D&D Next: Is it any good? Part 2

Hi there.

A bit late with the blog this week, sorry about that, but I'm here now and I've got one or two new rules to discuss that came up in last week's session. But before we do that, here's a few contextual qualifications:

• This week we actually had 7 people playing. If you've read the adventure then you know that there are only 6 pre-gen characters, and might be wondering how I've managed it: I let the 7th player have the NPC with strict instructions on how that NPC was supposed to be run. I did that because of the context of the club: It's a social club and there are around 30 of us; the 7th player hadn't got a game for this rotation and between having an NPC and not playing, he was grateful for the opportunity to get involved!
• We're up to the 'Dungeon Crawl' part of the adventure so a lot of the new rules I'm going to discuss relates to what happens in combat.
• I tend to contrast the rules to Pathfinder and 4e because those are the systems that I am a) most used to and b) consider the most relevant to the discussion, Pathfinder being DnD's closest rival and 4e being the system that 5e is replacing.

So here's the first new rule for this week:

Critical Hits

Of course, this is nothing new. Pretty much every game system I have played so far has used some form of Critical Hit system, or at least a better than average result if a certain set of conditions are met (usually to do with the dice.)

This one functions well enough: You get a critical hit if you roll an unmodified, or 'natural' 20 on a D20. You then add one more of the same kind of dice you would normally roll when rolling for damage, add the numbers together and the result is the amount of damage you do. For example, if you were attacking with a short sword, you would normally roll 1D6 for damage. If you get a critical hit, you roll 2D6 and add them together.

Is this a good system? In principle, yes it is. Taking the 'bell curve' mechanics of dice into consideration, the average score on any number of dice other that 1 (provided you're rolling the same kind of dice) is this: n*s/2+n-1, where 'n' is the number of dice you're rolling and 's' is the number of sides of the dice. This means that you can expect to roll a slightly higher number on two of the same kind of dice than the maximum possible score on one of that kind of dice.

Or, taking the super-nerdyness out of it, it basically means that at Level 1 you can expect to do a little bit more damage off a critical hit than you would have done if you'd rolled the highest possible score off a regular hit. Which works well enough for me.

It's certainly a lot more straightforward than Pathfinder's system of critical hits, which is comprehensive to the point of being convoluted. To be fair, it has to be; there is a huge range of weapons involved with this game and it needed a system that could accommodate the nuances of all of them. But it's still a long-winded process. For a start, some of the weapons have a 'critical threat range,' meaning that some of them will score a critical hit on a roll of 19, and if I remember rightly I think one of them will even do this on a roll of 18. You write this down on your character sheet, but you've still got to remember to do it. And then there's the 'threat' system. Because you see, rolling a critical hit is not enough. Rolling a natural 20 or whatever you need only threatens a critical hit; you still need to confirm it by rolling to hit again. Thankfully, if you miss, you've still hit, just not with a critical.

This makes critical hits very hard to get off in Pathfinder, because you've effectively got to roll to hit twice. I understand why this needs to happen though: the effect of the critical hit is that the damage doubles, and sometimes even trebles depending on the weapon. Given the range of hit points you usually have to work with in Pathfinder, and the damage potential of some of the weapons and especially magic weapons, this should not happen lightly. But it still makes for a complicated procedure.

On the other hand, DnD 4th goes perhaps a little too far the other way. With that system, if you get a critical hit, you automatically do the maximum possible amount of damage. This might not seem like much, but combine this with some of the powers and you've got a potentially horrific amount of damage that can be applied. It has to happen this way because of the range of hit points that monsters etc tend to have in 4th; in order for critical hits to mean anything you have to be reasonably certain of a large amount of damage if they hit. But it does take some of the fun out of rolling the dice to see what happens when you score a critical hit. It works for the system, but nothing more.

So what we have here with Next is a nice kind of middle ground that works well enough at lower levels and I'm assuming will scale up well with upper levels of play, Or at least it would work well if the players hadn't rolled appallingly badly for damage both times it came up during the game.

Movement

Movement could cover all sorts of things really but there was one particular part of the process that caught our eye during the game: You can move both before and after your attack.

This is a rule that took me somewhat by surprise as it dispenses with the usual combination of Standard Action/Move Action/Minor Action or however they're articulated in the various games. Instead of that, you are allowed to move a certain distance and, as long as you don't go over it, it doesn't matter when in the turn you do it. You can do it before your action, after your action or even both. This effectively means that you can move, attack and then move again.

I didn't expect this to be deployed all that much because to do this would provoke an attack of opportunity, but we actually found it surprisingly useful for repositioning yourself if you manage to kill whatever you were attacking. Now that we're aware of this I expect to see it used a lot more!

Flanking (or lack thereof)

This seems an odd thing not to put in the game given how long we've all spent working it out before, but there is currently no provision in the rules for flanking. I expected this to be a part of the advantage system mentioned last week, but I have yet to find a rule that says so.

This is both a blessing and a curse. On one hand, it takes a lot out of the clever flanking tactics used in previous editions. On the other hand, we're not slowing the game down to a crawl as we try to work out whether our position gives rise to flanking or not. It's a peculiar change but one that I would welcome, since all it would usually do is give you a +2 bonus to hit. Rogues still have their sneak attack, but this applies when attacking any enemy adjacent to an ally, and when you have advantage.

The only way flanking would come in to it that I can see is by what the game is calling situational modifiers at the DM's discretion, where the DM might decide you have a better or worse chance to hit due to a situation beyond the player's control. But this applies to things like applying cover, and it never mentions flanking.

We will see where this takes us!

No Game New Year Part 2: Grand Theft Auto 5. This is going to take me a while...

Hi there.

So No Game New Year is going well so far in the sense that I haven't given in to temptation and bought a new game. Early days, I know. But it's rare that we get this far in to new year and I haven't so much as set foot in a game store! In terms of my progress with GTA 5, I wasn't expecting to have much time to play this week due to work/band/Dungeons and Dragons/girlfriend commitments, but an unexpected day off work on Wednesday (I was sick with a cold) meant that I had some time between sleeping and eating to go through the game and I'm up to roughly 28% so far.

