Its Week 51 of A Game A Day! One week to go! Well, four days, really. Today Im going to regale you with my musings on the “Goldilocks zone” of experience and loot rewards: that sweet spot in game design where experience and gear arent too hard to get, or too easy...but just right. 12/21/14: * untitled playtest * Threes (Sirvo LLC) 12/22/14: * untitled playtest * SpellTower (STFJ) 12/23/14: * untitled playtest * Drop7 (Zynga) 12/24/14: * Shadows of Brimstone: Swamps of Death (Flying Frog Productions) 12/25/14: * Shadows of Brimstone: Swamps of Death (Flying Frog Productions) * FTL (Subset Games) 12/26/14: * Borderlands (2K) 12/27/14: * Borderlands: the Pre-Sequel (2K) When you play games every day, you start to establish benchmarks for “best” and “worst” features. “This is the best combat resolution system I’ve seen; a system is going to have to be better than this to impress me.” You find yourself comparing this game to that, mentally cherry-picking the best elements, lamenting the worst. A friend of mine who is a professional game designer views games in terms of percentages: “This is 70 percent of a good game,” he once told me about a game we were playing. “It’s got a lot of clever mechanics, but they don’t quite come together.” That’s kind of an ongoing struggle with game design, from boardgames to RPGs to videogames: You have to tie the disparate elements together so that they feel like they’re all part of the same system, but without being a flavorless repeat of the same specific system over and over again. “Roll a d6: On a 5 or a 6, you find the treasure. Roll a d6: On a 5 or a 6, you defeat the monster. Roll a d6: On a 5 or a 6, you save the world.” Consistency is one thing, but rigid consistency is the hobgoblin of poor game design…to paraphrase Emerson. Take rewards systems, for example—the awarding of loot (usually in the form of money or useful gear) and level gains (usually in the form of experience points). Some games handle it really well, ensuring that the players don’t progress too quickly or too slowly. Dungeons & Dragons, for example, has for decades now used a system in which it was essentially twice as hard to go from level two to level three as it was to go from level one to level two. But more importantly, the individual experience point rewards scaled up along with the difficulty of the monsters you had to kill, so that leveling up wasn’t a question of killing X number of goblins, but rather that each monster you killed represented, effectively, a percentage of the experience points you needed to advance from your current level to the next level, with any given monster providing a diminishing percentage as your level increased—and a diminishing threat. So, while you could effectively go from level one to level two by killing X goblins, going from level two to level three would require killing 2X goblins; level three to level four would require killing 4X goblins, and so on. It’s theoretically possible to go from starting level to maximum level by farming the same monster or repeatable quest over and over again—more than theoretical, really, given that MMO players do this sort of thing all the time. Dungeons & Dragons gradually evolved their experience system so that the experience rewards for any given encounter diminished as the relative threat dropped. That is, a goblin was worth 10 experience points when you were first level, and you’d need to kill 100 of them to advance to second level. But when you were second level, that same goblin was worth only 5 experience points, and since the level threshold was 2,000 experience points this time, you’d need to defeat four hundred goblins to advance to third level—ideally, compelling you to stop wasting your time killing goblins, and start tackling something a bit tougher. It’s a nice, coherent system, with just enough consistency (to the core mathematics) to keep it simple for the players to grasp early on and carry through the rest of their gaming. It doesn’t hurt that it’s 90 percent simple addition, either (with the occasional multiplication if you killed more than one goblin). Loot systems, on the other hand, tend to be a bit fuzzier in their progression logic. Not only does the system have to delineate how much is too much, and how little is too little, but any given piece of loot has to be useful to the player at whatever level it’s received. Again returning to D&D for a good example, a +1 longsword is extremely valuable to a player when +1 attack and +1 damage make a difference between winning and losing a fight. At higher levels, when a character’s base attack bonus is eight or ten times higher, that same +1 longsword is junk loot. D&D has the luxury of a scaling loot system to go along with its scaling experience point system. As you advance in levels, you tend to find gear that’s useful to characters of your level—occasionally less useful, as the loot is intended for lower-level characters, and rarely, more useful, as you get an insanely lucky roll on the loot tables. But even those are gated, so while that that lucky roll might get you the best gear for your level, it can’t ever get you the best gear in the game. Card games, however, don’t have that kind of luxury, simply because printing additional loot cards costs more money than printing some extra pages in the rulebook, which means either less profit for the company, or higher costs for the consumer. By way of example, let’s look at the loot progression for a couple of my favorite games from this year: the Pathfinder Adventure Card Game, and Shadows of Brimstone. In the Pathfinder ACG, the system is pretty simple: Every time you encounter loot, you can make a check to try to acquire it. Success means it goes in your hand; failure means it gets discarded. At the end of the game, you can choose to keep any loot youve acquired—but because your deck size has to remain constant, you also have to remove a card from your deck. Whats more, your deck has limitations on how many of any given type of card you can have in it, so if you want to keep the new spell you picked up during the adventure, youll have to discard an old spell. Additionally, some adventure rewards let you draw a specific kind of loot card for successfully attaining your objectives—usually an item card--but again, you are limited to how many items you can keep in your deck, so unless the new item is particularly useful, theres a good chance that youll end up returning the item you drew to the box, unused. Its actually kind of an annoying failure in an otherwise awesome game that your “reward” for a job well done can be literally nothing. In fact, if youre not that great at weighing the relative values of your cards (like me), you can