TTRPGs – “Once Upon a Time…”

I love worldbuilding. I love immersing myself in a new universe with new rules, new peoples, new conflicts. I love the tension between outlandish possibility (magic, aliens, gods) and fundamental, ever-present emotion (compassion, pride, fear).

Dnd seems like the perfect workshop for good worldbuilding: A general ruleset, well-defined building blocks, and a wide open canvas. So why is it so hard?

There have been times where I’ve done the whole process. I’ve blocked off a full weekend and built the world, top to bottom. Gods, nations, biomes, politics, economies, factions… you name it, I wrote it. I got to the end of the two day sprint feeling somewhat satisfied, somewhat burnt out. “Surely,” I thought, “all this hard work will be worth it. My players will have the time of their lives exploring this fully fleshed out world!” Those of you who have DM’ed before probably know what happened next.

My players were generally happy with the town I set them in but couldn’t care less about the broader scope of the world. All of my toil ended up not in a good or bad outcome, but merely a “meh.” More immediately, they wanted plot hooks to follow… and I hadn’t really put enough time into those. This brings us to the first major takeaway about worldbuilding, one that new DMs need to know and veteran DMs probably learned the hard way:

World Building is Not Session Prep!

While world building is all well and good at tying sessions together and creating large, overarching plots, it doesn’t help you know the name of the blacksmith or whether the town has a well. Prep for an individual session all but requires a narrower focus on the here and now surrounding the players. Many things can be improvised, but at least a rough script of the events of the next few days as well as sketched details of the player’s immediate surroundings go a very, very long way to making the world feel more alive. This sort of “lazy rendering” is one of the hidden secrets behind good worldbuilding. You don’t have to know the ruler of every duchy or the outcome of every battle at sea. You only need to know the ones happening close to the players. So long as you can keep one step ahead of the players, the world unfolds around them. Though it may feel entirely different to the DM, to the players the end result is the same: Everywhere they look is a fully formed, fully real world. Thus, we come full circle. While worldbuilding isn’t session prep, the narrow expansion you do in a radius around the players to prep each session is, in fact, worldbuilding!

Well, ok, you may say. Sure, session prep adds slow and incremental worldbuilding. Sure, the players may come to know the world by their random adventuring through it. But what about the grand reveals? How do I set up the villain in the first session, hidden in plain sight? How do I place the world on the brink of war, kept at peace only by a single, elderly ruler? How do I create such background that the players freak out at the drop of a name, the sight of a new city? If everything is only realized when the players come near it, what prevents a growing sense of regularity, of referring to cities and NPCs as “town 2” and “merchant 3?” In extreme brevity: Why should the players care about… well, any of it?

All of these are hard questions I’ve grappled with for years as a DM. For a while I thought the fault lied in my worldbuilding. I wasn’t doing enough to entice my players. I wasn’t tying the world into their backstories well enough. My plots were too convoluted and too messy to be worth decoding. I was dangling my carrots too far out of reach, causing them to shrug and divert their attention. Each of these thoughts had a corresponding revision, each of which only showed marginal improvement in engagement, if any at all. In complete honesty, as of a few months ago, I had mostly given up. Players would treat the world as randomly generated anyway, so why bother with all the pre-work?

But then something big happened. In one of my playgroups, one member took a turn as DM in a new setting. Instead of the usual formula, he proposed creating the world together, using a game called The Quiet Year. Together with all of the players, he led us through a Session 0, designing the history and structure of the world. Only after we completed this session did we start on our characters, set in the world of our mutual creation.

The difference was night and day.

Everything I ever wanted from worldbuilding was realized. The players built characters with mutual shared history. They were excited when a named NPC was referenced. They approached organizations and factions with knowledge of who they were and what they stood for, without further lore dumps by the DM. It was (and is, as this campaign is ongoing) truly fantastic.

That’s not to say everything was perfect. The Quiet Year is, after all, its own game. Using it as a Dnd campaign prep module is bound to be a bit messy. A lot of time is spent on narrow focus events like individual conflicts and subregion detail which ends up getting lost in the annals of history. The narration structure makes the game fun to play but greatly extends the overall duration without yielding any useful worldbuilding tidbits for later use. But, overall, the experience was fantastic and one I won’t soon forget.

I came away from that worldbuilding session 0 not only excited for the campaign to follow but also with a fresh energy towards worldbuilding as a whole. The shared worldbuilding resulted in a huge increase in enthusiasm and engagement, even with the small rough patches imposed by using The Quiet Year for anything other than its intended purpose. I knew that with a few tweaks it could become something truly magical.

I decided to do just that in Once Upon a Time! (Yes, this post is another homebrewry plug.) The ruleset is a branch off of The Quiet Year in that, while the core mechanics remain, most of the top-level effects and names have been changed to better suit TTRPG worldbuilding. Mechanics that didn’t result in valuable worldbuilding were scrapped in exchange for explicit callouts of worldbuilding nuggets like named regions and nations. The card-drawing system is repurposed to force specific historical events like natural disasters and wars.

Once the pre-story is done, the actual campaign can begin. Players go home to build characters, now set in a fully fleshed-out world they are intimately familiar with. The DM gets to peruse the world they built together, searching for dangling threads and unresolved conflicts to turn into the main plot. There’s no post-facto story weaving necessary, since every character is always built with the same shared history. The villains never appear from nowhere, they were in plain sight all along. Players enter every new city with a pre-built wealth of knowledge and opinions in ways that DMs could only dream about. It’s everything I could ever want from worldbuilding and more, all wrapped up into a single interactive game.

Want to see how Once Upon a Time works in practice? I used Once Upon a Time to build the world of Lefarus, available for streaming here on my blog! Check out session 0 where we built the world using this system. If you’re starting up a new Dnd campaign, I’d highly recommend giving this ruleset a shot! Who knows what story will unfold in your “Once Upon a Time?”

TTRPGs – Big Bad Evil Stuff

Sitting down to design a new DnD campaign is both thrilling and intimidating. There are just so many ways it can go. In my opinion, the cornerstone of a meaningful and engaging plot is the antagonist. There is no Harry Potter without Voldemort, no Frodo without Sauron. Wacky DnD antics will happen regardless, but powerful and terrifying villains are what pull your players back to the plot – If they do not act, the society they live in will soon come under the thumb of a powerful new ruler, one who has specific dislike for the characters and a penchant for cruelty.

(Lots of terminology here! If you haven’t played DnD and missed the last post, consider reading that one first.)

So far, this is extremely standard issue stuff. Many DM guides recommend creating the main villain early on in prep work so that you can be sure to weave in references and appearances throughout the campaign. Moreover, this trope is so common that there’s a standard acronym: BBEG. BBEGs, or “Big Bad Evil Guys” are so standard issue that guides on what to include in such a character are easily found online. If I were playing with a DM I didn’t know, I’d nearly take it for granted that a BBEG would show up around the third or fourth session. (And, in all likelihood, wipe the floor with us to demonstrate their power, then walk off, leaving us alive, etc.) You basically can’t have a DnD campaign without one.

Meanwhile, none of my campaigns do.

And the award for fantasy’s “Least Capable Baby Killer” goes to…

So, why the BBEG hate? If antagonists are needed to create plot movement and tension, what’s so wrong with a BBEG? For me, the main issue is the BBEG formula. As I began to specify to above, here’s how your average BBEG introduction goes.

1. BBEG is introduced. Light monologuing.
2. A brief fight occurs, but the BBEG crushes the characters. Most characters are down / unconscious. The BBEG then continues with either:
   1. Heavy monologuing before becoming bored and leaving without killing anyone.
   2. Leaving a minion (who the players can actually beat) to “do their dirty work.” Players defeat the minion.
   3. Being forced away for plot convenient reasons, leaving the players alive. (See Mr. “Should have wingardium leviosa’d baby Harry out the window” above.)

From there, the campaign can progress. The players now know that there’s a big bad person willing and capable of wiping the floor with them just sorta walking around. If and when they meet up with the BBEG again, repeat the above. If the players have grown enough, perhaps they can force the BBEG to retreat or leave them with a scar. Once we hit the end of the campaign, the players can actually defeat the BBEG, preferably doing so in a highly climactic and cinematic fashion.

To me, there are a lot of problems here. The single biggest one is that it requires the BBEG to be a bit of a shortsighted idiot. Most BBEGs have opportunities to straight up murder the protagonists. For plot requirements, however, they simply cannot – no struggle and no adventure means no plot. Why the BBEG repeatedly doesn’t kill the characters has to be explained away time and again, up until the final fight. Sometimes they’re bored, other times there’s a major Dues Ex. Either way, the protagonists win through no merit of their own. That sucks.