Two major things to mention today, and the first is character development. I'm actually really impressed with how this is working out. Michael, Franklin and Trevor (I've now found all three) are their own characters. There is evidence of crime movie tropes within them, but they all have there own different ways of dealing with things and people, and it makes them a lot more believable than characters in video games might otherwise be.

This is quite hard to explain without giving away spoilers, but I think I can say with some certainty that Michael is the character I can most relate to at the moment. In terms of the decisions I've made that have affected the course of my life, I haven't always got it right, and now that I'm 28 I have to live with the consequences of those decisions. And while my personal issues aren't on quite the same level as Michael's problems, it does make me empathise with him. He's well aware of his faults on being too quick to anger, but is desperately trying to make things work with his family, only to have it all blow up in his face because in reality, the damage was done a long time before... and he is forced to follow the only option left open to him.

Contrast this with Trevor... if you've played the game, you'll know what I mean when I say he is at the same time the most and least likeable character in the entire game. Yes, he is an absolute badass. But at the same time, playing as him, or watching his cut scenes, actually makes me feel very uneasy. You've got no idea when he's talking seriously about something or is about to lose it completely and violently murder somebody, or both. He is clearly a very dangerous man, fitting for a GTA game, but not a comfortable or enjoyable character to play. I'll tell you what he's like: He's like the 'hard' people I knew at school, the violent aggressive gang of bullies that prided themselves on nothing but their opinion that they could beat up anybody in the whole school. The only method I had of dealing with those people was to avoid them if at all possible, and if our paths ever did have occasion to cross, I had to keep my head down, my mouth shut, and utter a silent prayer to a God I didn't believe in that they wouldn't decide to mess with me today. That's what it was like when we were all 15. Trevor looks to be around 45, and it looks much, much worse.

And if you're wondering why I'm going in to such depth about the characters... well, that's how good this game is. It actually makes you care about the characters involved. So yeah, well done for that.

My second point regards the missions. If you read last week's blog you'll recall I talked about the missions that, while good in their own way, lacked variety in the ways you might approach them. This didn't change all that much to begin with. Again, the missions worked well as set-pieces, and the Heist missions (of which I have done one) give a choice when planning them of a gung-ho or stealthy approach which was nice, but once you actually get to playing the game, it does sometimes feel like an elaborate game of Simon Says.

This got better once Trevor came in to it. Once this happened, I noticed a lot more of, shall we say, 'classic' GTA missions where far from running and gunning, you actually have to think about how you're going to do it. For example, the mission where you have to destroy the O'Neil farm is an absolute beauty. While I'm sure it's possible to rush the whole farm with the right combination of weapons and armour, I actually prefer sniper rifles, even if I am appalling at using them. The game really did make you think about what group of enemies would be best to take out first, what weapon to use, and whether another option is available to you. In the end, I took out the middle rank of guards first with the sniper rifle, the front two using stealth, and by the time I got to the house, there were few enough left to make running and gunning an impossible task so I got to do a bit of that as well. Now, this might have been the optimal way to do this mission, I don't know. But the crucial point here is that the game let me figure it out. It didn't keep flashing pop-up messages at me saying "Take these guys out with the rifle" or "Stealth-kill these guys." That made for a much more enjoyable experience. I would like to see more of this as the game progresses. As I said before, I am aware that some of the missions were designed as set-pieces and have to play out in a certain way. But it's good to have a little bit of choice in the matter.

I also noticed the 'Skip' button, where if you fail a mission three times you can choose to skip it. I've never deployed this, but I'm assuming it means that the game will continue as though you had finished the mission, even though you hadn't.

I have mixed feelings about this. On one hand I can see why it has to exist. The storyline and character development have been by far the strongest point of the game so far and you wouldn't want to de-rail the whole thing because you got stuck. On the other hand it can take a lot of the challenge out of the game simply by giving you the chance to avoid it. And not in a clever, Metroid-Vania style 'cast-a-spell-that-turns-you-in-to-a-bat-and-allows-you-to-fly-over-the-fight-you-can't-do' way, because at least you have to find the spell that turns you in to a bat and you can give yourself a pat on the back for figuring out that particular strategy. No, this literally allows you to skip the bit you're on, like a level skip cheat on a Sega Megadrive/Genesis game, only this time you don't even need the cheat code.

Well, fair enough, if that's what it needs to keep the story going then that's what it needs. But I'm unlikely ever to use it myself. I'd be depriving myself of the immense satisfaction of either figuring out how to do a tricky mission, or getting past a tough part; that's where the game gets really good and I'm not going to throw it away!

A few additional points:

One of the things Rockstar don't really appreciate - and to be fair, they're not the only ones, I've seen quite a few games do this - is that not all of us have screens the size of classroom whiteboards. Mine is about 16 inches by 9, and due to the layout of my bedroom, this is not likely to change. While this rarely gives me a problem in playing the game, it does make the text a little difficult to read. Particularly in this game where messages come through the cell phone, I've really had to strain to read some of those text pieces. A bit bigger please, guys!

I've had a go with some of the mini-games as well, namely Tennis, Darts, and 'that' section of the strip club. They function well for what they are, but they are far too easy. Maybe it's because I've played Topspin on the old Xbox, which works in much the same way as the tennis game in GTA 5, but it was much too easy to beat the computer, and not that hard on Multiplayer either. Yeah I get it, they've made GTA 5, not a tennis game, but it takes some of the fun out of it knowing there's almost no challenge in there. Then again, maybe I'm just not playing the right people.

I also had a go with GTA Online and I'm liking that a lot better now that it's not just a free-for-all and there are actually some missions involved with it, as well as some more conventional multiplayer modes like death matches and team battles. I'm not awful at this, (I am in some other games) but I'm not great at it either. I think in some cases I have pissed off members of my team, not because I don't know what I am doing but simply that I'm not very good at doing it. But it's enjoyable enough, and probably as good as an online version of GTA is going to get.

We'll see how far next week takes us!

