A new direction: D&D 4e

July 27, 2009 at 11:07 pm · Filed under d20 ·Tagged

Since the StatsGames project is almost over, I thought that I would go in a bit of a different direction, with a few thoughts on the newest Edition of D&D, 4e.

D&D is such a strange game. What other game (outside of it’s genre) can you get a bunch of people together to essentially play make-pretend, without all of the pretty costumes. Yet this silly game has, at times, given me somewhere to run from the moments of insanity. Yes, running doesn’t solve anything, but it does give time when you cannot solve it because it’s affecting you too much. I started this game just about 3 years ago, my first year here. The group I had started hanging out with decided that they were going to get a game together, and I was curious, and they could use a rogue (thief, trapsmith, diplomat, basically sneaky bastard). So, I put one together, and I had tons of fun. After just about 2 years of playing this game, I find myself finishing up my first full campaign (the arena doesn’t really count, though it had the potential to be), and I think I did a decent job (though far from perfect). So, now in the rest of this post, I will have a nice little chat about D&D 4th edition.

On first look 4th edition looked gross. Looking from the perspective of only playing in 3.5, the changes, at first, looked really unhappy. Powers? Healing surges? Minions? WTF! Confident in this first look, I ignored 4e for a while, until the person who has been my favorite DM to date said he was running a new campaign in 4e. I decided that I had to try it because of the DM. Just like I did with 3.5, I filled in something that I wanted to play and that could help the party (Tiefling Warlord), and I looked deeper into the rules, and they just made sense. They don’t make sense in a way that it makes for the most logical world, but in a way that the mechanics were trying to make anything possible. Minions I actually was impressed enough with the idea to where I adapted it to 3.5. The powers that I gave problems gave more choice to the classes that were the least fun to play (Fighter anyone), and the structure helped to rein in the broken classes (Cleric and Druid). Though there are still exploits (as there are in any game that has optimal choices that are situation dependent), I did not feel that I was going to be truly lost running a high-level one-shot (just impossible for 3.5). So here we go, a more quantified list of the good, the bad, and the just plain ugly.

Good:
Everyone has options.
The game doesn’t collapse if you don’t have a healer.
-On the same note, you can play a primary healer that is not a cleric.
No alignment rider spells. Alignment is now allowed to play as much of a role (or non-role) as you want in your campaign.
Low fluff attacks. Every power gives a quick line of description and a mechanical effect. You are strongly encouraged to not worry about the line of description and describe it your own way. Great for making 2 characters feel different even with the same powers.
Transparent monster creation. You can go from concept to mechanics for a creature in about 10 minutes. I wish they would have given damage equivalences for some of the conditions, but you can take a quick guess and usually be close.
-Monsters are a breeze to adjust the challenge. Do you want a kobold that going to scare a 4th level party? Adjust one up. Do you want your second level party to have to deal with a troll? Well, drop the troll a few levels, and it should be fun.
Minions. Lots of monsters without all of the bookkeeping? Sign me up.
Every class is playable! I don’t have to worry about losing party effectiveness because I want to play a bard. I don’t have to watch myself get outclassed by an ANIMAL COMPANION!
Magic items: I’m no longer waiting until level forever for the slightly interesting magic items. Let’s take a frost sword, for example. A 3.5 character was waiting until about 8th-9th level (assuming no more than 25% of gold towards 1 item), while a second level character can start with a +1 frost sword.
-Magic items only give options: There’s no more magic items that hand over crazy power for nothing. Instead, magic items give you small, but interesting, options. Really classy.
DMG pg 42: Balanced rules for in combat stunts that your players will try to pull off. So much happiness in that page.
XP for non-combat encounters: 3.5 definitely didn’t give any guide for that by core, and although skill challenges have their own problems, to be able to give XP fairly for not killing things is a great tool to have.

