I might be on the Mantic stand at some stage but will otherwise be wandering about. Just in case anyone wants to say hi

Price rises, or, more specifically, GW’s annual price rise is bubbling on the forums. There was a link, but it’s been altered so that it doesn’t work. However, the basic scuttlebutt is that GW supposedly mentioned their price rise in 2 lines of a deeply embedded page, several links down their site. Copies of what purport to be the US trader’s new retail price list are kicking about with some scary % increases. Supposedly the non-US retailers have heard nothing of this. Whether it is real or nonsense is anyone’s guess.

Actually, I don’t think I care.

GW is a business and it’s been about for a while now. They don’t always make what I regard as sane decisions, but that’s their lookout. They’ve raised their prices many times before, and more than once it’s been by many times the rate of inflation. The forums will be full of angry fans and some will doubtless ragequit (only to slink back later as the cold turkey kicks in).

A few will abandon GW. Most will not.

This entirely predictable (and frankly dull) fury has been a routine event for decades. I recall the far off days when GW decided to put all their models in blister packs (and bump the price hugely in the process). There was an outcry then, and that was before the internet. It would be a regular firestorm if it happened now. But none of this stopped them from becoming a £100 million+ turnover business so they must be doing something right. Right?

Well the point I am pondering (and I do have a sort of point) is that this is all entirely futile.

If GW cared what people think of their price rises then they would have changed their behaviour long ago. One is left to assume that they don’t think their customer’s opinions matter in this regard, and as they keep turning a profit who’s to argue?

What I am curious about is when someone is going to come up with a way to actually make them pay attention, or even try to. I’ve no idea what this way might be, though with so many new concepts for mass organisation and action emerging over the last few years (facebook, crowdfunding, flash mobs, etc), all enabled by new technology, I expect someone to come up with something soon. And when they do it won’t only apply to GW. Just imagine if we could actually make the petrol prices sane

And before I am accused of GW-basing, I have to say I’m really just a mainly disinterested observer. Currently the only game of theirs that I’d play is Blood Bowl, though I might use some of their models for other things. That said, having seen many Finecast models and knowing something of the process, I do not own any and have no expectation of ever getting any. They make some nice hard plastics, but they’re available on Ebay

I’m just bored of the same old arguments, and the utter predictability of it all. Even posts like this complaining about the predictability of it all are becoming predictable.

Feel the irony.

This topic just rumbles on and on, but unfortunately the arguments have grown stale. All I’m hearing is the same tired points again and again, and I’ve refuted them repeatedly already.

It is still obvious to me that allowing pre-measuring enables certain people to be almost unbeatable, and removes a raft of characterful and appropriate uncertainty to your (pretend) general’s role. Quite apart form the loss of story.

I am entirely aware that some folk do not agree, and that’s fine. However, telling me I am wrong without any actual reasoning will not convince me. If you think I should change my tune then you’ll have to come up with some evidence and reasoned argument rather than just emotive language. I’m quite capable of revising my position on things if someone can explain why I should.

But let’s try again to step back a little and look at the arguments in a bit more of a rational light – acknowledging that we have come to a sort of religion versus rationalism point in the debate. Firstly, I’d recommend that you re-read my original post as most of the core points are covered there.

Secondly, I’m going to take a comment from Kevin Wesselby that he posted to the end of the last DT article on pre-measuring. This is a fairly typical statement of the “pro” lobby’s arguments, and stands not just for Kevin, but for a number of comments and discussions I’ve had with folk.

Before I start, I’d like to say once again, that you should play whichever games you find suit you and your friends the best. This post is about design theory, as the title says, and theory and practice are not always the same thing. There are many other things that affect whether a game is worth playing, and whether it is perfectly designed or not comes some way down that list. And that assumes that I would know what perfect design was, which I don’t. However, I do have several decades of experience, and if you look at the reviews of my games they seldom have much criticism of the design, so I like to think that I’ve got a reasonable understanding of the basics as well as the arguments for and against.