5/1/2014: Warhammer 40K: Chaos Space Marines vs Space Marines.

This match took place in Titan Games in Stourbridge between me and my opponent who is also called Matt. I had Chaos Space Marines, Matt had Space Marines, and we played a 1500 point game.

Now I'm going to say straight off the bat that this one ended in a draw due to time-out after the 3rd turn out of potentially 7 (the shop was closing.) Matt had the advantage on victory points and the game had the potential to turn into a complete bloodbath, but he's a really nice guy and was gracious enough to call it a draw. As the game did not have time to reach its conclusion, it won't be the usual blow-by-blow account. Instead, I'm going to comment on some of the new 6th edition codex rules that we came across, and how they affected the game.

This might just get even more nerdy than usual...

First of all, here was my army:

	Components	Points	Total Points	Total Army
HQ	Chaos Lord	65	130	1498
	Aura of Dark Glory	15
	Axe of Blind Fury	35
	Veterans of the Long War	5
	Mark of Khorne	10
	Chaos Lord	65	135
	Aura of Dark Glory	15
	Jump Pack	15
	Lightning Claw (2)	30
	Mark of Slaanesh	10
Troops	Khorne Bezerkers (8)	162	284
	Chainaxe (4)	12
	Gift of Mutation	10
	Veterans of the Long War	8
	Icon of Wrath	15
	Power Weapon	15
	Plasma Pistol	15
	Chaos Rhino	35
	Havoc Launcher	12
	Khorne Bezerkers (8)	162	237
	Chainaxe (4)	12
	Gift of Mutation	10
	Veterans of the Long War	8
	Icon of Wrath	15
	Power Weapon	15
	Plasma Pistol	15
	Chaos Space Marines (6)	88	191
	Lightning Claw (2)	30
	Close Combat Weapon (5)	10
	Plasma Gun	15
	Veterans of the Long War	6
	Icon of Excess	30
	Mark of Slaanesh	12
Fast Attack	Raptors (6)	112	164
	Meltagun (2)	20
	Plasma Pistol	15
	Melta Bombs	5
	Mark of Slaanesh (6)	12
Heavy Support	Chaos Defiler	195	200
	Havoc Launcher	5
	Chaos Vindicator	120	157
	Siege Shield	10
	Havoc Launcher	12
	Daemonic Possession	15

A curious amalgamation of Khorne and Slaanesh, but there is a reason for this: I don't really have one big army (or at least, not one that's any good,) so instead of that I have about 8 different small armies across Games Workshop's games. This is because I get fed up with painting the same thing over and over again, and want to move on to something new. This means I could start an army every 10 minutes, and about half of them would be Chaos. Having painted a few new pieces for my Khorne army, I found that I actually had enough of each army to form a reasonable force, so that's how I got it up to 1500 points.

So here's what we came across:

Space Marines: Combat Squads

The rule in the Space Marines Codex that allows full-strength Space Marine squads to split in to two squads was first introduced in 5th edition. It's still fundamentally the same rule but with one difference: You can now only do this at the start of the game before rolling for your Warlord Traits. This means you can now no longer do it once the game is underway.

If I remember rightly, this was more or less the case before anyway (A note here: When I played Space Marines in 5th Edition, I used Salamanders, who couldn't use the Combat Squad rules because it came under Ultramarines Chapter Tactics.) But the difference here is that now that the Warlord Traits can sometimes affect the way the army is deployed, the squads have to be split first if they are going to divide into combat squads. Which is fair enough. Matt actually forgot to do it, but I let him have it anyway; there's no point being a dick when we're just getting used to the new rules. But by the same token, I forgot to roll for my Gifts of Mutation at the start of the game and he let me have that. It's amazing what you can do with a kind word!

Chaos Space Marines: Daemonic Possession

This rule in the Chaos Space Marines Codex affects vehicles, and is nothing new, being in operation at least as far back as the 4th edition Codex. However, it now works slightly differently for the new edition of the game: You now have to roll 2+ on a dice to ignore Crew Shaken and Crew Stunned on the Vehicle Damage Table. As the table is now only applied on a penetrating hit, this will come up a lot less, which I'm presuming is the reason for the reduction in points from 20 to 15. It still reduces the Ballistic Skill of the relevant vehicle to 3.

There is also another nasty twist: If the vehicle is a transport unit, then you have to roll 1D6 when the unit embarks. If you get a 1, it eats one of the passengers that embarks on it. It can recover a hull point if it does this, but given the cost of even the most basic Chaos Space Marine, losing even one of them will hurt.

As you can see from my army list, Daemonic Possession affected both the Vindicator and the Defiler (the latter by default.) Did it help? No. Quite the reverse, actually. My Vindicator got shot a lot but the most Matt was able to do was glance it, so the benefit of the rule never actually applied. On the other hand, it did make my scatter launches less accurate, and I remember at least one occasion where the target Dreadnought was missed by 1 inch - the inch I wouldn't have lost if I hadn't put Daemonic Possession on it.

Ironically, the rule would have been better employed on the Rhino. This did get a Crew Stunned result, which wouldn't have bothered me except that the squad within can't then charge into combat. Removing the passengers from the Rhino would have left them in open ground with nowhere to go because the Rhino couldn't get out of their way (it was rather dense terrain!)

Chaos Space Marines: Champion of Chaos

The Challenge rule has been in Warhammer for some time and was bought to 40K in the 6th edition. It's quite a nice addition to the game and can make for some thematic battles. It's also a pretty good way of making sure your squad sticks around to take the combat in to multiple rounds; the challenge has no affect on the rest of the combat so assuming your guy survives and passes his leadership check, he can force the combat to carry on into the next turn. This is a good tactic when contesting an objective!

Of course, Chaos have their own spin on this: The Champion must issue and accept a challenge wherever possible, and if he wins, gets to roll on the Chaos Boon table (which I won't go in to for this game as it never came up.) Of course, there's nothing the Dark Gods like better than watching their champions go at it in single combat.

