletop game online is definitely the measure of success for designers and publishers today.
(Not only that, but Goblinworks and the MMO appear to be in very stable hands with names like Ryan Dancey, the very person without whom Paizo wouldn’t be able to publish the Pathfinder we know today. He’s the man responsible for the Open Gaming
Remember this little icon?
License allowing 3rd-party publishers to publish their own D&D material, thereby making it legally accessible for Paizo to pick up the 3rd edition of D&D when WotC climbed the 4e mountain. Since his tenure with Wizards ended, he’s been working with CCP and EVE Online and hinted at his involvement on a new top secret MMO during his recent interview with the Fear the Boot podcast. Knowing that MMO was Pathfinder Online seems all too fitting.)
The biggest question remains how much of Pathfinder’s tabletop mechanics will remain in their MMO. To start with, Pathfinder Online will not be OGL compatible. The setting, Golarion, will remain in a manner befitting this detailed locale, but what of the mechanics themselves? On Wednesday, Goblinworks talked about building an MMO through shortcuts called “middleware.”
“Until recently, every MMO was built from the ground up—every significant system was created by that MMO’s developers. The clients, the servers, and all the “glue” that makes an MMO work had to be created, integrated and maintained by the development team. This is expensive. It requires a lot of time. And it’s risky—you’re making a bet that your team can solve a lot of problems of security, privacy, scale, and exploit protection in the face of a growing community that has become expert at attacking these kinds of systems.
“But there has been a recent sea-change in the market. Now it is possible to license middleware—the software that does many of these key functions—from companies that have battle-tested it in released games. The burden has been lifted from the shoulders of the game design teams, allowing them to focus on what they do best: create innovative and engaging game designs populated by interesting and visually stunning landscapes, characters, buildings and creatures. Thanks to middleware, it’s now possible to create a working internal prototype of an MMO in a matter of months.
“We are negotiating with several middleware vendors, and once we’ve finalized things, we’ll be talking more about the capabilities of specific software and how it will be used in Pathfinder Online. But all of the options we’re considering will give us state-of-the-art technology without the high upfront cost for design and development, or the ongoing cost of maintenance and upgrades.”
Ryan Dancey, Goblinworks CEO
From the Goblinworks Official Blog
Using middleware to create a cost-effective and world-focussed MMO makes perfect sense when competing with an incredibly flooded market, but rare are the computer versions of our favorite tabletops are the exception to the norm.
FROM DICE TO COMPUTER
I’m sure most of us experienced RPGs as computer games and there’s a fair notion anyone in my age range (35-40) learned about their tabletop cousins by playing the old AD&D computer games developed by SSI. My favorites were Dungeon Hack and its twin console game, Slayer, for the failed 3DO system. In those early days of big pixels, tabletop conversions were fairly accurate to the original game. All characters were divided into turns from which a single player controlling the entire party would click on icons to designate what they would do in a particular round. Spells, magic items, races, and classes worked just as they did in the books.
In time, the capabilities of home computers resulted in more than just better graphics. Processors could perform the simple calculations of a standard dice roll in milliseconds and RPGs had to compete with first-person shooters to get the sales needed to make the expenses viable. These upgrades resulted in computer RPGs drawing on tabletop RPGs for inspiration only and, in some cases, name only.
Take the recent Facebook game, Heroes of Neverwinter, as expressed by the review on EN World.
“Using a turn-based combat and a tabletop view with a grid map, the developers of D&D: Heroes of Neverwinter were well on their way to create a much updated version of the “Gold Box” engine that successfully powered a dozen AD&D computer game titles in the bygone days. The spells and powers of each class are specifically detailed, and ready to be programmed into the game engine in order to create an authentic D&D 4E experience -a game which has already been playtested and revised for over two years now by WotC and its fans. Building an authentic-feeling adventure should have been a snap with rules for encounter design and monster archetypes specifically designed to work versus the characters’ powers and spells.
But for some reason, all that was thrown by the wayside, as the developers of D&D: Heroes of Neverwinter decided to re-invent the D&D wheel, and create their own interpretation of what 4E is all about.”
Review of Heroes of Neverwinter (Facebook App) by Atari
By Mike “Neuroglyph” Evans for EN World
And speaking of EN World, their own War of the Burning Sky saga is in development as its own MMO developed through GSG Systems and includes an OGL logo as well as a link to the OGL text on their website. Same with the spearheading DDO (Dungeons & Dragons Online) with similar 3rd edition character stats. But in this way, character concepts can be sure to remain, but what about those dynamic conditions such as attacks of opportunity?
Perhaps the only recent (meaning within the last 10 years) translation may be D&D Tactics for the PSP released by Kuju Entertainment, taking not only the essentials of 3.5 but the entire threshold of the game and presenting it in a portable gaming format. Only by providing the game as a turn-based simulator was it able to make a direct translation from tabletop to video game and this bring us today’s topic.