Bad:
Everything is in squares. It just feels really offsetting to have it like this.
The highly versatile classes lose their versatility in these rules. Probably best for balance, but I don’t think I can ever play a 4e Wizard or Rogue again (though I’m warming back up to the Wizard, yay summons).
Battle length (real time): First off, let me say that I do appreciate that an epic battle is more than 12 seconds long game time. At the same time, some battles, especially solo battles, can take hours real time. For example, I naively ran a Young red dragon against a 3rd level party. That was a rather uninteresting fight, everyone rightly complained about that fight, and it took nearly 2 hours. That is just horrible, especially because 4e relies just as much on the 4 encounter day to keep things balanced. Anything besides combat much?
I can’t play as a non-combatant: This isn’t a problem that I have so much as a problem that seems to be echoed by many other people. Yes, it is true that you are forced to have some skill in combat. However, the actually useful skill system also lets/makes you have some skill outside of combat. It’s part of the philosophy that no matter the arena, that everyone should have something to do, and that I also appreciate.
If it isn’t cinematic, it doesn’t matter: This is a borderline good thing and bad thing. On the good side, there are no more trap skills (anyone actually ever find a use for craft other than trapmaking or alchemy). On the bad side (for believability), there are minions and healing surges. I can put myself back together by taking a few deep breaths… Wait, What?!? It’s fluffed away with blows not being damaging until you’re down, but getting set on fire? Having your life force drained? Getting struck by lightning? However, it is the healing surge mechanic that makes it possible to travel without a leader or a wand of cure light wounds, so…
My Kingdom for an …axe? If you want realistic at all, don’t look at the prices for paragon and epic items. Enough said.
There are no really simple classes: This is kind of a mixed bag too, because as 3.5 casters proved, options are king. However, somebody starting out has no less that 4 unique powers to work with, all of which need to be planned carefully. Also, there are the situational class features that most classes have (Just about anyone that’s not a Ranger) which also need to be remembered and planned for. This can quickly get overwhelming to a new player.

Ugly:
Stealth errata: Their math messed up, lets put it as a feat. Some paladin builds suck, let’s add another feat. My favorite one: Focused Expertise (playtest for PH3). This is an errata to fix an errata (Implement Expertise and Weapon Expertise). So much fun.
Give us more money: The 3.5 PHB classes are split over 3 4e Player’s handbook (Monk in PH3). WHY?!?

Overall, although I will note the biggest gripes that people have with 4e, and some of them are understandable, 4e has much more going for it than the problems that it has. It is strongly not advised to throw out your 3.5 books over this, because the 4e books are fluff-light (which can be unnerving for a new DM), and the two games give completely different experiences. Don’t be afraid to give 4e a try, though it is definetly less useful of a system for groups that avoid combat.

Leave a Comment

The not so Great fish pond

July 27, 2009 at 10:26 pm · Filed under StatsGames ·Tagged

In the matter of a week, the Fish pond project is over. There’s a reason that this thought set is on my blog and not on the official StatsGames blog. It’s because I need somewhere to rant.
Let me start on the good about this. I learned to program in a language that I had never touched before, and being the goto guy for figuring out animation fun was a big surprise to me. We did do a decent job of working together to get something useful together, although we all sucked at getting in on time. Finally, I had some great people to work with.
Now for the rant. This “game” is only a game in name, in my honest opinion. What we have is a rather contrived, fancy way to manipulate numbers. There is nothing about this game that is actually fun, and I don’t see anyone playing it without being forced to, which is what we tried to avoid. What we have instead is a lecture in a box, nothing more. At first, it would seem that we would have the game at the very least leave open exploration of the ideas without being cattle prodded in a specific direction, but no, it was vitally important to spoon feed them all of the information instead of letting the players discover some of it on their own. I just don’t see at all what this game can do that a lecture couldn’t, and in that assessment, I am including being any sort of fun. This game turned from the management of a fish pond to a “game” of numbers. Do you know what this reminds me off? Those silly educational games that use pretty colors and images to hide the fact that multiplication drills aren’t fun. I’m not a little bit bitter about this fact, I’m honestly pissed off. I’ve honestly considered trying to detach my name from this.

Disclaimer: It goes without saying that my views do not represent the viewpoints of my advisers, my coworkers, Grinnell College, or apparently the Statistics community, who seem like they are actually going to find this game useful.

Leave a Comment

Flash: Some cute tricks

June 12, 2009 at 1:13 pm · Filed under Flash ·Tagged , ,

As I said before, I am going to note some tricks, and some of the stranger hangups that we have run into to try to make life easier on others that are programming in Actionscript 3. Some of these things may already be familiar to the reader, but these things have come up as really strange/different to me working with Java and C before this, and never really working with graphics.