It's a good thematic rule but one that can lead to some trouble if you're not careful. Apart from anything else, the champion may very well end up entirely out of his depth if he happens to challenge, say, a Librarian, or an Eldar Exarch, or even an Ork Warboss. Also, even if he wins, it might not help matters all that much, because the efforts of the Champion would have been better spent on the actual combat.

In this particular case, my squad of 6 Chaos Space Marines was charged by a 5-strong squad of Vanguard Veterans armed to the teeth. I took one out in Overwatch - another good new rule, by the way - and then issued the challenge. As the squad was only 5 men strong, the Veteran Sergeant couldn't have refused even if he'd wanted to, and because my Champion had both the Mark of Slaanesh and a pair of Lightning Claws, he took the Sergeant out very quickly. The remaining Chaos Space Marines took out another Vanguard Veteran... and then the two remaining Vanguard Veterans killed 4 Chaos Space Marines, causing them to lose combat.

And no matter what happened in the challenge, surviving it won't protect you from Sweeping Advance...

Which brings me on to the final rule, which should have come up, but didn't:

The Icon of Excess

This is a new rule that you can only give to squads who have the Mark of Slaanesh. It gives the unit Feel No Pain, which isn't quite as good in 6th edition as it was in 5th, but still useful.

You'll see on the army list that I gave The Icon of Excess to the unit of Chaos Space Marines with the mark of Slaanesh, which was involved in the close combat mentioned above. Unfortunately I forgot to do it, which meant that some of the Chaos Marines who died could potentially have survived the onslaught of the two Vanguard Veterans. I'd still have failed the leadership check if I'd lost (I rolled 11) but if I'd made a couple of saves it wouldn't necessarily have come to that.

So, that's what I think of the new rules that came up in the game. As it's technically a draw but the match didn't reach the conclusion we were looking for, a re-match is on the cards, but some scheduling issues means that I have no idea when this is going to happen.

See you all next time!

No Game New Year: Grand Theft Auto Five

Right, I wasn't expecting to come back to this blog quite so soon but something's come up and for some unknown reason I'm really excited about it:

No Game New Year.

This is an idea put forward by Brian Castleberry and Norman Caruso, the latter known on YouTube as The Gaming Historian. I suppose it all ties in to the New Year's Resolution we're all allegedly doing, but this is something that I can do and I'm actually really interested in doing it.

The idea is that we - that is to say, everybody who is doing it - will buy no new video games this year. Instead of that, we will play through the ever-increasing backlog of games we have. We play our old games, and if we like them, we keep them. If not, we get rid of them, either selling them, exchanging them, or just giving them away if we can't do that. There are more rules to this, just to clarify the ways you can get around not buying any new games, so here's a link to the Facebook page where you can see what's going on:

https://www.facebook.com/groups/256949654464181/

There are, of course, benefits to this. It will, for example, save me some money. Not much money - I rarely buy a game on release, after all - but some money, that could perhaps better be spent elsewhere. But the main benefit to me, as far as I can tell, is that I've got about sixty Xbox 360 games, some of which I've had for nearly two years and never played, and even more that I've started, got about a tenth of the way through and never picked up again. This is as good a time or reason as any to give them a go.

So why am I doing a blog about this? Well, part of the deal is that we're all supposed to be updating our progress on what games we're playing, whether we're enjoying them and whether we're making a decision on whether to keep the games or move them on. I could do this on YouTube of course, but to be perfectly honest I prefer to write. And the camera on my phone is rubbish.

This is supposed to be happening every week, however I think I can almost guarantee that there are weeks when I'm just not going to be able to make an update, for whatever reason. The two most likely are either:

• Personal circumstances meaning that I won't have time/internet access to write a blog, or even play the game. I'll usually know if this is the case and let you know in advance.
• Because some of the games are quite long, it might be the case that I've got almost nothing to say about it. I won't want to blog just for its own sake, and if this happens I might just make do with a post on the Facebook site if it's all the same to you.

However one thing I will say is that I'm unlikely to move any of my games on. I bought them all for a reason, even if it was only to make up a special offer, and I won't get rid of any of them if I still think I could potentially get something out of them (or while there are still achievement points to be milked!)

So that's the pre-amble. Now, on to the first game I'm going to be playing:

Grand Theft Auto Five

I had this game for Christmas last year. I'm taking a somewhat cautious approach to playing it. I've seen quite a lot of coverage on it so I had an idea what to expect, but of late, I've not been too impressed with the series. Let me give you some background on this:

I've played and owned all of the 'core' games in the series, from the first GTA game all the way up to this one. Not the expansions though, by which I mean not GTA London, not any of the PSP spinoffs from the GTA3 canon, and none of the DLC for GTA4. In that time, I've seen it grow and develop and constantly try new things, which is great, as nobody wants to play the same game twice. However, with a creative team as innovative as Rockstar and Rockstar North, there are going to be times when it doesn't go quite as well as they'd hoped, and personally, I think GTA San Andreas was as good as the series ever got. I didn't like GTA4 very much. I'm not saying it was a bad game, it wasn't a bad game. But it didn't engage me on the same level that San Andreas did. I wasn't rushing home from work in order to play GTA4, as I did with San Andreas.

The reason I'm saying all this is that a lot of the comments I'm going to be making on GTA5 will be in comparison to the relevant parts of the rest of series.

So, is GTA5 any good?

Well, yes it is. It's a GTA game, it was never going to be bad. The controls work well enough, the graphics are perhaps not quite what I was expecting for the time it was released but then again, I have it on the Xbox360 which is coming to the end of its iteration. The gameplay is good fun and I'm enjoying it so far. From having played what the game is telling me is 14% of it, here's what I'm getting out of it so far:

By far the best innovation that the game has made is the three characters. I say this even though I have only reached 2 of them so far (I haven't got Trevor as a regularly playable character yet,) and being able to switch between the three of them at almost any point is an absolutely genius idea for an open-world game. Lots of games want to tell a story. Rockstar have taken it a step further and decided to tell three different stories that interlink with one another. Well, good on them, because I'm liking it so far.

