Guild Wars 2 (Again): Combat

http://www.guildwars2.com/en/the-game/combat/part-two/


If you don't want to read the post, that's fine. I'm going to summarize it anyways. The article is discussing combat in an upcoming computer roleplaying game, a sequel to the highly popular Guild Wars, and it aims to take combat in a pretty interesting place.

I'll let you read the article if you want, but what really concerns me is the treatment of weapons and the skills that accompany it. Weapons, in my mind, are a really difficult thing to get right. The choice of a character's weapon should define, in a large part, their fighting style, which determines the way they fight, the places they want to fight, and a lot about their personality. In most games, though, the weapon you're wielding has about as much impact on how you fight as the color of your beard. It applies its damage bonus, and then maybe an accidental benefit or two through critical damage tables or bypassing a gimmicky resistance idea. This is not good.


If you watch any two people fighting in real life, even with just their hands, what they do results directly from minute factors. I'm talking about how their style interacts with their enemy's, their footings, and their ever-changing stances. And, sure, there's a certain element that you can't quite express with a system that revolves mostly around rolling dice. But there should be a little bit more to it.

That's why it was so cool seeing the Guild Wars 2 post about it. Basically, it gives you a handful of abilities you can use. Roughly half of them are due to the weapon you wield, meaning that your choice of weapon is a huge factor in how you fight and how others fight you. If you have a sword, your basic moves are nothing like if you're wielding a greataxe, or a bow. And you can port that over to D&D style, combat, if you want.

Naturally, there's a bit of a slippery slope when rewriting combat rules. You have to decide how much "realism" you want and how much "game," and how much of either you want in creating character builds. I think that if you didn't mind a rather healthy amount of game, you could port this almost directly over. It could be a pain to describe and detail the abilities, but I almost think it would be worth it.

Something to think about, at least.

Guild Wars Environmental Postcards

Guild Wars is on my short list of MMOs that I wouldn't change anything about. Or, well, hardly anything. The character creation and customization is pretty robust, the combat is quick and lively, and the environments are superb. There's probably a pretty good storyline, too, but I always skip the cutscenes and neglet to read the quest text. Hey, I'm trying to play a game, not read a book. When I feel like reading books, I'll crack open a book thank you very much, give me some more gigantic animated plants to slay.

One of the very best things, in my opinion, is the art of Guild Wars. It has a very specific style, and a very epic feel. Recently, the developerts of Guild Wars (ArenaNet) released some concept art of environments that, to my knowledge, never got used. It's safe to say they wouldn't appreciate it being used in a commercial product, but there's no reason you still can't admire a little art for the sake of art.

Changing Classes

I told one of my buddies that I was going to write about Fantasy General, an outstanding fantasy wargame, but I decided not to. You heard me!

Instead, I'm going to write a little about classes and how they shape the default setting of our campaign world by explicitly expressing what is and is not possible to player characters and why.

As a quick example, we all know about the Magic User of OD&D, or basic D&D. He has a finite list of spells that he can perform, and that is the extent of his magic. He can shoot lightning bolts across a room but cannot generate an electrostatic charge. He can put a man to sleep but cannot awaken him again. He can turn a man to stone but cannot simply encase him in stone. The Magic User is a man of no subtlety, a man who wields the forces of magic with all the grace and finesse of a sledgehammer. And this sets the tone for your campaign.

One of your player characters (or maybe more) has this small set of incredibly destructive magic and, as they say, when you've only got a hammer, everything looks like nails. Suddenly every encounter is a chance to scour the earth with flame and explosions, every diplomatic encounter is a chance to command another's mind. And you wonder why the players always fight to the death!

It's really not just limited to magic. The class features are the number one game-defining decision. If you have a game where you choose one of four classes, you have a game of specialists with role protection. If you have a class-building system, or a "buy what you like" system, then you have a game of generalists where the idea of "role protection" is a little laughable.



Let me give a quick example, and then I'm out of your hair:

Imagine you're playing D&D, except that your DM hands you a little handbook and says, "I'm trying something new. Instead of the classes you're used to, we're going to use these classes." Inside the handbook, it explains that the Fighter is now a graceful Dervish, who is quick-footed and nimble. The Cleric is now a Blood Priest, who has no grasp of holy magic but heals and harms through an understanding of the magic of blood. The Magic User is now a Runemaster, who casts no magic but utilizes the power of Runes, which consist of enchantments laid on objects and people.