Anyway, back to my stalking horse. Kevin’s comment is in italics, and is reprinted here in full. I’ve interpolated my comments in red.

Kevin: I believe a good wargame should JUST focus on the intellectual decisions of the players representatives. That’s why we have specified distances and % chance of success.

Jake: Well you obviously include luck as well as intellectual decisions because you mention % chance of success. If it was to JUST focus on intellectual decisions as you say then you would have no dice rolls, card draws or anything else uncertain or luck-based. In other words, you’d be playing something like chess with a fixed board, set armies and a fixed set of movements and attacks.  If I want to play chess then I play chess. I play tabletop games on terrain and not on a gridded board for a different experience. Pre-measuring seems to me to be a way of trying to introduce some of a board game’s gridded board certainty into a game without a gridded board. Whilst there is often experimental value in moving elements across genres, I can’t see that this would be a good thing in general as it denies an essential feature of tabletop gaming as a whole.

Kevin: Guess range weapons just give unfair advantages to those people that are better at guessing ranges. (FACT)

Jake: Perhaps, though that is only half the story. You have conveniently forgotten to say that pre-measuring gives an unfair advantage to those people that are better at geometry (FACT). And anyway, is this “unfair” in either case?

Kevin: Can I ask for all close combat resolution to be ‘arm wrestle your opponent?’As having a good arm I could use this as my advantage to cancel out your ability to guess ranges better than me! (lol)

Jake: you could ask

Kevin: I prefer rule sets that ‘level the playing field.’

Jake: so do I. We just define that differently.

Kevin: Wargaming is an intellectual pursuit, totally devoid of the physical trauma of warfare. And therefore physical skills should not really be utilised (apart from rolling light plastic dice, and moving miniatures.)

Jake: well that’s your opinion, not a fact. Whilst you are right that wargaming is an intellectual pursuit, I can’t see that guessing a range is anything but an intellectual skill. It’s certainly not a physical one unless I’m using parts of my body as rulers (which is generally frowned upon). So you seem to be arguing against yourself.

Kevin: As already said dice rolls can generate the ‘randomness’.(EG roll for scatter/malfunction.) So why do you want to put in a resolution method that IS unbalancing and makes accurate costing impossible?

How do you cost a guess range weapon/unit accurately?

Jake: again, you just use emotive language without actually dealing with the issues. The why is discussed in the original article and above. In terms of accurate costing, guessing ranges is not the main problem here, though it is related to it. The most difficult thing to cost in a points system is the fact (or should that be FACT) that different players, with different skill and experience, get more or less value out of the same unit. Units are also more or less effective against other armies, or more accurately against certain builds of certain armies. So how do I point a unit? Against a better player, a worse one, one with more experience or one who has built his army to nullify these troops a given unit will be worth more or less. Guessing ranges is the least of your worries.

Kevin: And WHY artificially restrict the gamers with poor range guessing skills to non guess range weapons/units?

Jake: if people want to limit themselves then that’s their decision. I’ve not yet met anyone (without a medical condition such as dyscalcula) who couldn’t improve their skill at estimating ranges once they gave themselves a few minutes to practice. I have met plenty of people who said they couldn’t do it until we got some models on the table and had them spend 10 minutes doing it (whereupon they suddenly could).

I think that what is happening here is simple.

The game-breaking and unpleasant experience of playing against people who are very good at geometry in games that allow pre-measuring is not common. When you’ve had that experience I can guarantee you won’t be a proponent of the concept. It reduces a game to a maths lesson, entirely free of story and fun. One side simply has zero chance.

Far more common than this is the situation of someone giving up before they try with guessing ranges. Perhaps it’s the spectre of failure, as I suggested before. Perhaps I’m wrong and there’s something else going on, but there are far more people claiming to be bad at guessing than really are. And I say that based on having run hundreds of demo games, and seen this happen many times. Once people get over this initial hump and just get on with it then they are fine.