This innovation alone is good, but the characters themselves are very well designed, written and acted. Not necessarily likeable, but that's not the point. They are... compelling. I can think of no better way to describe it, except to add that it is a massive step up from the previous game. Let me go through the previous games and tell you what I mean:

• There really wasn't any personality from the first two GTA games; your character was there to play the game and that was about it.
• There wasn't much personality from Claude from GTA3 either. (While the lead character is never referred to by name during the game, he does appear briefly in San Andreas where Catalina calls him Claude.) However, this wasn't the point. At that time, a 3D Open World game was a relatively new concept and a VERY big deal, and the aim was to make that into a good game. Others had tried before, some got nearer the mark than others, but in terms of making a fun game to play, Rockstar took the mark and pissed all over it with GTA3. In the end, all that alluded to Claude's personality is how the player played the game, or more accurately how ruthlessly the player completely the missions, how indiscriminately they killed pedestrians, how often they forced a 6-star wanted-rating killing spree just for the fun of it. It was left to the overblown caricatures of the supporting cast to provide the personality of the game, and in terms of the way it was handled, for the time it was pretty good.
• Tommy Vercetti from GTA Vice City was much better. Having some discernible back-story, a background as a mobster and having the added bonus of being an absolute badass breathed some much-needed life into the player character, and we could be reasonably confident we weren't just playing the same game with a different setting and skin. Even though Vercetti was pretty much an anti-hero in every sense, the fact that he had something to offer meant that I actually cared about all those missions I found myself doing, and I wanted him to win in the end, even if it was not necessarily for the right reasons. Sadly I never played the game to the end so I referred to Wikipedia for the back story. Cheating, I know...
• Carl Johnson from GTA Vice City was probably one of the most compelling and well-done characters in any game that I have played. He tries to be, and probably at some point was, a really nice guy, and tries to uphold an honourable ideal, if not a very good one. However, he is desperate to win the approval of his gang and peers, desperate to clear his name of murder (which is kind of ironic, given how many murders he does through the game) and is prepared to go to any lengths in order to do it. Because the game pretty much for the first time gave you some control over how this played out, this struck a balance between the personality of the character, and the personality of the player. This is actually quite hard to do, especially in a video game where there can only ever be a finite number of options, and Rockstar did it quite well here.
• Then we had Nico Bellic from GTA4. And he was DULL. Not fighting for anything other than a new life, he somehow manages to get caught up in crime. He rarely gets angry at anything and seems content to do as he is told. Now fair enough, I didn't play much of GTA4 so maybe this improves later on. But as an opening statement, Nico let the side down quite badly.
• Now, in GTA5, we've got Michael and Franklin, (again I haven't found Trevor yet) who have their own set of ideals, and their own set of problems. They've got friends (sort of,) allies, patrons and their own quite unique ways of responding to them. Any of them on their own might make for more of an interactive movie than a game, but the ability to switch between them I think gives a well-rounded experience, and I'm looking forward to see where the game takes this.

That's a good part of the game. Now for a... sort of middle of the road part, neither good nor bad. And that is the missions: (this section contains some spoilers)

The missions themselves are actually quite good. They're well-designed as set pieces, set up pretty well though the use of flowing cut scenes (starting the dialogue for the cut scene as the character approaches the relevant trigger, and cutting to the scene with almost no load time, is a stroke of absolute genius and one I expect to see used far more in the future with the new console generation,) and have good cinematic points that fit the story. I've had some fun playing them.

The problem is that there's really not much scope for doing the missions that I've done so far in any way other than the way the game wants you to do it. For example: The mission where Michael and Franklin have to save Jimmy from the people who have kidnapped him in the boat he was trying to sell can only be done by driving close enough to the truck to allow Franklin to climb onto the boat, shooting the crooks on the boat and then driving underneath the boom arm to rescue Jimmy. There is no other way to do it. You can't, for example, switch to Franklin as he gets on the boat and get Jimmy off once you've killed everyone on it. You can't cut the truck up to stop it getting away. You can't use any gun other than the pistol Michael has in the glove box, and you can't allow Jimmy to die and get the boat back. (Obviously this last one probably wouldn't happen anyway since I have a feeling Jimmy will become more relevant to the story later on, but from the dialogue running up to the chase, Michael seems more than prepared to let that happen.)

This particular mission is designed as a set piece so there's pretty much only one way it can be done, but the other missions aren't much better. Whether driving, escaping from the cops, or corridor shooting, there's usually only one way to do it, the exception being when you have to escape attention from the police as that does at least give you the whole map to do it in. Now, I understand that if it's important to the story, certain missions have to play out in a certain way. But remember in GTA3 where you're ordered to kill somebody, and you could either nick a car and run him over, drive-by shoot him or go back to your hideout to pick up one of the many weapons you'd amassed there and gun him down? Hell, you could even do it as a fist fight, if you wanted to. None of that so far is in GTA5. There's usually only one way to complete the mission, and if the game thinks you need a new weapon or piece of equipment, it will give it to you in the mission pre-amble. For example: quite early on in the game, Franklin gets involved in a gang shootout. There are more enemies than can be reasonably handled with the pistol, but one of the guys you shoot early on rather conveniently drops a shotgun. There's still, therefore, a lot of hand-holding going on, where the game is almost telling you what to do. This is something that I think let GTA4 down quite badly, as it was still explaining game mechanics to me 6 hours in to it, and thankfully, it's not quite as bad with this game. But I still found myself thinking "no reason to go to Ammunation to get more ammo for my gun before I do this next mission; if the game thinks I need it, it will drop a new gun for me with enough ammo to complete the mission." I don't think that should be happening in this day and age.

I've also come across some of what I think is called "Jank," which I understand to mean: "An inconvenient necessity to make the game work," and I suspect I will come across it more and more as the game goes on. Where I noticed it was the mission where Michael discovers his wife's affair with her tennis coach. When the coach runs out of the house, jumps in his car and drives away, Michael follows him in a pickup truck that certainly wasn't there before, and for no reason explained in the cut-scene, Franklin is suddenly in the truck with him. Both are necessary to complete the mission, (you'll see,) but their sudden appearance is rather weak given the detail of the rest of the game.