Furthermore, for the BBEG to be the BBEG (and not just a… Evil Guy), the audience needs to fear them. To create the type of gravity we want, the protagonists need to come into a fight thinking they’re likely to lose. To create that, the BBEG needs to seen defeating the protagonists multiple times. But, as mentioned above, the BBEG needs to be able to bow out gracefully after a fight, such that they do not end up killing the protagonists. This can work in non-interactive storytelling mediums such as books and movies. It’s still a little gimmicky, but gimmick aside, the plot progresses as it needs to.

Unfortunately, things never turn out so cleanly in TTRPGs.

From the aptly titled Quora thread: https://www.quora.com/What-stunt-did-your-D-D-players-pull-that-completely-derailed-the-campaign

Unlike scripted protagonists from the pages of a fantasy novel, DnD players are not so willing to go along with the BBEG formula. To the players, this isn’t a scripted plot sequence; it’s a fight with their characters’ lives on the line. If they see a way to win, they’ll take it, no matter how silly or unorthodox.

As a DM, you only have two options at this point, neither of them good. You can either allow the BBEG to fall organically in the first encounter (depriving them of their “Big Bad” status), or you can insist on their victory in the fight (depriving your players of their agency and not rewarding them for their ingenuity). Both are bad options, and neither is at all satisfying.

If not BBEGs, how should we fashion an antagonist?

An ideal DnD antagonist is pictured here, and it’s not Sauron.

After realizing that I don’t love the BBEG formula, I spent a while wandering the internet, searching for a way to give my players a meaningful plot without trapping myself into the BBEG framework. A few years of DnD campaigns later, I’ve found my solution: BBES, or Big Bad Evil Stuff. Instead of a single humanoid (or otherwise conscious being) filling the role of main villain, BBES gives that role to an object (or objects) of great power. Consider LoTR’s One Ring as a baseline. Mechanically, things are mostly the same, but with a few key changes.

• As with BBEGs, BBESs are absolutely malevolent. They wants to destroy the world and/or subjugate it to their rule. The players still need to stop them, and their failure would have dire consequences.
• As with BBEGs, BBESs should be introduced early. The players should know that the BBES exists and some portion of what it can do (and why those capabilities may merit the BBES title).
• Unlike BBEGs, BBESs are objects. Thus, they have no agency and cannot act independently of other actors. For example, the One Ring may be the “One Ring to Rule Them All,” but it can’t move itself down the street. (They may be able to influence beings to do their bidding, however.)
• Finally, Unlike BBEGs, BBESs should be nearly invulnerable and/or immortal. Players cannot easily destroy the BBES should they get their hands on it. Either the destruction could have dire consequences, or the object’s destruction could have specific requirements.

There are a ton of upsides here. First off, since the BBES has no agency of its own, we do not need a contrived reason why it does not immediately kill the players – the BBES is only as powerful as the hand that wields it. The players may be able to “defeat” the BBES in their first encounter with it, but all that does is place the BBES under their ownership, it doesn’t “defeat” the BBES.

Secondly, the way to defeat the BBES will only become clear over time. When the players first acquire the object, they will likely not know what it is, what it can do, or how to destroy or otherwise defeat it. This is ideal – it stretches out the campaign while simultaneously providing ample opportunity for meaningful plot injection – say the players acquire an evil-looking staff made from the spine of a demon with the skull on top. They’ve tried destroying it with hammers and smite type spells but have had no success. On the flip side, Zayre (the party wizard) tried casting with it and had no luck. They forget about it and continue on their way. In their next encounter, the barbarian slays a goblin, cutting him in half from shoulder to hip. In that moment, the DM gets to deliver a line like this:

“Your axe slices clean through the goblin who shrieks with pain. You’ve killed many goblins, but something is off – your axe emerged clean, with not a drop of blood along the blade. Lines of blood float through the air, streaming towards Zayre’s back. The blood streams into the skull’s mouth, disappearing with a hiss. As the battlefield grows quiet, you feel a demonic presence in the air, as the bottom spinal link of the staff turns a deep crimson.”

As a player, this would be a gigantic “Holy Shit” moment. There are so many questions that need answering: How did it do that? Does it always do that? What happens when the whole staff turns red?” The players will now be extremely invested in uncovering the mystery of the BBES, knowing full well every clue the uncover may very well be pulling them towards their doom. Invested players are happy players, and happy players make a good campaign.

TTRPGs – What Do You Do?

“Well, this is th’ place.” Your guide turns to you, barely holding his readily-apparent terror in check. “Y’paid me to lead ya to th’ abandoned temple, and here we are, so….”

It’s not hard to see why he’d want to collect on your agreed payment and run back to town as fast as his short goblin legs would carry him – The jungle temple shows far too many signs of being recently lived in. Deep footprints marr the carpet of grass laying atop the worn stone steps. A streak of fresh blood adorns the wall to your right, the print of a hand that was dragged downwards from shoulder to hip height. Even more worrying, the massive fountain to your left contains a pool of disturbingly opaque black liquid. You’ve heard too many rumors about this place, but even from the entryway alone it looks like some of them are true.

One thing’s for sure – whatever’s going on here, it’s bad news.

What do you do?

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On top of everything else, the late 2010s are turning out to feature (inexplicably) a massive revival of Tabletop Role-Playing Games – TTRPGs for short. Dungeons and Dragons (D&D / DnD), an original TRPG and the one with the most name recognition by far, has been around since the mid-1970s and had been the exclusive domain of uber-nerds for nearly as long. Turns out something about gathering in a parent’s basement to roll dice and argue for hours at a time didn’t appeal to basically anyone else.

And yet, in the past few years, that appeal has suddenly widened, especially on TV. Early adopters include Community, which had an early episode featuring D&D in 2011 and more following later on. More recently, Stranger Things (2016 – Ongoing) features the game prominently, using it to foreshadow other events in the show. Shows focused entirely on D&D started popping up in the middle of the decade, such as Critical Role in 2015 as well as comedy-focused HarmonQuest in 2016 and Fantasy High in 2018. Rather than portray players as socially awkward teenagers with inferiority complexes, these shows have shown them as regular people, gathering to play one of the single most immersive and enduring games ever created.

Most of the times I’ve mentioned D&D recently, I get a reply along the lines of, “Oh, that game from Stranger Things! It looks fun, how does it work?” It’s a great question and, as a proud TTRPG evangelist, it’s one I mean to answer. This post aims to do just that, and as such is written for those who’ve never played before. If you’ve ever wondered, “Is D&D for me?”, well, I’ll let you be the judge.

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What exactly am I pitching you? What are TTRPGs? Good question! I’ve thought long on the most concise way to define a TTRPG – what characteristics can I strip away, and what remains? Here’s what I have. A TTRPG is:

Collaborative Storytelling with Adversity

That’s it. (In my opinion, of course. I’m not going to even pretend there even is a universally agreed-upon definition let alone that I know what it would be.) It’s a short definition, but a loaded one. Let’s break it down.

1) Collaborative – This one isn’t complicated. It’s an activity you do together with your friends. No one player has absolute control over anything, not even the world-generator-plus-rules-arbiter player known as the Dungeon Master or Game Master (DM / GM) who runs the game. The sum of the players’ input defines the game, and every player gets a chance to act.

2) Storytelling – Also simple. Together, the players and the Game Master tell a story. At the beginning of the game, each player other than the Game Master creates a character to represent them in the story. The character can be as similar or dissimilar from their player as the player wants, but every character comes with backstory, personality, and goals. Perhaps a banished knight, wishing to redeem herself in the eyes of her lord? Or a high priest who suddenly learns that the God he serves is not as pure and praiseworthy as he once believed? The options are as limitless as the human imagination. Together, the sum of the Player Characters (the PCs) forms “The Party”. Session after session, (TTRPGs are played over the course of months if not years), The Party creates the story through the sum of their decisions. Some days add a joyous zenith chronicling The Party’s triumph, while others mark a nadir as The Party slinks away from a humiliating defeat. Either way, the story about the trials and tribulations grows, resulting in a rich and ever-growing tapestry of story, featuring and written by the Players.