(Incidentally, the reason they are fine is that being able to estimate a simple distance is a hard-wired survival skill for humans, whereas geometry is not.)

The reason for this situation is that games that do not allow pre-measuring require you to confront this often. Typically you will need to estimate a range as soon as you want to make a charge or shoot an enemy. Pre-measuring games, on the other hand, hide the real strength of that feature away. The vast majority of people I see playing games that allow pre-measuring seldom use it, and few explore its real potential. Whether this is because they are unfamiliar, complacent or simply fail to realise the advantages they are passing up, I don’t know. Whatever the cause, the irony is that many games that allow pre-measuring are played out as if they didn’t simply because the players don’t use it.

Q = Question

A = Answer

D = Discussion.

I’ll start by answering the ones that Donner posted on another item.

Q: Can a Corporation model reaction fire at a Veer-myn that moves into a square adjacent to him? Say the Veer-myn has dodged and is trying to move back into position.

A: No, you cannot reaction fire at a model in a square adjacent to a Corporation model. See the fourth paragraph on page 6.

However, in your example, if the Veer-myn had dodged away to a non-adjacent square before dodging back, you could have reaction fired against it in the square it originally dodged to. That is, assuming you thought to do it before he continued his movement.

D: Reaction Fire is a type of shoot action and you cannot take a shoot action against a model adjacent to a Corporation trooper (including yourself). People sometimes get muddled up with Panic Fire, but the main reason Panic Fire is called something different is that different rules apply. Reaction Fire says that it uses all the normal rules apart from the fact that you can interrupt the other player’s turn. 

Q: Can a Corporation model shoot at a Veer-myn in an adjacent square using a shoot action instead of fighting with a movement action?

A: No.

He can either fight it in melee or Panic Fire against it or try to Break Off, all of which will cost a movement action.

D: The reasons for this are to encourage players to think more carefully about which action tokens to use and in what sequence. By grouping their functions it helps clarify the difference between the combat value of shoot actions (useful at a distance) and movement ones (useful up close), and understanding this makes it easier to plan your action token usage.

Q: Can a Corporation model shoot at a distant Veer-myn if there is another Veer-myn adjacent to him (the shooter)?

A: Yes.

D: It may seem odd at first that you can shoot at a distant model but not one close up, but I allow it for a number of reasons. Firstly, with long weapons like rifles, their sheer size makes them tricky to use close in. This is why real world assault troops such as SAS break in teams don’t use them. In Panic Fire you specifically step back to make room to use your weapon.

Shooting at someone some a distance away, attacking a friend, is easier in one sense because there is room to aim and point your weapon. Of course, you have to ignore the attacker breathing down your neck, but holding off a rampaging Veer-myn with one hand while pumping shots into another and thus saving your mate from certain death is a cinematic and heroic image which I thought fitted the Corporation elite of Unit 17 perfectly. As I tend to think of my games as movies first, it was inevitable that this sort of detail would sneak in.

If you have a question, please post it here and I’ll add it in

I think this comes from the natural flow of the creative process as a whole, and this applies to all creative endeavours, not just game design. You start with a (metaphorical or occasionally literal) blank canvas. Anything is possible. Your first brushstroke, design decision or line of text begins the process of limiting what you can do next. Every additional mark you make brings the walls further in until you are completely restricted in a tiny space and the endless vistas of where you began are but dimly remembered. Dimly, but fondly. Why can’t you keep that freedom? Well, you can’t because it is the antithesis of a finished creation.

However, the natural tendency of creative people seems to be to try and put as much as they possibly can into a design before they finish. Learning restraint and to stand back is something that only comes with time and experience. A good way to see this is to look at the work of acknowledged master painters over their lives. The majority get vaguer and simpler over the years, abandoning an early attempt to capture every nuance in a photographic manner and replacing it with a feeling of the sense of a subject rather than every detail. This is a much bigger subject that I’ll cover here, but suffice to say that Rembrandt, Turner, Matisse et al are following the same principle as people do in design – they start out trying to put in every detail and gradually learn what to leave out.