That having been said, I think the scoring system for the missions is a good idea. You can now get Bronze, Silver and Gold rankings upon completion of each mission depending on how well you did and whether you did certain things in the mission, even if it's not always clear what you have to do to get the top score. It's more carrot than stick, because it rewards you for doing missions well rather than punishing you for barely scraping through with your life, let alone the mission objectives (the latter usually being how I end up doing most missions in any GTA game to be honest.) The reward in the game is, as far as I can see, rather abstract. You either get a gold medal or you don't, and if you don't it doesn't appear to have an affect on the progress of the game. But it's nice that, for the first time, the game is telling you: "You aced that, well done," or "Yes, you could have done that better, and here's how:" Competitive players and speed runners will love it. If I pay any more attention to it than I already have it will be to unlock an Achievement to increase my Gamerscore.

I do have a couple more things to say but I've rattled on far too much already and it's time for me to go to bed. However, a couple of points I'm going to be looking out for next week:

• So that I am not playing the game through like homework, I will interject my progress through the main game with the occasional foray into GTA online. I've had a go with it already and it looks pretty good so far, though I suspect I have been the victim of people farming kills off me which made it less enjoyable than it might have been. More on that next week.
• I'll be interested to see how the story plays out in terms of how you can influence the environment around you. The best game I've seen for this so far is San Andreas, where you could participate in a turf war that made, apart from anything else, some areas of the city safer to visit than others. I haven't seen it in GTA5 yet but that doesn't mean I won't...

See you all soon!

D&D Next: Is it any good? Part 1

It's been a while since I've had anything to say on the subject of gaming, hence the lack of posts in the last few months, but I'm currently running a game of Dungeons and Dragons at the Roleplaying club in Blackheath, and we're using the new rules set whose title flows between "Next" and "5th Edition." What I'm going to do here is give a commentary on the rules I have experienced and whether or not I think they're any good. I'll try to be as balanced as I possibly can.

A few things to keep in mind from this session:

• We had fewer than the expected number of players because of some confusion over when the game was supposed to start, so we were running with 3 people rather than 6.
• The rules we were working to are currently in closed Beta. I should imagine that the rules are pretty much as they're going to be in the final edit; currently they (Wizards of the Coast) are working through stat blocks of monsters etc to make sure everything is balanced. Or at least, as balanced as it ever gets in DnD.
• Currently the rules make no provision for character generation. It is important to recognise this, particularly in the section that relates to ability checks, as some of the characters have Class Features that affect the ability checks and I have no idea how these are going to work when generating characters.

So without further ado, here is the first thing I want to comment on:

The Advantage System.

I like this. This is a system that innovates rather than iterates, by which I mean it brings something new to the game rather than tweaks a rule from the previous edition of the game.

The way it works is easy enough: Sometimes, the rules say that you have an advantage, or a disadvantage. Either way, you roll 2D20 rather than the usual 1D20. If you have an advantage, the higher of the two dice is used, if you have a disadvantage, the lower dice is used.

This is something I've been aware of for some time due to some naughty videos on YouTube posted during the early stages of the open Beta (you weren't supposed to put anything about the new content of the game on social media,) but what I didn't appreciate at the time was just how many situations this would affect. Hidden attacks, Aiding another, Dodge, Unseen Opponents all give rise to use of the advantage system, and that's just the core combat rules; I haven't even started on Spell effects yet!

But what's great is that this is a catch-all system that almost completely replaces adding or subtracting to your D20s when you make attack rolls or ability checks. That doesn't mean you don't do it any more - your D20 roll is still modified by the relevant ability modifier - but apart from a very small number of occasions that appear to be at the Dungeon Master's discretion, that's about it. How many times have you played previous editions, or Pathfinder, and found yourself saying something like: "OK, I got 12 on the D20, plus 3 for my Strength, plus 1 for the magic weapon, minus 2 'cause he's in cover, but plus 2 because he's my preferred enemy..." And when you get your final figure, the DM tells you you've missed anyway? With the advantage system, you either have an advantage (or disadvantage!) or you don't, and the only other thing that modifies the number on the dice is your attribute modifier. It's quicker, cleaner, and saves a lot of less-than-necessary hassle, so I'm pleased with this change to the rules.

The one situation in combat that isn't covered by this new advantage system is cover. I think this is because there is no way they were going to make it work across different levels of cover. The cover system now adds to the target creature's Armour Class and any saving throws based on Dexterity, depending on how much cover the creature is in. I won't go in to too much detail about this since it didn't come up in the game, but again I'm glad to see that this affects the target creature rather than the attacker, as this reduces the amount of adding/subtracting they have to do during the attack roll.

Ability Checks

This came up a few times during the game. It seems to have completely replaced the skill system from previous editions. From what I can see, what was previously covered by skills is now a list of things you might do based on your abilities. For example, where Climb was previously a skill, now it is a Strength test. Where Sneak was previously a skill, now it is a test on Dexterity, and so on. They still exist in name, but together with abilities, rather than separately as skills.

This is somewhat similar to 4th edition in that all characters can at least attempt all skills, and don't have to be trained in them in order to do so. However it has almost completely dispensed with training skills (where a character would, at the start of the game, be better at certain skills depending on his class,) or putting ranks in to skills (where a higher modifier would be added to the skill during the level-up process.)

Do I like this? Well it's hard to say at this point. I'm pleased with the fact that they're no longer pretending Skill Checks are anything more than a test on the appropriate attribute, as they did in 4th edition. It saves a lot of tedious mucking about with levelling up, as the only time it now makes a difference is if the attribute itself increases to the point where the modifier also increases. Skills increasing with your level was pretty much pointless anyway because all it meant was that the DM would increase the difficulty of the skill checks, just to keep them challenging.