Meanwhile, the Game Master plays as every other entity in the story, allied or otherwise. The Party enters a tavern – the Game Master plays the barkeep and the other tavern patrons. The Party stumbles into an orc encampment, armed to the teeth – the Game Master plays the Orcs. The entities need not even be sentient: If The Party decides to brave a mountain pass late in the winter, the Game Master plays the weather they encounter along the way. The Players act to reach towards their goals (through their Characters). In contrast, the Game Master’s role is to react, fleshing out the world and providing the Players with the opportunity to make decisions, achieve their goals, and forward the story.

3) Adversity – This is the piece that confuses most potential players. How does adversity fit into collaborative storytelling? In order to make goals meaningful and growth require effort, Players are not able to say exactly what their Characters do. Rather, they say what their Characters try to do. The Game Master, aided by randomness in the form of dice, informs them if they are successful. Some actions such as speaking may have little to no adversity, so Players are able to freely narrate their Character’s action. In contrast, other actions such as shooting a bow at a target, picking a lock on a chest, or intimidating a guard into silence, have a high degree of adversity. Just as in real life, attempting these actions comes with a chance of failure, determined both by your Character’s proficiency at attempting a particular action along with some level of situational randomness. And just as in real life, there are different outcomes based on whether your Character succeeds. Either the arrow finds its mark or it does not. Either the lock pops open or it does not. Either the guard nods sharply with a nervous gulp or, glaring at you, raises a loud shout, “INTRUDERS IN THE EAST WING,” while running away down the dark hallway.

It is in the adversity component that we find nearly the entirety of the rules for the game. Allowing Players to attempt nearly any hypothetical action requires determining the adversity to that action. You want to climb the stone wall to get a better view of the illicit gathering of nobility down on the docks? Great – roll this die and add that number from your Character sheet (a summary of your Character’s strengths and weaknesses in numerical form) and tell the Game Master the result. If the sum is high, the story continues with you climbing easily to the top, silently gaining an eagle’s eye view of the whole affair. If it’s a little lower, perhaps you reach the top, but not without kicking lose a small fragment of ancient stone, its quiet impact on the wooden docks noteworthy in the otherwise silent night. Too low and you fall, slamming into the docks with a sharp CRACK and immediately alerting the gathered nobles that their gathering is not quite as secret as they had thought. Regardless of the outcome, though, the story continues. It may continue with the horrifying revelation of planned treason against the king, or with a midnight fight on the docks as the nobles seek to exterminate all who may have overheard their plotting. Either way, though, the story continues.

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So, that’s D&D and TTRPGs, more generally. All of the dice and sheets and miniature figurines, all of the fake locations and fake races and fake gods – all of it is merely a vehicle for Collaborative Storytelling with Adversity. It allows Players to live out countless lives, strive towards fantastical goals and pit themselves against dastardly foes. With no more than their imaginations and a host of record-keeping tools, players get to experience defeats as harsh and triumphs as great as any character in any book or movie. They get to decide when to exercise mercy, and when to continue their Character’s bloody vengeance to its final act. They are their Characters, both in deed and in thought. Game Masters can create any world for their characters to live within. The Players may find magic and wonder, superstition and sickness or terror and tyranny. By discovering the world, we discover ourselves.

It can seem overwhelming, at the start. There are many rules to learn, many decisions to make. In the face of uncertainty, as you regard the various barriers to entry, I’d advise you to just dive in. Once you’re playing, I think you’ll find it all becomes quite simple. There’s only one question you need answer.

Your contact said you’d know him by the Rose brooch adorning his left breast. There’s just one problem – in the past three minutes you’ve seen five men wearing such brooches, none of whom gave you more than a passing glance.

The party was crowded when you arrived and it’s only gotten worse. Between the nobility bringing along damn near every warm body residing in their estate and the swarms of well-to-do commoners desperate to make an impression, there’s scant enough room to move, let alone make covert contact with a masked stranger. Ranks of masked waiters dance through the throngs of people, pouring wine freely and serving steaming meats on wood skewers. All the while high above the courtyard the giant clock slowly swings its iron hands around, counting down to the climax of the Twilight Mascerade, the Demon’s Hour. The plan was to be in and out long before that sadistic bloodbath. Things aren’t going according to plan.

Suddenly, a hand grabs your arm from behind, holding you close as you feel the familiar point of a knife pressing lightly into the base of your unarmored neck. “There you are!” The voice continues with an air of joviality, “I was worried I’d never find you! Have a moment to chat?”

What do you do?

The Pendulum Swings, Part 2 – Gravity

(This post is a continuation of a previous one – start there, then come back.)

First, a quick recap – in brief, an ideal JRPG has both:

• A complex and flexible combat system
• A meaningful plot with surprising twists, usually somehow pertaining to saving the world

In part one I talked about the first point. Now let’s look at the second.

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Most JRPG plots involve, somehow, saving the world. The exact form can vary – perhaps someone plans on freeing a long-sealed evil, or attaining omnipotence through a forbidden ritual. In Chrono Trigger’s example, a parasitic planet-devouring creature happened to crash into the earth millions of years ago and is only now waking from its slumber. Regardless of the exact circumstance, two aspects of the plot are nearly universal:

1. The world-ending event is truly world-ending. There’s no point in making plans for what will happen after the world-ending event if it isn’t prevented as there won’t be a world to live in anymore.
2. Only the protagonists are in a position to prevent the world-ending event. Maybe they are the fated heroes, or perhaps only the protagonists even know that the world-ending event will occur. Regardless, if the protagonists do not act or act but do not succeed, the world will certainly end.

From a narrative standpoint, this can be seen as an unnecessary and frustratingly juvenile framework to have to work within. However, it plays a very important role in the plot as a whole: It explains why the various characters in the game come together to adventure despite their fairly fundamental differences. Without this linchpin, the narrative fabric can begin to fall apart.

(Warning – some plot spoilers for both Chrono Trigger and Octopath Traveler ahead.)

“No.” “…. oh. Ok then.”

The most meaningful example of necessity trumping personal ethics in Chrono Trigger is the interactions between Frog and Magus. (In the above picture, Frog is the broccoli holding a sword in the center and Magus is the orange-gloved purple-pantsed handyman at the top…. 16-bit graphics leave some things to the imagination.) Frog, originally named Glenn, was once a squire to a man named Cyrus. In service to their lord, they ended up fighting against Magus, a rogue sorcerer who was terrorizing Cyrus’ and Glenn’s people. Together, they attack Magus. He defeats them without a second thought, slaying Cyrus and cursing Glenn with his current half-frog half-human form. Needless to say, Frog holds a bit of a grudge against Magus. It’s crazy, then, that they later end up on the same team fighting towards a common goal.

The initial fight with Magus is later revealed to be a misunderstanding – Chrono and friends believed Magus was the cause of the world-ending force Lavos, but Magus was also trying to destroy it. When this is finally understood by all parties involved, Magus offers to join the team and lend his extraordinarily powerful sorcery to the cause. Throughout it all, it’s unclear if Frog ever confronts Magus or if Magus ever apologizes for cursing Frog or slaying Cyrus. Given the lack of reconciliation, it appears that both men approach their predicament with a stoic and grim sort of determination – the deeds of the past won’t matter if they don’t succeed in saving the future.

Plots that have a world-ending event loom on the horizon allow any set of characters to come together and work to save the world. Even blood enemies can get along since they can presumably agree that they’d prefer the world to continue undestroyed. On the flip side, plots that drop this point start having to answer some uncomfortable questions.

Spoiler alert! The mansion is extremely pregnable.

The plot of Octopath Traveler started to fall apart for me when I got to Therion’s first chapter. As noted above, Therion is a thief and his adventure begins when he decides to try to rob a certain mansion. After adding Therion and picking a set of four characters, my party included:

• Tressa, a merchant who spent her entire first chapter yelling at a pair of pirates for stealing from people.
• Ophilia, a cleric who follows the preachings of her church to the letter.
• Olberic, a knight with a nearly iron-clad set of ethics and morality.
• Therion, a thief who somehow got the above three people to help him break and enter into a mansion to rob its residents.

Feels a bit nonsensical, no? If I’m really to believe that Olberic is such an honorable knight, why would he agree to help Therion? After getting through paragraphs of text spoken by Tressa extolling the virtues of trading compared to the vices of thieving, I know for a fact she wouldn’t agree to help Therion unless there was a really, really motivating reason. Frog agrees to allow Magus on the team despite Magus literally ruining Frog’s life because Frog knows that regardless of his personal grudge they will need all the help they can get against Lavos. Tressa agrees to help Therion rob a mansion because…. why exactly? There’s no reason I can find in the plot, which unfortunately means we fall back to the worst answer of all: Tressa teams up with Therion because the plot needs her to do so.