I’ve written about this before from other angles, and this isn’t intended to replace those articles, merely shine a light on the same topic from another angle. Language isn’t especially good at describing the creative process (a left and right brain discussion for another day), so trying several approaches gives me the best chance of explaining what I mean.

To come back to game design, I find myself prone to this as much as most folk, though definitely less than I used to. I’ve also learned to let go of things much quicker and by experience learned what to keep and develop and what to save for another day. At least, I’ve learned to be a lot better at that. I’m sure there will be room for improvement for many years yet

So, an example. The most recent design I can talk about publicly is Project Pandora: Grim Cargo, so let’s use something from that. In Pandora you determine what you can do in your turn by playing an action token. There are several different types of token, most are different and several are unique to one side or the other. This allows for a lot of character to be built into the way a side plays. However, there used to be even more and I took it out. What? Taking out character? I grant you, this is exactly the opposite of what I normally do, which is why it’s a good illustration of how sometimes simplifying the way a game works can be the most important consideration and overwrites your normal priorities. You all know how much I like every side to have a strong character and different play style, right? So you can see that I might have had a natural resistance to making this change. You see, my first version of the action tokens had the same mix of actions on them, and almost the same combinations. However, the critical difference was that they had to be done in a set order. This was an attempt to build in the combat doctrine of the different forces and show that the Corporation were organised and well trained, so suppressed their opponents before moving (for example), whereas the Veer-myn were rather more uncoordinated and random, with a mixture of different sequences in their moves. It worked, certainly, but not particularly well. It was not a complicated rule, but it restricted the player in a way which was irritating because it was commonly forgotten in the heat of battle, only to be noticed 2 moves later when it was awkward or impossible to “wind back the clock”. I still like the idea of including the doctrine and tactical training as a restriction on the way people play their forces and I’ll try it again somewhere else, but in Pandora this rule produced only a slight benefit in return for a considerable annoyance, so I took it out and the whole thing flowed much more smoothly.

So was that dumbing it down, or was it simplifying it?

Dumbing down is an emotive cry, beloved of those who haven’t played the new edition of an old favourite, but confident nonetheless that everything will be bad. It will have been simplified and that is terrible. The majority of times I’ve seen this comment on forums it has been made by people who are not discussing the game in question in any serious way, merely slinging mud. However, that does not mean that the term “dumbing down” cannot be used reasonably. If we take it to mean something has been simplified for the sole purpose of making it appeal to a broader/less critical/less intelligent?/more inexperienced/mass audience, then this clearly does happen. Sadly the overuse of the term greatly reduces its usefulness and impact.

Simplifying is a far less emotive comment, and I suppose it is really only the intent behind the change that sets the two apart.

The example in Pandora was driven very much by a desire to have a clean design. No point in having a rule that people routinely forget. Far better to put the rules you have where they will be remembered.Overall I doubt there was much dumbing down involved here as other rules were added at the same time this was removed, so it’s no simpler overall – just smoother and more easily remembered. Rules in the right place is the idea, not just cluttering things up.

To go back to the title, if we keep the distinction of these two processes of simplification as being one of intent alone, is dumbing down ever the right thing to do?

Absolutely.