HOW INITIATIVE RULES SUCK ONLINE
All this talk about computers in our RPGs brings up one key factor as to why they will never play out the same as they do at the table: initiative. Every tabletop game uses one tool to settle players into a calm, organized flow of an otherwise chaotic series of swings, spells, and misfires. Initiative is what keeps our games pleasant as we all sit around staring at each other, flipping through pages of materials, ducking heads under the table when that pesky dice rolls on the floor, or debating the legalities of a rule with the GM. While we’re all still trying to remember what’s the DC for an Acrobatics check made to roll over top of a dropped item and snatch it for yourself, your PS3 has already figured out all the math and dished out 67 points of damage on your sorry ass with that ogre rampaging over the hill. Oops.
Speed is something computer RPGs have in spades and with multi-player options and online campaigns, everyone can sit comfortably at home, soft drink in hand, going at your own pace as quickly as your fingers can react to danger. Our brains and mouths can’t possibly keep up with the processing power of computers.
Initiative as a mechanic has always been a necessary evil to get to the fun. Providing an initiative mechanic remains one of the standards since RPGs began; determine how fast your character is at the start of an event, particularly combat, and just run with that order until the event has passed. While many games or optional rules encourage rolling initiative every round, this is often relegated to the single initiative roll for “simplicity.” Sure, there are rules to delaying your character’s turn and jump in at a later time, but what you roll, draw, or choose will remain with you through thick or thin. In this way, initiative can be your first and most important result.
This mechanic does not translate into narrative storytelling. If you were to write out an action sequence based on the delivery of an RPG combat scene, you’d be all over the place, jumping from one character to the next without a solid connection between successive rolls and effects. In the majority of games, characters have one attack per turn. Can you recall a book where each character makes a single strike per paragraph throughout the entire book?
Then how else should we organize player actions? That’s the million dollar question and the answer is normally an offshoot of the core mechanic. Rolling at the start of each round, adding personal initiative modifiers for characters built faster, interrupting actions, and others are viabilities to the tried and true original for one damn good reason. Some nerds are so hopped up on caffeine/sugar/the game, they’ll hog the entire fight if they’re not reeled in.
I played with a guy back in high school who memorized the entire AD&D Monstrous Manual the way preachers master the Bible. His adrenaline level during a game was to the point of rabies, eager to shout out a descriptive detail of his character well outside of his turn. The only way such a character could viably carry out so many actions would be with a speed of 200 ft. per turn and a Dexterity of 35 plus the Wisdom of a god. We finally stopped playing with him when an excited cry for battle launched a spitwad onto the DM’s prized map of Castle Ravenloft. Original mint condition, until the Loogie Incident.
Initiative mechanics work perfectly within the parameter of our shared co-operation. If we spend too much time figuring out where our characters will act in a round, we’ll have no clue what they’ll do when they get there. Unless initiative is built into the game as an equal measure to attacks and defense, it’s the bell signaling dinner’s on the table.
That may be a flaw compared to computers, but there’s a major benefit no console can best. Initiative gives you time to ponder your next move. It puts chess into your RPG. Accepting your character’s role in the scheme of things, you can use it and the time you have between turns to calculate your best power, formulate the odds of success on a skill check, and discuss tactics with allies without the bugger of wasting a full minute wailing on a specter before realizing your weapon doesn’t harm spectral undead.
A THOUGHT ON PATHFINDER’S MECHANICS
So the question remains. Will a Pathfinder MMO truly present the Pathfinder everyone knows without using the Pathfinder mechanics? By this, it’s safe to assume there will still be paladins, fighters, wizards, and rogues, but their core abilities and experience may yet be different from what we play at the table. This question then begs yet another. Without the mechanics, what is Pathfinder other than a D&D clone? Can you take another game’s rules and mix in the Pathfinder setting to the same effect? And if the answer is yes, then what exactly is it about Pathfinder as a whole that makes it such a value to those who play it?
Without any concept of how Pathfinder Online will present itself, these questions are nothing more than theoretical exercises in futility. However Goblinworks (and Paizo) choose to provide online gamers with Golarion and its inhabitants, I have no doubt it will be the best means possible. As for the tabletop version, it does make me stop and think about the Pathfinder RPG tome sitting on my bookshelf.
Just how much of Pathfinder’s mechanics are essential to the success of the game? It’s an incredibly relevant question since so much of the furor surrounding Pathfinder has been its selection of OGL mechanics. As a player of both Pathfinder and Pathfinder Online, will my halfling rogue have the same feel from one platform to another? And with that can of worms open, is it at all possible that Pathfinder Online may yet be the awakening of a new Pathfinder RPG? A Pathfinder 2nd edition, you might say. Or does it truly come down to Paizo and its handling of the Pathfinder brand as their strength rather than as game designers?
Time will certainly tell.
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