An unfortunate but practical limitation imposed upon JRPG plots is that for the most part, the party can’t split up. That means that for the vast bulk of the time they are adventuring together everyone in the party has to agree on the path they are following. Under the gaze of a world-ending event, this is trivially easy, which I think is one of the reasons why such plot structures are so common in JRPGs. Without one, however, there are no easy outs, and fundamental ethical differences like those between Tressa and Therion can’t just be handwaved away.

Beyond Tressa’s horizon: Shiny rocks, then MORE shiny rocks!

Even more broadly, having a world-ending event on the horizon answers a general and persistent question – why should I care? Why should I care about this character’s trials or that character’s desires? Why does any of this matter? In many game genres, the answer can simply be “you don’t have to.” Even in Breath of the Wild (a fantastic game I reviewed two posts back), the plot isn’t the part of the game that makes it so amazing. The plot isn’t at all bad, but it takes a back seat to exploration, combat, and discovery. Adventure games like Breath of the Wild just don’t rely that heavily on their plot, and Breath of the Wild does a wonderful job recognizing that fact and allowing the player to freely adventure without forcing them to walk a linear line of plot.

JRPGs, for better or worse, are on the opposite of this spectrum. The plot and strategic combat together are the most important two elements, and an argument can be made that plot is the more important of the two. There are many ways to a bad plot, but a fast and fatal one is to construct a plot that the player (or reader or viewer) simply doesn’t care about seeing to completion. I don’t specifically have to love or identify with the protagonist. Within the context of an adventure, though, I do have to believe that the character’s actions are making some sort of impact. Otherwise, I have no reason to fight the next random encounter or turn the next page.

Gravity, in a way, is what is needed in every JRPG plot. The characters’ actions need to matter within the context of the world they inhabit. It has to matter that I defeat this particular boss or journey to this town and start a cutscene. If things are essentially left unchanged by my actions, what was even the point? As above, having a world-ending evil to defeat fixes this problem in a jiffy in somewhat hyperbolic fashion. If you don’t continue on your adventure, the world will literally be destroyed. Ok, yep, got it. Box checked.

Aaaaand in this corner, weighing in at 100000 tons, the source-of-magic, the dinosaur-extinctor, it’s Lavos!

Octopath Traveller ditches this hyperbole, (which is fine), but in doing so swings too far in the other direction. Tressa’s entire story is one of personal discovery. Seriously – if Tressa had not left home, the rest of the events of the story would be essentially unchanged. This type of narrative just doesn’t fit into a JRPG context because it lacks gravity. I just don’t care if Tressa comes to a personal epiphany, at least not in the same way I care about Chrono preventing apocalypse-via-space-parasite.

Some of the lack of gravity is unfortunately caused by the format of Octopath Traveller’s plot. Featuring eight characters, Octopath Traveller opts to serve eight unrelated plots, each with four chapters. This means that Tressa’s whole story is actually only four chapters long, which is not nearly long enough to develop a journey of discovery into something even slightly motivating. Had they opted for a more linear plot structure (by joining the eight characters’ plots into a single branch after the first chapter or two) they could have had more time to work with.

There’s more to why I didn’t find Octopath Traveller’s plots particularly engaging, but the bottom line is that I didn’t particularly care whether the characters succeeded or failed. I continued onwards because the combat is just that fun (as detailed in the last post) and because engaging in the plot is the way to get to harder enemies, but I never felt amazingly drawn in. There’s a pendulum in JRPG development, swinging between combat and plot, micro and macro. Octopath Traveller is a great game (and again I recommend it to any fan of the genre.) This time, though, it may have swung a bit too far.

The Pendulum Swings, Part 1 – Flexibility

Another day, another game. Unlike other recent posts detailing surprise favorites, this is one I’ve been looking forward to for a while and was very excited to play as soon as it was released. Let’s talk about Octopath Traveler.

HP, SP, and four people in a line – looks like a JRPG to me

Octopath Traveler is a quintessential JRPG, but what exactly that means in 2018 merits some discussion. First, though, a simple definition. A JRPG – Japanese role-playing game – is a game that has the two following qualities:

• Adversity in the form of combat that emphasizes strategy over technique or skill. Combat is usually turn-based. Otherwise, it can be real time in that characters get to act every [x] seconds or the like. The player is almost never required to react quickly or in honest real time. Rather, the player is expected to think multiple turns in advance and have their characters act in a way that maximizes their joint effectiveness.
• A detailed and rich plot featuring multiple characters, usually from a diverse set of backgrounds, who (nearly always) must come together to defeat some all-powerful, world-ending evil. While the framework is bland, JRPGs rely more on their plot than any other genre I can think of and as such have left a long history of memorable plots and iconic characters.

The genre has been around for a very long time: Final Fantasy I was released in 1987, meaning JRPGs have been an easily identifiable genre for at least 30 years. This has been long enough to spawn subgenres including tactical JRPGs (grid-based JRPGs that focus on unit placement and map control like Fire Emblem and Advance Wars) and monster capture JRPGs that allow you to capture your enemies and use them in subsequent battles (Pokemon, you’ve probably heard of it).

Like every art form that has been around for a long while, “pure” JRPGs released today have both a high standard to live up to and an increasingly restrictive space in which to live. So long as they adhere to the tenants above, they will be judged against the best and the brightest of their school of gaming.

Which is exactly what I’ll be doing today.

Chrono – a man of very, very few words. Zero words, if I recall correctly.

Chrono Trigger! The 1995 time-traveling world-saving Square Enix classic that effectively defines the genre. Some fans may have other favorites, but everyone who loves JRPGs has played Chrono Trigger. If you’re a JRPG fan who hasn’t, you should rectify that as soon as you can. (Just grab a SNES emulator and ROM, I won’t tell anyone.)

Well, we have two games and two criteria against which to judge them. Let’s get to it!

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In today’s post, combat. A great JRPG gives the player enough choice to allow them to use their characters in a near-infinite set of ways, each with trade-offs and counter-balances. Furthermore, the game is difficult enough to make this strategic thinking a necessary requirement for progressing, just like platformers require timing and FPS’s require reflexes.

On this front, I’d give the point to Octopath Traveler.

That’s not to say that Chrono Trigger’s combat system was bad – in 1995 it was great and even now it holds up as being fine if a bit mundane. Just like how Shakespearean stories now seem cliche and predictable because they were followed by hundreds of copies that made their once original and gripping twists into household standards, Chrono Trigger’s combat system now seems ordinary because its copies (effectively) reused its novel inventions.

Chrono Trigger takes the standard attack/skill/item system from the early JRPG era and adds combos – instead of using a skill with a single character, you can wait (Chrono Trigger had an active battle system) to use a more powerful joint skill. This created interesting decisions both in the micro gameplay of choosing whether to act now or wait for a higher payoff, as well as the macro gameplay of choosing a party from available characters based on what combo skills the chosen party could perform. Again, this is a fun and engaging combat system. I first played Chrono Trigger when it was re-released on DS in 2008 and I loved it, all the while having no idea that it was a barely-changed re-release of a 13-year-old game.

Chrono Trigger’s combat was good. Octopath Traveller’s combat is phenomenal.

Miss?? Give me a Break

Similarly to Chrono Trigger, Octopath Traveler starts at the same Attack/Skill/Item(/Defend/Flee) base set of actions. On top of this, however, it adds two key additions:

• An armor and break system, as illustrated above. Each enemy has an armor number displayed next to a list of symbols that match some subset of the 12 damage types (6 physical weapons + 6 magic types). Each time the enemy is hit with damage of the matching type their armor number decreases by 1. When the number hits 0 the enemy is “broken.” They lose their current and next turns and take double damage while they are broken.
• BP (battle points) which accumulate during the course of a battle and are represented by the dots just below their names in the illustration above. Characters start the battle with 1 BP each and can have a maximum of 5. At the start of each round, each character that did not use any BP during their last turn gains 1 BP. In a single turn up to 3 BP can be used to increase the effectiveness of a skill or (and this is the crucial part), get one additional basic attack per BP spent.