Let’s imagine that you’re writing a game with a brief of being a 1 hour introductory game on the Eastern Front in WWII. Let’s also imagine that you’ve written Drang Nach Osten by mistake. You would not only have to simplify it, you would have to dumb it down because it is not what your brief is asking for. You are not writing for people who have a PhD in 1940s political science, you’re writing for the interested neophyte. Perhaps you think that dumbing down is an over-harsh term, but I don’t think that it necessarily means the intended audience is dumb. It’s a reference to the product and its complexity, and if that needs to be simple enough to appeal and be used by a broad audience then it may well need to be “dumbed down”. In the example above it is the experience and familiarity of the gamer with the subject which is the issue, not their intellect. If you argue for dumbed down to be only an insulting term that suggests the audience are idiots then you also have to offer a replacement term to cover this example and others like it where you are dealing with experience, not smarts. Perhaps we should invent a new term anyway and abandon dumbed down as a pejorative. How about amateur friendly or expert free? It needs to be something to do with reduction in the required experience, but that’s too wordy. Answers on a postcard…

Of course, the big shouty arguments about dumbing down come with things like 40K and Warhammer when they have been around for years and they are changed with a new edition. Here, the designers are in a bit of a cleft stick. If they do nothing then there are complaints that they haven’t done anything. If they make any changes then those are complained about in turn. It’s a bit of a lose/lose situation.The only way out of this (historically) seems to have been for the designers to make such a clearly better version that the inevitable grumbles are quickly drowned out by the appreciative murmurs and then the vast bulk of people just get on with playing the game.

The problem with GW games is that there is a top-down drive for a new edition every so often, and this has nothing to do with whether the game needs changing or not from the viewpoint of the game itself. Warhammer could be the most perfect game in the world and it would still get new editions every so often. That’s just GW’s business model. Do they dumb things down? Do they do this unnecessarily (which is what the complaints really should be about)? I know they’re accused of such on a frequent basis, and I know that they deliberately attempt to appeal to a wider audience and make changes for that specific reason. They are, after all, in business, so that’s hardly surprising. However, when you see the mass of special rules and baroque fussiness in a lot of what they produce, I have to say that if they really, truly wanted to dumb down their games they’ve got a heck of a way to go.

Apart from random observations on various gaming topics, I’ve been busy writing new games and that’s taken up the time I’d have otherwise been using for blogging. Mostly these are things I can’t discuss just yet, though their time will come soon enough.

I’d also like to do some more with recently released games like Tribes of Legend and DKH3: Ancient Grudge (which seems to have been rather missed by most folk). That’s a real shame as there is a mountain of gameplay in there. I have been doing some articles for Tribes, so there’s more coming from Foundry on that front. Not to mention their next Open Day, which should feature a new army for it.

I really do need to manufacture some time from somewhere as the site needs to include more FAQs and articles for both the games that are out plus at least two more which will see the light of day this year. Actually, make that three. One is Project Pandora: Grim Cargo, the second I’ve mentioned several timers before and will be out in the summer (I am told), and the third is currently still Most Secret, but should be out towards the end of the year.

As is always the way, various other projects have been postponed, cancelled or mutated into something completely different during their development. We’ll have to see where they settle. Perhaps a spring clean is in order to tidy up the files…

And no, I can’t do anything about the pre-measuring. You’re the third person to ask me that. Core gubbins is Alessio’s department – it’s his game, after all. Instead he kindly asked me to write the optional rules section, which was rather fun. Optional rules are something I may have ranted about before, I forget. It’s a funny principle, but I’ll come back to the generic conceptual stuff later. Specifically…

The KOW optional section has 4 threads to it. Firstly there are a few extra bits of terrain rules. These add more texture to the simple rules in the core game and allow you to do more with race specific areas, giving them a bit more character.

The second bit is a discussion about multi-player games and is a bit like one of my rambles here. It’s one of those subjects that is fairly resistant to hard and fast rules because it’s such a variable topic and depends to a large extent on who you’ve got and what they want to do (with what armies).

Thirdly, there is a set of siege rules for fighting out assaults as either one-off games or as part of the fourth section: campaigns. Well, campaign in the singular, actually. Although I mention lots of options, this is really about setting out some simple and sustainable rules for running a successful campaign. One that might have a chance of finishing, rather than the often rather grandiose affairs you see bandied about. The biggest failing of almost all the campaigns I’ve ever seen attempted is that they fizzle out and are abandoned, leaving a nasty taste in your mouth. Far better to have a simple, short but successful campaign that people remember fondly. You can build on that.