Your game has changed enormously, obviously. You no longer have anybody wearing heavy armor. You don't have access to light spells (since it would normally come from the Cleric, who is now limited strictly to healing and damage spells. Your Magic User has no gross magical powers- instead, he creates use-limited magical objects that he can hand to others.

And as obvious as it is that the game has changed, it makes me wonder that more people don't inspect the impact of the default player classes in their games. If I had a dollar for every time that something in a default class simply smashed the default assumptions inherent in any game world, I'd be a very, very rich man.

Wyrms of the Desert

It's not just the fact that I am an insatiable Dune fanatic, I promise (although it is a major point of the setting that enormous sandworms roam the barren landscape, I'll admit)- there's something evocative about the deep desert in all its foreignness.

I've got a better post in the back of my brain, but I just got done with an all-day process, so I'm a little drained. This pic should tide you guys over and give you something awesome to look at in the same stroke.

Lolth: Spider Bitch of the Abyss

Today, looking at my statistics, I realized that the most searched-for term that lands visitors here is none other than Lolth. Lolth? Why her?

Lolth the babe

Well, as anybody who's been following this for a while knows about my love-hate relationship with Q1: Queen of the Demonweb Pits. It's a brilliant piece of module-writing that is in a really weird place. On one side, it captures extremely well the early conglomeration of what we know today as fantasy and sci-fi, and it features several portals to other realities without telling you once what you should be doing in them or what their significance is. It's both kind of a short module and an extremely massive one, with leads that could find your party travelling to a multitude of places, and dealing with the strange and varied inhabitants. But on the other hand, it hides the gold inside the dross of somewhat gimmicky puzzles that need to be solved without leading themselves to an actual solution, weird encounters with a  variety of extremely mundane creatures, and a couple of encounters that don't seem to have a purpose.

And behind all of this madness is a very killable Lolth, with a number of hit points that makes anybody familiar with new-school roleplaying games positively shudder. It really is extremely old-school, and that's both its primary attraction and its primary downfall.

But more to the point: It's Lolth. I'm quite aware that there's a fairly long fantasy series about Dark Elves and their problems revolving around their capricious goddess, or just about Dark Elves in general, and it's honestly pretty fertile ground. Ignoring the adolescent bondage fantasies and the intentional inversion of only the most shallow societal elements (women rule instead of men, everybody lives in upside down houses, idolizes betrayal instead of loyalty, etc), it's actually pretty cool stuff. You have a demon goddess who's alternately a babe and actually pretty hideous, who overlooks these scheming subterranean elves with a religion that doesn't seem to care much if she's around except at the very top.

Lolth the monster

So here's to Lolth, one of the most interesting goddesses around. Everybody knows that the villians are infinitely more interesting than the heroes, and Lolth is hardly an exception. I'd go so far as to say that she's one of the most interesting villains out there.

"When Mourning Goes Viral"

http://life.salon.com/2011/10/07/digital_mourning/singleton/

Without a doubt, the dumbest editorial I've read in a while. It's no secret that the news media loves stories that are easy to digest and they love making grandiose statements that mean nothing, but this kind of takes the cake.

I have no idea how Twitter and other social media has changed the way we mourn, but apparently it changes it because that's what we do. It's essentially an article about nothing, a profoundly meaningless article like this one I'm writing now describing for you the pointlessly self-serving article that somehow ties itself into Steve Jobs' death like so many other articles.

Of course, I'm having more fun with mine, which is both significantly shorter while being 10% less pretentious.

The Legend of Zelda

This awesome post takes inspiration from the Game Boy game "Link's Awakening" and turns it into some seriously awesome art.

Take a peek: http://sceneryvilla.com/?p=145


It's the sort of thing that makes you realize that D&D isn't dead, and neither is old-school dungeon crawling. It's just not called that any more. These pictures could be in any fantasy roleplaying supplement released today, and nobody would even bat an eyelash.