Why is this so innovative? And how does it unlock so many strategic possibilities and tradeoffs? In a sense, BP accumulation is like giving a character free turns. Spending a full 3 BP a character can have 4 basic attacks, which if used correctly can reduce an enemy’s armor by 4 and lead to a crucial break. Thus, should you use your BP for basic attacks to reduce an enemy’s armor fast? Or save it for skills which will result in more damage? All else equal, which character’s BP should you spend to reduce an enemy’s armor? Should you use BP to boost a damage skill and take a large chunk off of a boss’ health, or use it on a stat-boosting effect to make a character more effective or resilient over a long period of time? The combination of armor/break and BP systems leads to an amazingly large set of choices and positively blew my mind when it was first explained in the game’s opening levels. (Another sign of a good system – it’s simple enough to be explained during the beginning of the game. I’m looking at you Xenoblade Chronicles 2 – if you can’t explain something until the 20th hour you should probably cut it.) Breaking enemies becomes essentially mandatory during the game’s later boss fights, requiring the player to have a strong grasp on how to use these systems to the greatest effect.

Every other choice the player can make in Octopath Traveler complements this primary pair of mechanics. As the player picks up characters they can make their party of four from any of the eight (though they are required to keep their first character in their party until completing that character’s plot, which I’ll touch on next time). Any set of four the player selects yields a set of weapons and magic types that the represented characters can attack with. Even if the player specifically wants to cover all twelve types (and this is by no means required) there are a host of “complete coverage” party combinations. Later on, the player unlocks secondary classes that can freely be moved between characters, further freeing the player to craft their ideal party.

This flexibility, I think, is what made Octopath Traveler such a joy to play. The game gives you strategic pieces in the form of characters, classes, skills, and equipment, and expects you to figure out how to put them together into an effective force. I (as the player) felt like I had the freedom to craft a party that was both powerful and fit my playstyle. Yet when I compared my end-game party to what my coworker created we found that we had nearly no overlap. I had made a powerful and interesting combination of strategic pieces, and he had made an entirely different powerful and interesting combination of the same strategic pieces.

Chrono Trigger had strategic flexibility, but Octopath Traveler has raised the bar. In doing so, it does its forebearer proud.

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Next time in The Pendulum Swings, Part 2 I’ll talk about point two – plot, memorability, and saving the world.

Choice

After breezing through Super Mario Odyssey and slogging through Xenoblade Chronicles 2, I found myself without another new Switch title to really grab my interest. Looking at what I have in my collection, I decided to fire up Breath of the Wild again, to see if it still holds up on a second playthrough.

Short answer – yes. Even a year later, after the initial hype has worn off and we’re all getting excited about the next mainstream Pokemon title (…eventually…), Breath of the Wild is not only an amazing game but one that I suspect will come to be seen as a major milestone in game design and history.

It takes my breath away, every time

As with any true masterpiece, Breath of the Wild has a lot to teach us about good game design, specifically what makes a good adventure game. That’s what Zelda games are, at their core – the original in-development nickname for what would become the Zelda series was “adventure Mario.”

What makes a good adventure game? Or, even more concisely, what makes a good adventure? It’s a simple yet extremely difficult question. Each society has been working on it for millennia in the form of stories and legends passed down through the years. Clearly, this is a topic of great study, but a short laundry list of items an adventure should have could be:

• Some number of protagonists, who are working towards some “good” goal.
• Opposing them, adversity in some form. Either an “evil”, consciously working against them, or simply the natural adversity of life.
• A trajectory of growth for the protagonists. Rewards for passing each trial along the way, both in tools needed to oppose their adversity and in skills learned in doing so.

From only these three aspects, we already have a rough outline of an adventure. There exists a goal that needs to be accomplished. An evil defeated, an object found, or perhaps just a world explored. A protagonist is chosen, by fate or chance, to accomplish this goal. However, at the start of the tale, they are not nearly ready to simply accomplish the final goal. They lack the strength, or the knowledge, or the resources. These things they lack become sub-goals that must be accomplished before the original top-level task can be attempted. Thus, the protagonist sets off to attack these subgoals. When they are finally ready, they can attempt to complete the original task, achieving their good end and completing the story. Everything that happens in the middle – the friends they make, the places they travel, the skills and knowledge they acquire – is the adventure. A good adventure game, then, is one that allows the player to do all of these things.

That’s what makes a good adventure game. What makes a great adventure game, however, requires allowing the player to feel like they are the adventurer. That’s a good deal harder.

Imagine, for a moment, that you’re an adventurer, and you need to slay a dragon that’s been torching the kingdom on the regular. So far, sounds like an adventure, right? Now suppose that in the center of the town square is a large red button labeled “SLAY DRAGON.” Your adventure consists of walking to the button and pushing it.

Doesn’t feel very adventurous, does it?

Unfortunately, plenty of adventure games are more like this than what you were probably imagining before the big red button part. In an attempt to make accomplishing the final goal feel awesome while keeping the game accessible, the adversity is removed. As we’ve noted, though, the adversity was the very source of the adventure: removing the adversity removes the adventure. Cosmetic changes involving the protagonist (“only the fated hero can push the button!”) or the nature of the button (“It’s actually a magical orb from the dragon-slaying dimension”) don’t help, no matter how much lazy game studios wish they did. No adversity, no adventure.

Back to the hypothetical scenario. Let’s remove the button since that’s an obvious dead-end. There’s still a dragon to slay, but no obvious, easily accessible Deux-ex device to utilize. However, this time, after asking you to slay the dragon, the king hands you a long parchment, detailing the exact steps you’ll take to do so. First, you’ll travel to the northern marshes to find the lost breastplate of fire-proofness. Then you’ll head east to the dark forest where the elves craft the strongest bows in the land. Along the way, you’ll meet a new acquaintance who will initially be skeptical of your abilities but will become a true friend in time. From there you will turn south to the great ports, where any good can be had for the right price. You will eavesdrop (completely by chance, of course) on a conversation between two merchants, letting you know the location of the illegal midnight market where the most contraband items are sold. Upon arriving, you will learn it was all a setup. You’ll barely escape with your life and, crucially, the very item you came to buy: the famed cowl of invisibility. (In the process your love interest will die. Just a heads-up.) Your checkbox-style inventory completed, you will track down the dragon in the steppes of the south-west, and after a long confrontation slay it with a cinematic shot through the eye.

If you were this protagonist and the king actually handed you this list, your eyes would probably glaze over halfway through the list. (If you actually read the whole paragraph above, your eyes probably actually glazed over halfway through the list.) If you were playing a game where you then had to actually go and do all of the listed things, the feeling of adventure would be dead on arrival. It would feel more like grocery shopping than adventuring. What’s the problem then? The above story has all of the things we need for an adventure. There’s a protagonist who wants to adventure, an evil that needs defeating, and a well-thought-out trajectory of growth and challenge to get the protagonist from A to B. What’s missing?

Aww, he wants a hug!

Choice. Choice is missing. The single biggest implicit prerequisite for any adventure is the ability to make choices in how to go about it. Without choice, everything else falls flat. Adversity loses its teeth, as you will only ever encounter adversity that you have the tools to beat. Protagonist growth goes out the window, as you have no need to learn and grow. As long as you remain locked on a railroad traveling towards the final goal, everything you’ll need at any point along the way will be effectively spoon-fed to you at just the right moment.

Boring, right?

The presence of real choice is where Breath of the Wild sets itself apart. For years, adventure games have tried to lay out series of events to create ever stronger senses of adventure. Bosses got badder, twists got twistier, and terrain more extreme. In doing so, though, they became more and more scripted, which has a way of killing the very adventure the script was supposed to create.

There are many ways Breath of the Wild breaks this mold. The extremely well disguised “tutorial” section of the game essentially hands you all of the mechanics in the game, restricted to a small part of the map. After completing that, you’re able to travel to literally any part of the map, completely ignoring the plot if you so desire. You can even travel to places you are woefully underprepared for and promptly have the shit kicked out of you. The main part of the plot of the game is broken up into discrete chunks, which can be tackled in any order (or, as noted above, simply ignored). The sub-goals, designed to increase your power and knowledge and prepare you for the final confrontation, can be completely ignored. If you want to, you can run straight to the final confrontation without so much as putting on pants. Not like a real adventurer would, but like a real adventurer could in a real adventure. You have complete freedom of choice in how to progress, in a way unlike any game I’ve ever played before.

Breath of the Wild – a game about climbing cliffs.