For Pathfinder players, the fact that you're no longer putting ranks in to skills may be both a blessing and a curse. On the one hand it's not shutting you out of the game if it requires a check for a skill you either don't have, or don't have enough ranks in it to have much of a chance of succeeding. On the other hand, there's less scope for individual character customisation. For example, you may want your Rogue to be good at picking pockets, so you'd give him a higher DEX score when rolling up your character, but in reality he'd be no better at picking pockets than a Wizard who happened to put the same score into DEX. This particular example is fixed with class features at higher levels, but the point remains across the board - if you're good at a particular skill, chances are someone else in your party is every bit as good, if not better.

At least, that's my theory, because to be perfectly honest I never played either DnD 4th or Pathfinder at a high enough level to see how the skills affect the dynamic of the game at upper levels. Personally, I like this new system. It didn't affect the game at level 1 because currently all the players are doing that's different is looking at a different bit of the character sheet for the same information. But I think it will be significantly better than Pathfinder, because it will stop or at least reduce situations where the adventure is de-railed because it required a skill check in order to proceed and the one character who had the relevant skill messed up the roll; now all the characters can have a go and be in with a reasonable chance of success. It is just about better than DnD 4th because the only time you were ever really in control of what skills you had was during character creation when you added an extra 5 to four or five different skills, which would mean less and less in upper levels of play because the rest of your skills increased as you levelled up.

Exploration

This is something I wasn't so fond of. This is the first time I've come across a set of core rules that gives a specific section to exploration. It basically tells you how to move, hide and look for things outside of combat, which is fine, as it promotes the idea that yes, you are supposed to be doing these things.

In previous editions, most of this was actually covered by the adventures themselves, by saying what was in a particular area if the players happened to search it. In 4th edition, they also had Skill Challenges, which was a system by which you were supposed to make skill checks and get a certain number of successes before a certain number of failures. This could be used for exploration. In my opinion it felt a bit clumsy to use, as it was hard to balance the significance of success with an appropriate penalty for failure. However, it did at least get all the characters involved in the exploration process, and was clear about what was needed for success.

In the adventure I was running, the characters had to explore to find an ancient temple where a Dragon was currently residing. The problem was this: at no point during the adventure or the rules did it give any indication of how this exploration was supposed to play out. I knew, for example, that I was supposed to roll a D20 for every hour they explored and spring a random encounter on them if a certain range of numbers came up, but I had no idea what they were supposed to be doing in the hours they spent exploring. In the end, the players told me they were following an NPC who was acting as a guide, and I gauged the speed they were moving with the time they ought to have taken to find what the guide was leading them to, which made matters a lot more straightforward - if they hadn't have done this, how was I supposed to run the exploration?

This might have more to do with the way the adventure was written than the rules, and it may be addressed in a Dungeon Master's Guide. But that is the only thing I'm not happy with at this point - we needed a better set of rules for wilderness exploration.

So, that's the new rules as it has affected us so far. What do you guys think?

How to enjoy hobby games

This is another blog I'm doing in reaction to a lot of the negativity that surrounds hobby games. In the midst of all the attitude shown towards it by people who have nothing but criticism for it, it's sometimes all-too-plausible to forget that it's actually quite good fun and you're supposed to be enjoying it. There's no tricks involved with enjoying hobby games; it's all to do with the attitude you go in with, and if you want to enjoy it, you will.

But first, what do I mean by hobby games? Broadly, hobby games is what I say when I'm describing board games, card games, role playing games and war games. They'll almost always include some material components, have a set of rules to them and are mostly - but not always - played competitively, e.g. players play against each other. It could be anything from Chess right the way up to, I don't know, Warhammer would be the obvious choice.

Those who play these games generally have a great time. Those who don't and have no intention to play these games generally look upon them in a passive, dismissive and sometimes quite hostile manner. For a great many people, it would simply not occur to them even to give it a go, and since they're either quite rude or not very forthcoming about the reasons why, (the latter, I suspect, to avoid the former) I'm left to speculate about them. I'll tell you what I think a lot of it is: Stereotyping Start talking to the man on the Clapham Omnibus about Warhammer or Dungeons and Dragons, and his immediate thoughts will be of fat sweaty nerds who live with their mothers on a diet of KFC, and have no hope of a social life or any kind of meaningful sexual relationship. And quite understandably, that is not a world most people want to be a part of. Of course, it's all rubbish, and what we get as a result is people being presumptuous about a group of people who are nowhere near as bad as all that. That having been said, about half of that rather cynical and condescending description applies to me, and the people who I play games with - nice people though most of them are - don't do much to counter the stereotype. Some other arguments centre around not having the time or the money, but these are pretty poor excuses really as you can always get things cheaper if you know where to look, and it's actually not that hard to make time to do something you want to do.

So, a lot of negativity comes from outside its demographic, but what continues to astonish me is the hostility that comes from within its own demographic as well. I've said much of what I want to say about that in the blog I did last year about Bitter Veterans, but I will add that this blog is derived from looking at the posts that Dungeons and Dragons make on their Facebook page. They're talking up what's being released and design-related articles (we're not far away from 5th edition/Next now,) and invariably there are comments under these posts to the general effect of: "Death to Wizards of the Coast!" "4e (Dungeons and Dragons 4th Edition) destroyed DnD!" "I'll only ever pay 1st Edition!" and it drives me FREAKING NUTS. Especially if comments like this actually have nothing to do with the feature that's been posted. And that's just with Dungeons and Dragons! That's called trolling, guys. You're trolling your own hobby. Well done.

With turmoil within its own demographic, and a significant amount of the rest of the universe wishing hobby games didn't exist at all, how is anyone who isn't already involved in it supposed to give it a chance, and get in to it?

Well the answer is really quite simple: You've got to WANT to enjoy it.

If you want to give it a chance and have a go, you'll probably enjoy it. If you don't, or you can't work out why you're there, then you won't enjoy it.