First off, Flash arrays are dynamic. In both Java and C, code like this would just break, but not in Flash:
var fooArray:Array = new Array("foo", "bar");
fooArray[2] = "foobar";

However, in Flash, this works and returning the array would give you “foo”, “bar”, “foobar”. Really handy stuff.
An array has the length of the number of elements in the array, not the maximum length of the array, or the largest element that the array gets to. Also, interestingly enough, an empty array has length 1. Flipping a Sprite or movie clip about an axis is actually rather simple.
movieClip.scaleX = -p;
multiples the width of the object by p, then flips it about the y-axis.
The trigonometric functions return radians. Keep this in mind if you try to use one of these functions to help you rotate an object.
The last one that comes to mind is the frustrating one about trying to get an array of movieClips:
mcArray[i] = new movieClip();
//set properties of the movieClip as needed
stage.addChild(mcArray[i]);
breaks to pieces, especially when you are trying to use a class that inherits from movieClip. What you need to do instead is to store the movieClip into a temporary variable:
var tempClip:movieClip = new movieClip();
//set the properties of the movieClip
stage.addChild(tempClip);
mcArray[i] = tempClip;
I suspect that when you put it directly into the array, it “forgets” that it’s a movieClip, because the elements of an array are untyped until something is put into an element, and then when you call a function, like addChild, which relies on a movieClip, you get an error that screams that you are trying to coerce a variable into a movieClip when it either is a movieClip, or inherits from a movieClip. Strangely enough, the first code works fine for Sprites.

I hope this was at least a little useful, and as I work on the StatsGames project, I will continue to add information to oddities that I’m finding that will hopefully help out somebody that either was doing as much screaming about the problem as I was, or somebody looking for simpler ways to do what they are trying to do.

Leave a Comment

StatsGames: The fish pond

June 11, 2009 at 9:37 pm · Filed under StatsGames ·Tagged ,

First, a little about StatsGames.  The goal of the StatsGames projects is to make multiple open-source games that can help teach Statistics and serve as tools for the people in Statistics classes to help collect data.  To this extent, 3 Grinnell College students, myself, and 2 faculty members are working together to put together a series of games: Tanagrams, as a useful data collection tool that will help with experiments dealing with spatial reasoning, and communication analysis; The Fish Pond, which will help teach the statistical concept of Capture-Recapture, as well as model creation; Glinko, which is the Central Limit theorem shown through a popular game, and an adventure-style game which will put together a bunch of minigames that will allow students to play around with other Statistical tools, like regression lines, and the aforementioned Glinko.  One of the really nice things about this setup is that it is open-source, and the intention is that if these tools are edited by others to serve specific purposes, they are to also remain open-source.

This post, however, is about The Fish Pond, a Flash applet that I am working with another Grinnell Student to make to show Capture-Recapture.  The idea behind the program is that the players are given a fish farm to manage, where at its most complex has food, a prey fish, a predator fish, and fishermen to interact with each other.  By design, the players will be allowed at a given time increment, to pull a sample, and tag said sample.  The idea behind the Capture-Recapture method is that one grabs a sample, and tags all of the fish involved in the sample.  After a period of time, where the creatures will have the opportunity to spread out within the enviorment, one pulls another sample, and based on the number of tagged creatures, one can get a rough estimate of the overall population.  A reasonably simple, but more thorough explanation of Capture-Recapture can be found here.  What makes this interesting is that the player initally has no idea how things interact, nor what’s in the pond, and has to try to make a stable population by changing the amount of food, and the number of fishermen (so the player can actually buy food).  Through multiple passthroughs, the player gets a better and better idea how things interact, and how many fish are in the pond, and can make better decisions.  Like all of the games that will be made this summer, this will have a path to a database that stores how well the students do at the task of making a stable population. As we are still trying to implement the game itself, we haven’t thought hard about what information would be useful in a database created by this program.

I hope to keep the people who decide to read this up-to-date on the progress of The Fish Pond, and also hope to have hints here and there about Flash programming that have tripped us up and probably have tripped other people up.

Leave a Comment

Hello world!

June 11, 2009 at 9:07 pm · Filed under Uncategorized

Hello, my name is Jeffrey Thompson, and I am a fourth-year Computer Science major at Grinnell College.  I hope to talk more than a bit about my role in my Grinnell Summer research project, StatsGames, and about some other things that I find interesting. Please note that any comments that I will leave here do not necessarily represent the opinions of my coworkers, Grinnell College, or my employers, or in fact anybody besides myself.

Leave a Comment

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.