If I had to credit the abundant choice found in Breath of the Wild to a single game feature, it would be the ability to climb. Most games use cliffs as walls: If you’re walking down a road between two vertical cliff-faces, you’d have no choice but to take the road one way or the other, as those would be the only options available to you. Not so in Breath of the Wild. Just as in real life, you can decide you’re done with the road and try to climb one of the walls. Many landmarks you want to travel to in the game present no easy path, so climbing becomes a necessity. This creates a subtle but massively important shift in how the player thinks about exploration. Instead of seeing a far-off fortress and thinking “How can I get there”, or even worse, “How can I get there that the game will allow”, or even worse yet, “Will the game allow me to get there”, the player is faced with the choices involved in planning a route. Is there a road that makes sense? If not, what path is the shortest and the least steep? (In a symbiosis of realism and good game design, the stamina system allows the player to climb further when the ascent is less steep, incentivizing planning a route over blind climbing.)  Will taking a less standard path allow you to stumble upon something noteworthy? The presence of climbing alone in the game changes travel from logic and possibility-elimination into, for lack of a better word, adventuring. You feel like you are truly exploring Hyrule, limited only by your strength (health and stamina), the tools you’ve found so far, and your wits. You feel like an adventurer.

I don’t know how long it will take for another game to come along that captures the spirit of adventuring as well as Breath of the Wild does. I can only hope that game developers are paying attention to Breath of the Wild’s massive success and will try to emulate it in all of the right ways. That they will realize that engaging world design goes further than elaborate, scripted cutscenes in making us care about what’s going on. That they will give us a few multi-use tools instead of many single-use ones, as only multi-use tools allow for creativity. That rather than boxing us in, they will allow us to venture wherever we want, even when the plot turns right and we turn left. I hope that when the time comes to create the next great adventure game, these developers trust us, the players. Because they’ll have to trust us, in order to give us the ability to choose how we play.

Because It’s There

Every so often I stumble upon a game that I immediately know will be one of my all-time favorites. More and more, the games that fall into this category are indie games that only take me a single digit number of hours to clear. Despite being short by video game standards, they manage in this short time to demonstrate the very best gameplay qualities and innovate further within their chosen genre, as well as present a compelling and deep narrative, all along with art and music that link the two together. It seems like a tall order, but back when I started this blog I had just started Bastion and knew instantly that it would forever be one of my favorite games. Later on, Axiom Verge and Undertale joined the list. This week, the new inductee is Celeste.

It doesn’t.

A glowing review from a co-worker convinced me to buy Celeste on Switch (though it is available on most consoles and Steam), and within mere minutes I was loving it. Celeste is a puzzle-platformer with a platforming difficulty level somewhere above Super Mario Bros but well below Super Meat Boy, which puts it right in the sweet spot of challenging but not sadistically punishing. That may intimidate some who aren’t huge platformer fans, but about half of the challenge (and in particular the hardest parts) are purely optional. Strawberries are distributed throughout the levels in hard-to-reach spots that will push your platforming skills to the limit. They’re there if you want to get them, but the game even goes out of its way to let you know that they don’t matter other than that.

Strawberries – the hardest way to impress your friends. Seriously.

So then what’s the point of the strawberries? Why do I (the player) feel such a gut-level need to at least try to collect them?

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In Celeste, you play a girl named Madeline who is trying to climb the titular Mount Celeste. Along the way you meet a few other characters, including social-media-obsessed fellow climber Theo and a crazy old lady who seems to be more with it than she lets on. At the start, the lady warns you that strange things happen to climbers who attempt to summit the mountain and urges you to turn back. Of course, Madeline stubbornly pushes ahead, insisting to both the lady and herself that she “needs to do this.” It’s only in a later chapter that you meet the reason why – A physical manifestation of Madeline’s mental illnesses (mainly depression and anxiety) who springs from Madeline’s mind in a nightmare and retains physical form even after the sun has risen.

Rude.

The girl (nicknamed “Badeline”, though this name is never used in the game) haunts Madeline at every turn, insulting her and telling her repeatedly to give up. At every success, she urges Madeline to quit while she’s ahead and at every failure trumpets her foresight and warns of even worse consequences if Madeline doesn’t throw in the towel. But Madeline persists, and persists, and persists.

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There is a very interesting connection between platformers and depression. In any sufficiently difficult platformer, even the best player will “lose” to the game hundreds of times before they eventually succeed by the skin of their teeth. With every successive failure, the game is effectively telling you, “You can’t do this. You’re not good enough. You’ll never be good enough. Quit. Turn the game off. Give up.” I am no expert in anything mental health related, but I wonder if these same feelings of frustration and hopelessness are what people who suffer from depression deal with constantly in their everyday life. If so, the game not only destigmatizes depression but praises those who carry its burden while continuing to push themselves to reach the highest heights. Within the game, continuing to play is telling the game that it is wrong. That after every failure you will try again. That you have the ability to succeed and the fortitude to see it through.

The fact that the mechanics and the narrative are intertwined at the deepest of levels really drives this point home. I yearn to collect strawberries just like Madeline yearns to reach the summit of Mount Celeste. Neither poses any reward of any sort, yet the very existence of the mountain (and the strawberries) issues a challenge to any who would dare lay eyes on it. Simply walking by would be admitting defeat, and neither I (the player) nor Madeline the character are ready to give up just yet.

Towards these ends, the musical score is truly magical. It seamlessly fits into the mechanics and themes, while also subtly re-asserting the plot throughout the game. For an example, here’s “Scattered and Lost”. Each of the songs blends light acoustic sounds (mainly piano and acoustic percussion) with heavy, dark and dissonant electronic sounds. In a way, this combination symbolizes the state of Madeline’s mind, with the acoustic sounds representing her optimistic and confident personality and the electronic ones representing the weight of her depression. Throughout each of the songs in the soundtrack, these two elements do battle, each vying to gain dominance over the other yet both unable to fully declare victory. The plot of the game, which I won’t spoil here, comes to the same conclusion.

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One of my favorite parts of games as an art form is that they are able to unlock emotions in the player that other art forms (for example, books, movies, and paintings) struggle with. Platformers excel at causing the emotions of frustration and (in the non-medical sense) depression when the player fails while bestowing elation, confidence, and pride when the player succeeds. Celeste capitalizes on this unique ability of platformers to weave a narrative of challenge and suffering, of rising only to fall and yet still getting back up onto your feet. It instills a deep empathy for Madeline and respect for all who struggle with depression but despite its burden still continue through life.

In a way, the very frustration and challenges set up by platformers like Celeste make them the most optimistic and encouraging of games. By setting up challenges they make us better players by allowing us to overcome them. We collect the strawberries because they’re there. We climb the mountain because it’s there. We strive to make tomorrow better than today because that’s what it means to be alive. If the mountain could see our faces at the top, if it could feel our elation and our pride at conquering it, I don’t think it would curse us.

I think it would be proud.

Impulsive Decisions

This Thursday, I sat outside a Best Buy for four and a half hours! To tell this story right, I have to tell it as it happened. I wanted to blog as I went, but my phone died in the middle, so I have to rewind a bit. So here we go..!

Let’s do the time-warp agaaaaaain!

Friday, March 3rd at 12:01AM marked the release of the Nintendo Switch, Nintendo’s new console-portable hybrid. For the non-nintendo-fanperson, here’s a rundown: The “Console” itself is a medium sized tablet-looking rectangle. At home, the console can be placed in a dock which is then attached to a TV via HDMI cable. The controller is then two controller pieces with buttons and a joystick, each attached to a controller frame that provides the hand grips. On the go, the console can be removed from the dock and the controller pieces can be attached to the console, resulting in a device similar in style to a PSP.

The concept is exceedingly novel, but until Thursday at around 7PM (PST) I had decided not to buy a Nintendo Switch. More out of laziness than an actual lack of desire, I felt that I didn’t need a Switch. I had basically moved away from console gaming towards the glory (and sale prices) of Steam, and didn’t see a huge reason to change that policy now.

But gosh, LoZ: Breath of the Wild. That’s a link to Google results for “Breath of the Wild Reviews”. Click it. Seriously, click it. In addition to quite nearly flawless reviews across the board, we get link previews like:

So when I say Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild not only gatecrashes the list, but probably beats the lot as the greatest of them all, I hope you realise how serious an achievement it is. (source)

And

If everything remains the same, there’s a case to be made that Breath of the Wild is in the top three best reviewed games for as long as review … (source)

I was finally pushed over the top when Aaron (thanks Aaron!) sent me a compiled list of Breath of the Wild’s scores across some twenty-plus game reviewing platforms.