So, say someone's starting up a Role Playing Game and asked you to join in. You've never done it before. Chances are, something like this may happen:

If you go in there thinking to yourself "Hmm, games with dice and toy soldiers aren't really my thing, and I don't want to have to learn a lot of rules out of those massive books they all have" then you're not going to enjoy it. Reason is, the real reason RPGs are fun has very little to do with dice or toy soldiers, and only a little bit to do with the rules. However, this is all you expect from the game so that is what all your focus will be on. For the record, it's the engagement with the characters and the immersion into the world of the game that makes it fun. Get that bit right and it can quite often become the highlight of your week. But if you're not aware that this is the whole point of the game, then you'll need to work it out quite quickly or you'll find yourself wondering what's going on.

If you go to the game thinking that "Only nerds play games like this!" - and yes I DO mean nerd in the derogatory sense of the word -  well, if you think that, then the only reason you'd go to the game at all is to prove yourself right, which you will. You will see what you expect to see: A small group of people talking about something you neither know nor care about. You won't be able to join in the conversation because you won't know what they're talking about, you'll feel isolated from the group and you'll come to resent hobby games because of the level of involvement the other guys have in it at your expense. So it's probably best not to bother.

If you're there because a friend has brought you along, well that can go either way depending on your pre-conceived ideas, but if that's the only reason you're there, think about this: Your friend has asked you to go to the game because he or she thinks you might enjoy it. The reasons for them thinking about that are their own, but there will be a reason for it. It's not a bad thing to find something new and fun to do in your spare time, and it's certainly a good thing if a friend thinks you might be interested in it as well because they are pro-actively trying to give you something new and fun to do in your spare time. The least you can do, in that situation, is give it a go.

If you come in to it thinking "Never done this before, let's give it a go and see what it's like, then I'll decide what I think about it," then that's absolutely great and we need more people in the world like you. My advice here would be to look for things you enjoy about it, rather than expect to find things that you don't. And if you don't understand something, it's OK to ask other people how it works. Again, ultimately it could go either way. If you decide you enjoy it, then that's great, I can't think of many people who would say no to more people being involved with hobby gaming. If you decide it's really not for you, then that's fair too, and no one will think any the less of you for giving it a go.

And then there's the one that applies to me: "I've always wanted to try this out, let's go to a game and see how much fun it is." I remember going into the roleplaying group for the first time - I had no idea what to expect from the game, but I really wanted to enjoy it so I gave it my best shot. I've made better characters and played better games since then, but for a first attempt - and I had and appreciated a lot of help from the guy who was running it - it could have been far worse. I also remember my "intro game" at Games Workshop, who hadn't really got the idea of doing intro games at that point and put me in a mass participation battle with a tank I had no idea how to use, got blown up in the first couple of turns and I hadn't got a clue why. By the standards of what we would expect if that had happened to a casual onlooker, they should never have seen me again. But I wanted to enjoy it so I came back and gave it another go... Well the rest of the story's another blog in itself.

But you see my point? Because I WANTED to enjoy it, I did - and still do to this very day. Some more than others, but I always try to find the fun in what I'm doing.

I think it's what's called having your glass half full. A lot of people I know could do with re-filling their glasses entirely...

If that tailed off quite badly then it will be something to do with the fact that it's 2am and I've only had 9 hours sleep in the last 48 hours. Time to go to bed I think.

See you all next time!

Matt

40K: Chaos Space Marines vs Dark Eldar 11/7/2013

Again behind a bit with the blogs...

So I had a game of 40K last week at Games Workshop Dudley, it didn't go so well for me! Here's why:

Sometimes I have managed to win games by insisting that my opponent uses a smaller army. This worked quite well in Warhammer 7th Edition, where I would tell opponents I could only go up to 1500 points which would mean that they couldn't use their Lord choices, which in turn would cost them the game.

However, insisting that people go from using a 1500pt 40K army to the 600pt army I had ready to roll is taking the piss a little bit, especially on Thursday nights where you get all the tournament-style play going on. Normally I would avoid situations like that but I go into Games Workshop as and when I can, and this particular night I found myself in on a Thursday. My opponent, Craig, was all ready to play 1500pts, and I only had 600... so I had to cobble together an army out of 2 different armies that were both Chaos. On the plus side this was the first time my Khorne Bezerkers had got an outing. On the down side, they never had a chance...

My army consisted of the following:

• Chaos Lord w/ twin lightning claws, a jump pack and the Mark of Slaanesh
• 2 squads of 6 Chaos Space Marines w/ the Mark of Slaanesh, plasma guns and twin lightening claws, and an Icon of Slaanesh which gives them Feel No Pain
• 6 Raptors with 2 Melta Guns, a Plasma Pistol and the Mark of Slaanesh
• 2 squads of 8 Khorne Bezerkers with a Power Axe and a Plasma Pistol.

This brought me up to roughly 1100pts, which Craig matched.

Craig's army was built around Venoms; squads of 5 Whyches riding in 4 venoms which I'm sure is making many of you who know what that means shaking your heads in sympathy.

Not much to say about the battle really; it was The Emperor's Will game which means that there is one objective on each side, Craig won the game 4-1.  I was completely unprepared for fighting this kind of army, and my army was not geared towards tournament play. To my credit I lasted 4 turns before I was tabled, but with far too many shots coming from the splinter cannons on the venoms, I'm astonished I lasted that long. The Bezerkers got wiped out to a man very quickly, and the Raptors didn't even make it into the game, having Deep Striked off the board.

The one victory point I did manage to earn came from having my CSM squads shooting that Craig's Archon and his Incubi. I didn't take them out; 3+ is a tough armour save to get through, but I did take enough of them out to force a panic check which they failed. They also failed the subsequent check to rally, and the game was all over before I'd managed that.

So, what to do next time?

Well, I probably won't be playing a tournament-geared army unless I'm prepared for it, because it made me feel like a nut being cracked with a sledgehammer. But, with that army, the only thing I could have done differently is take my Khorne Lord rather than my Slaanesh one. Reason is, that would make the Khorne Bezerkers count as Troops and therefore scoring units, so on the off chance any of them were still alive by the time they got to the top of the board, they could in theory have taken the objective. As it was, they were Elite, so they didn't have that option.

Can't say I enjoyed that game too much! Got some more work to do before I try taking Craig on again.