actually screw yourself by making the wrong choice—replacing an extremely effective card in your deck with one that underperforms, or worse, negatively impacts the mechanical theme of your deck. True, thats a pretty accurate simulation of d20 System RPG gameplay, but that doesnt make it any more fun. That said, I understand the rationale behind it. Box space and printing costs mean that decks tailored to the “level” of the characters (characters in PACG don’t really have levels like they do in the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game) would be prohibitively expensive. And the designers got around this limitation relatively neatly by having each adventure path’s deck (available for $20 MSRP) scale up in the difficulty of challenges and the usefulness of the loot. Moreover, as you advance, you rotate out the older cards by removing them from their respective decks. In other words, when you’re playing the fourth adventure in the series, the gear that was suitable for the first adventure won’t even show up in the random draws anymore, because it’s back in the box, where it can’t fool you into thinking it’s valuable. I’m basically okay with the system, though. I’ve learned to accept the absurdity of Dungeons & Dragons and Pathfinder that the monsters waiting for you are somehow always just tough enough to provide a challenge, without being so tough that they wipe out the party in one round. So I can accept that, thematically, you’ll sometimes get junk loot. My wife, on the other hand, finds it an impediment to her enjoyment of the game. It wouldn’t be so bad, she points out (rather validly) if you got some kind of compensation for those items you discarded. After all, in the Pathfinder RPG, you can at least sell that junk loot and apply that toward the cost of buying something that’s actually useful. But no, there’s no money in the Adventure Card Game, so choosing not to keep junk loot is effectively the same as throwing it away. The fact that my wife has to overcome her distaste for the loot system each time we play the Pathfinder ACG is part of the reason why we’ve played so much of Shadows of Brimstone lately. It doesn’t hurt that we both like the game, and she has more than once cited the ACG’s troublesome loot system as her reason to instead play Shadows of Brimstone. You might have noticed that there are two different versions of the game: City of the Ancients, and Swamps of Death. Both are actually complete games with slightly different (but still compatible) components, meaning you can mix and match them, or just play them individually. So far, we’ve played them separately, running through the first six scenarios in City of the Ancients with the set’s Marshall, Saloon Girl, Gunslinger, and the Outlaw (which was actually a Kickstarter bonus; the set comes standard with the Bandido). Now, while I’m sure we made some mistakes with the rules in that early game, the loot system wasn’t actually one of them—at least, not according to the information we’ve been able to find online. And we looked quite a bit, because we were only three scenarios in when we noticed that our gear made us virtually unstoppable. Let me explain: In Shadows of Brimstone, when you overcome a threat (which is to say: when you defeat monsters), each hero gets to draw one Loot card for each Threat card in the encounter. That Loot card then tells you what you get, from a little bit of gold to a fairly powerful artifact. There are two Loot cards in the deck that let you draw from the Artifact deck—but since there’s only twelve cards in the Loot deck, your odds of getting an artifact are one in six. And the Loot deck gets reshuffled after each use, so your odds are always one in six. This wouldnt be such a big deal if you werent drawing one Loot card, per character, per Threat card—because when you draw a Threat card, it sometimes instructs you to draw two more Threat cards. That’s three Threats, meaning three Loot cards per character—and in a four-character game, that means both of those Artifact cards are going to come up. It happened so much in City of the Ancients that all of our characters were decked out with piles of kick-ass gear. And because you can sell junk loot when you return to town (the dollar value is printed right there on the card), what we didn’t pick up randomly in the adventure, we were able to buy from merchants in town. Where the progression in Pathfinder ACG is frustratingly slow, the progression in Shadows of Brimstone is boringly fast. After doing our due diligence looking for errata or a clarification online, we just decided to rule that the “Draw two Threat cards” card did not, itself, count as a threat card, and should be taken to read “Discard this Threat card and draw two Threat cards.” That’s the system we employed for our second go-round, in Swamps of Death, and the Lawman, Rancher, Preacher, and Indian Scout have had a much more reasonable progression of loot. Somewhere in between those two data points is the “Goldilocks zone” of loot progression. Anyone with a little game savvy can fix any game’s shortcomings with a judiciously-developed house rule, and obviously, we don’t mind doing that when we feel the need. And I’m not particularly complaining that neither game got closer to the system that was just right. I still enjoy both games, and will continue to play them for some time to come. Hell, I’m painting piles of miniatures for use in both games—and the Pathfinder ACG doesn’t even use minis! What I’m really endeavoring to draw attention to is the complexity of a good progression system in games, for both loot and experience. Too fast is just as bad as too slow, in its own way, particularly if gear or level is tied to your chances of success in some way. And lest anyone think it’s easy to design a loot or experience reward system that considers all of the involved factors, let me make it clear: As long as loot is randomly determined, it’s next to impossible to account for every potential combination; as long as experience is rewarded for every achievement, it’s next to impossible to control any given player’s rate of advancement. The best you can hope for is a system that keeps all the players more or less on equal footing, so that no player feels their contributions to the party’s efforts are meaningless. As long as all the players are operating at the same level of effectiveness, the game will be fun for them. The challenge then becomes making sure they don’t blow through the game’s content too quickly…or have to slog through hours of tedium to get to the higher-level content. But that’s always the challenge.
Posted on: Thu, 01 Jan 2015 20:43:32 +0000
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