Anyone notice “Time” in there? Yeah, that’s Time Magazine.

Thus, at 7PM PST, with both the game and the system launching in five hours, I decided to jump on board. At that point, preordering was long past possible. The only way to get my hands on a Switch and the absurdly-well-reviewed Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild was to take matters into my own hands.

By which I mean wait in a line outside of Best Buy for four and a half hours.

Nerds. Nerds everywhere.

To be honest, I got very very lucky. The first place I called (a Best Buy) said that their line was too long, but to try a different best buy half an hour further down the road. I called them and they said if I arrived then I had a very good chance of being early enough, so I immediately called an uber. Upon arrival, I was at position forty-seven in line, which made me fairly optimistic (as fifty is a nice round number to have shipped to you).

And so we waited.

This is what I’m really writing to talk about. Not the Switch and Breath of the Wild (I’m sure I’ll get to it soon enough), but the experience of waiting in line for a new console and game. I’d never done it before, and after doing it once, I can say I’d absolutely do it again! (And that I’d prepare better).

I was surprised by how friendly and outgoing everyone around me was. After a few minutes of awkward silence, we started talking about our favorite games and systems and why we liked them. One of the guys who lived nearby left and came back with snacks for everyone, which was amazing because my hastily thought out plan didn’t include provisions for sitting in one spot for four and a half hours. One couple came with a huge fluffy puppy who immediately took a liking to me (along with everyone else) and spent the night moving from person to person and licking our faces.

[Picture of Dog would go here, but my phone died before I could get one. Just imagine a huge dog with long black and white fur and little sharply pointed ears. You doing it? Great! Good imagining. Who’s a good imaginer? You are!]

At around ten thirty they handed out tickets guaranteeing us at least a Nintendo Switch and a copy of Breath of the Wild. This, of course, raised everyone’s spirits and made the rest of the night fly by. The fact that I found a Game of Thrones book in my backpack didn’t hurt.

Finally, the time arrived. The doors opened and we were herded inside into yet another line. Slowly, the line progressed as people exchanged their tickets for products and walked out, tired but triumphant. A little while longer, and it was my turn.

 

“Aha!” You’re thinking, “a plot hole! You said your phone was dead.” Great detective work, hypothetical reader! I plugged it in when I got into the Best Buy.

Reflecting on the whole experience, waiting in line for four and a half hours was really, really nice. I cannot recall a single instance of assholishness. No one tried to cut, and when people left to go to the bathroom or pick up supplies, no one got angry at them for resuming their former position in line. When the time came and we were let into Best Buy, everyone proceeded in an orderly fashion. No one threw a fit when the specific version of the product or a specific add-on was no longer available when they reached the register. Everyone picked what they wanted out of what was available, paid, and left.

The contrast to standard Black Friday decorum in America could not be more stark. With that in mind, I have to wonder, what made this shopping experience so different? Some of it was the weather and the duration of waiting. We were waiting in the fifty-degree chill of a mild Californian winter, and for a mere six hours at the most. I assume that the atmosphere of waiting in a multi-day line in the snow would be exceedingly different. We’re also only waiting for a single product, and one who’s company makes a conscious effort to be family friendly and on the whole “nice”. I have to wonder what the same line would have been like if we were waiting for a new Playstation or XBox. (Here’s one theory).

There’s plenty to ponder, for sure. But for now, on to Breath of the Wild!

 

Spring 26, Year 17, Parallel Universe 3

It’s been a long time since I stayed up until 4 AM playing a video game. The onset of both college and post-college life meant that I would rather spend my fairly limited time doing many other things. I just couldn’t afford to ruin the next day by spending the time I would be sleeping on playing a game. In order to convince me otherwise, a game would have to be playable in an unlimited number of discrete increments, such that I would always want to play one more. Additionally, it would have to be non-competitive so I wouldn’t give in after losing a game. Growth and achievement are must-haves. Taking all that and tossing in pleasing visuals and sound, in an endlessly rich world, gets us to a fairly strict set of requirements.

Fortunately, I have just the thing.

 

A wonderful world awaits within!

Recommended to me a while back, I picked up Stardew Valley during the past Steam winter sale, and finally had a chance to open it a couple weeks ago. Since then, for better or for worse, I have been completely hooked.

If I had ever played a Harvest Moon title, I would probably say the game is reminiscent of Harvest Moon. Having not, it feels like a wonderful amalgamation of Animal Crossing and Minecraft, with some of the good parts of Farmville. The game is divided into days, each of which take about a half hour (though this can be highly variable). Each day you wake up promptly at 6 AM and have until 1 AM the next morning to do whatever you want, whether that’s planting, watering, and harvesting your crops, fishing in the rivers, lakes, and ocean, talking to villagers, or any number of other activities.  Your path forward is entirely up to you.

 

You know it’s not my farm because he’s not using his scarecrow efficiently.

And yet, the wide range of choice leads to a frustrating conclusion. Upon initially opening up the game, I made it to the first summer before giving up. In a game about open-ended cultivation and exploration, I nevertheless felt like I was doing it wrong. Over the course of that first spring, I had realized so many things I hadn’t been doing or did wrong. I didn’t know that all your crops withered at the end of each season unless they specifically are marked to carry over. I didn’t know that you could build a chest until I had already thrown away tons of useful material. I didn’t know that because of weekly gifting limits, you have to start early to become friends with the villagers.

Thus, after the first month, I started the game over.

On take two, I made it to day 13 of the first spring before giving up. I once again felt that I wasn’t doing it right. There were many days in which I didn’t get done what I thought I had to accomplish. On one day I even ran out of energy and collapsed in the mine, which is never a good sign. With so many successive days of perceived failure, I didn’t have it in me to continue.

So I started over. Again.

On my third play I finally nailed everything for the first spring. I went into the Egg festival with tons of money for strawberry seeds. I blitzed the mine up to level 40 to start gathering iron for sprinklers. I made a bunch of tree tappers to gather pine resin for fertilizer. Finally, I felt like I was hitting or even exceeding all of my goals. With more and more sprinklers, I had to water fewer and fewer crops each morning, leaving me with more time and more energy to do other productive things with the rest of the day. Summer came, and I spent my accrued fortune on as many blueberries as I could support. I’m now at Summer 4, year 1.

And I feel a little bit lost.

 

Not pictured: Me. I skipped the Flower Dance to keep fishing all day.

In my relentless drive to perfect my first month, I set myself up for failure following it. I did it; I hit my goal, I made every day count. But now what? Should I set another extremely distant goal and replay over and over until I hit it? It’s not quite that I don’t want to give up on my progress again, but that I don’t know what I should even be aiming for in the first place. What is the point of playing Stardew Valley?

In this way, Stardew Valley feels less like a video game and more like, well, life. There’s not really a “point” of playing the game. The closest thing the game provides to a singular main goal is repairing the community center, but that feels more like a way of marking your progress than your motivation to progress. When I finally decide to stop playing, I don’t think I’ll feel completed. Though I don’t know what the “end” of the game has in store for me, I don’t think it will feel like a fitting, all-inclusive conclusion.

And yet, isn’t that life? Living out one more day, reaching another little goal you’ve set for yourself, and making new friends along the way? Perhaps the all-consuming search for perfect and complete meaning isn’t the right way to play, nor the right way to live. Stardew Valley does not give a reason to farm, to fish, or to explore. Aside from an initial hint, it doesn’t even force you to meet all of your neighbors.

But then, it doesn’t have to. The world is so rich in color, in sound, and in personality. Blades of grass and flowering bushes dance everywhere you go. The music shuffles to match the season and the weather, as well as to punctuate key scenes and days. Each and every townsperson has a completely independent schedule that varies by day of the week, season of the year, and current weather condition. Additionally, all have exceedingly deep personalities that change and reveal themselves as the player gets to know them. I’ve never seen this much attention to detail in a game not for the purposes of game mechanics, but purely to create an amazingly rich world in which to play.

One day while I was farming away, I heard a train whistle. Immediately thereafter a notification popped up on the bottom of my screen, saying, “A train is passing through Sundew Valley.” Did that have any significance? I don’t know! In any other game, I would answer yes, beyond a doubt. But in Sundew Valley I’m not so certain. Maybe it didn’t have any meaning. Maybe, just as in real life, sometimes trains pass through your town, blowing their far-off whistles while traveling to far-off lands. As the sound fades, maybe you return to your prior activity, or maybe you start a new one. Maybe it had significance to you, and maybe it didn’t. Did it mean something? No one can say for sure. That’s just life.