Anyway, you’ll be able to see all this as part of the 3rd edition which should be out sometime later this year (late summer?), if their 3 year plan works as I (vaguely) remember it.

Things are still running along apace behind the scenes, though you’ll see less publicly for a little while. Then we have Pandora’s release at Salute/Adepticon, which will be another biggie. I’ll be there too, and hope to see a bit more of the rest of the show this year. We’ll see how that plan pans out on the day

I was going to do a photo report for last week’s KOW bash. Sadly my camera decided it was only going to take 5 pictures before it died. I did take a load with Mantic’s snazzy camera, though I think there was a wetware issue there. Anyway, someone a little more competent hopefully took pictures of our slightly cobbled Pandora demo in the evening, which proved rather popular with quite a few of the participants coming back for another go (and another…). Someone described the first scenario from Dwarf King’s Hold Dead Rising as “the heroin for the game”, and I’ve tried to make this equally addictive and replayable.

Pandora is looking very snazzy now. The art has a style of its own, the layout and maps are crisp and the toys are great. I’ve seen all the models in the flesh now and had that weird sensation of thinking they were tiny (which is just a reflection of looking at them as pictures on a big screen for 6 months). They’re not tiny at all in reality. Another oddity was how different the Corporation models looked in green, metal and resin-plastic. Exactly the same models, just a different material and colour picking up the light differently. It makes the grey ones look less detailed than the metals, but when they’re painted they look identical. The eye is easily fooled. When I mentioned this to someone they said that this was why Finecast looked higher detail than metal and that it was just a trick of the light. Spray them both the same colour and the difference goes away. Allegedly. Well it’s not anything I’ll be wasting cash testig for real, but if someone has both and could do then it may be worth posting some pictures.

But I’m distracting myself.

Time to sort out my (considerably better) backup camera and potter off to run ToL all day

It’s going to be a blast. I’ll see if I can get some pictures for those that can’t make it. Of course, if you can make it then do pop along and say hi.

This is the emotional gratification for a project like this. It’s all very well getting my usual brown paper bag full of crumpled fivers when I’ve finished the writing (and I do have to pay my bills), but that’s really just mechanical. It is just to pay my bills. The real payoff is when people like what you’ve been doing and “buy into it”, not in a financial sense, but in a sense that they make it part of their (gaming) life.

It’s also fun to work with people who are as passionate about games and models as I am. I’m really lucky in having a number of different companies to work with, all of which have real gaming fanatics in. We don’t always see eye to eye on the detail, but we are all coming from a sense of passion and commitment to making the best, the most fun game we can. Having spent some time working for companies in what has been called the Real World, where nobody cares tuppence about the quality of the result and most folk are just keeping a chair warm till they can go home, I can tell you it makes a big difference to your work environment.

So what’s next? Well I’ve mentioned God of Battles a few times, and that’s a game I’m really excited about. Having spent a year sitting on my hands and not being able to talk about it, I’m very keen to be able to discuss it openly. It’s still some months away, though I’ve started winding up for it already.

But Tribes of Legend is not forgotten  – quite the contrary. I’ve been playing it quite a bit recently, and look forward to the Foundry Open Day for it on the 24th and 25th of this month. I’ll be running some games of both Tribes of Legend and Ancient Heroes, and they should be great fun. I’ve also written an article about expanding the Amazon army, with a new scenario for them, and Ancient Heroes has a set of expansions about monsters, including a multi-player scenario I might be able to demo at the Open Day if we get enough people who don’t mind being eaten.

If you are able to come along to the Open Day then it would be great to see you, especially if you’ve already played Tribes of Legend and have some questions or comments (good or bad). I expect to be there part of friday and all of saturday. For those of you who live in foreign climes, I’ll do a photo report as I have for other Open Days, so at least you get a little of the flavour.