 

 

 

Get Up and GO

So, Pokemon Go. Now that the moment has essentially passed, what the heck was that all about? After an initial record-shattering surge of downloads, Pokemon Go has essentially faded away. As with any fad of this scale, there are certainly important lessons to be learned from the sudden rise and exponential decay of the popular gaming app. Here are my thoughts:

The single most important thing that Pokemon Go proved is that Pokemon is very alive, with a wider fanbase than I think anyone realized. When I told my parents about the game and attempted to explain its appeal, each of their immediate, knee-jerk reactions were, “I thought Pokemon ended ten years ago.” As it turns out, that is very much not the case. Because the franchise aggressively markets itself to older children and pre-teens, it makes sense for those forty or fifty years and older to think about the franchise as an artifact of a bygone era, one that existed exactly when their children or grandchildren were at the targeted age, and died out swiftly thereafter. My parents stopped hearing about Pokemon when my brother and I stopped talking about it constantly, and so they forgot about it. With that mindset, the revival of the franchise in such a public way must seem very odd.

The issue is, not only did Pokemon not die (and as such it continued to indoctrinate new generations of players throughout its two decades), the past players… never really stopped playing. Yes, I stopped watching the cringe-worthy TV show, but I kept playing the games until very recently. Even friends of mine who didn’t keep playing the games remember their time as a Pokemon trainer fondly. When Pokemon Go was initially announced a long time ago (I think around a year ago but I can’t find a source for that), we were all suddenly brought back to that time, and given a chance to relive it.

Little by little, the hype built. News and details slowly trickled out, along with an eventual release date: July 2016. We got a commercial introducing the game, which led to hype. We got a super bowl commercial for Pokemon, which led to even more hype. Finally, the game launched, and we got scenes like these:

One particular corner of Central Park in New York. Quite literally everyone in this picture is playing Pokemon Go. This picture was taken in August, which means that the scene in July must have been twice as crowded.

People went absolutely nuts. All of the people who devoured Pokemon Red and Blue after their release in 1996 were oh-so-ready to jump back into the world of pocket monsters, now accessible through the device you already carry with you everywhere you go. Nintendo’s stocks skyrocketed after the initial launch (though, as the article details, quickly fell after the reality of Pokemon Go’s shared ownership among Niantic and Google surfaced).

After that absurd launch, however, players started leaving. What the hell happened?

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Pokemon Go is only the second “augmented reality” game that I’ve played. Before Pokemon Go was ever announced, I was a Geocacher. In a nutshell, Geocaching is a worldwide, everyday treasure hunt. There are nearly 3 million players and nearly as many caches to find. Everywhere I go I spend at least a few hours hiking around, trying to find these little boxes hidden throughout the world.

Essentially, here’s how it works. Using your phone or computer, you locate a geocache near you on a map, like this:

Here are all of the caches near me, right now. There are probably just as many near you, right now. What are you waiting for?

Then, using a geocaching app (on your phone) or a GPS, you navigate to the location of the cache listed online. This may be as simple as walking down the street, or as difficult as hiking to the top of a mountain in the middle of nowhere. Once there, the real fun begins. Unlike in Pokemon Go, there is a physical prize, the cache, to be found. It can be as big as a large toolbox or as small as a fingernail, and it’s up to you and your puzzle-solving skills to find it.

Just today I spent a few hours walking around downtown Mountain View, grabbing a few caches (note the smiley faces on the map above). Some were easy, quick grabs I managed in under a minute. Others took between five and ten minutes, as I walked back and forth around the listed area scratching my head and contorting myself into strange positions to look under rocks and around poles. Two I couldn’t even find.

One cache, the second-to-last that I found today, took around half an hour and is easily my favorite cache to date. Never before have I felt so much on a treasure hunt as I did while finding the aptly-named Treasures Abound.  The listed location of the cache took me to a lovely park just behind the Mountain View Public Library. Amid the rolling green and lazily meandering paths, I set in to solve the puzzle.

Upon arrival, I immediately noticed a nearby sculpture, depicting a couple literary characters that some of you may recognize.

Two animal gentlemen talk near a home in a tree.. I knew I had seen them somewhere.

Noticing the sign on the right that says “Toad’s Book Club,” I googled around and realized that the shorter chap on the right is none other than Mr. Toad, a character in The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame. The solution to the puzzle must be obvious now, yes?

Unfortunately, I still had no idea what to do. I walked around the whole park looking for another clue, but found nothing. In re-reading the description of the cache, however, I noticed that it includes the following restriction:

Note that the cache is only available:
Mon.–Thurs. 10 a.m.–9 p.m.
Fri.–Sat. 10 a.m.–6 p.m.
Sun. 1 p.m.–5 p.m.
These hours could change, and there is no access on major public holidays (and some days preceding or following the holidays).

If the cache were outside, there would be no such restriction. If it were inside, however, it could explain the warning. Sure enough, I went to the nearest door into the library and found that the hours synced perfectly.

As a geocacher, I have to be prepared to go anywhere, including…. into a public library

I was on the right track. Surely, now, the solution is apparent to everyone with a brain?

Apparently, I don’t have a brain. I spent a few minutes walking aimlessly walking around the library, wondering what I was supposed to be looking for and how it would lead me to the cache. Finally, a spark of inspiration – I should look up the book that features Mr. Toad! If I find the book, surely I’ll find the cache. I was pointed towards the children’s portion of the library and walked over.  I found the book and combed through the couple copies the library had in stock and found… nothing. Confused, I stood up and looked around. Suddenly, there it was.

The search… IS OVER! WAHAHAHAHA!

Looking around to make sure no one was looking, I reached to the top of the shelf and pulled down the box. I sat on the floor, and, hoping no one would want to walk into the aisle, opened up the cache.

The cache! Full of trinkets of every shape and size.

The caches always contain a log on which to write your name and the date of your find. Many, like the one above, also contain a host of tchotchkes, knick-knacks, and the like. You never know quite what you’ll find when you open one up, which is part of the fun. The bigger draw though, to me at least, is the challenge of the game. It’s fairly easy to get to the location listed online, but going from a pin on screen to a cache in hand takes intelligence, skill, and patience. Each and every new cache you attempt to find will challenge you; I’ve been geocaching for years and still have to work to find them. Sometimes, you’ll have to go home without finding a single one, but that only makes the successful finds all the sweeter.

Challenge, in my mind, is what keeps Geocaching fun for cache after cache. In contrast, Pokemon Go didn’t die for no reason, it died because it lacked challenge and as such got boring. In the end of the day, it just isn’t difficult to walk to a spot, flick my finger on the screen a couple times, and move on. Every catching attempt, regardless of the Pokemon I found, was exactly the same. Even the illusion of challenge (in the form of higher CP) is just that: an illusion. Your success has more to do with the internal probabilities determined by the game than your skill at playing it.

Geocaching couldn’t be more different. Each puzzle has a set level of difficulty based on where and how it is hidden. You (not the game) determine if you are able to find it. Each successful find adds to your ability to play. Rather than aimlessly looking around the listed location, you begin to learn where caches are likely to be. Is the cache listed as very small? It’s probably magnetic, check everything metal. Are there a bunch of fist-sized rocks near the listed location? Roll them all over to check if any are actually plastic. In an urban setting? Check the free local newspaper dispensers, no one ever opens those. The list goes on and on, and only grows as you continue to play.

Moreover, Geocaching as a game has a host of positive qualities that Pokemon Go attempted to exemplify. It actually requires you to interact with the world around you (as opposed to simply going somewhere and then spending the whole time looking at your phone). You can actually work with other players to solve a puzzle, rather than just play along side them. Best of all, Geocaching is essentially FREE. You can pay to be a premium member, but so far I have found my basic member experience completely sufficient. There are official apps for both iOS and Android, though for Android I use and greatly prefer c:geo (as usual, Apple restricts what can be created for iOS through the App Store, so I am unaware of a free unofficial app for iOS). The only reason I never spent any money on Pokemon Go is that I was never so invested in the game as to actually be willing to pay for more resources, which are sold in the form of micro-transactions.

Geocaching is one of my favorite outdoor activities. Everyone I’ve shown it to has loved it, and has requested to accompany me on future caching trips around the area. It’s challenging, it’s truly outdoors, and making an account couldn’t be easier.

So what are you waiting for? Get up and GO!