#palliddata

Edit: Forgot the text, ha!

So last night I came up with an intriguing dice system for our as of yet unnamed game. It’s pretty simple.

It’s a roll under system vs. how challenging the task at hand is, rather than how good you are at a skill. Your stats, such as Strength, determine how many dice you roll, and you skill determines the size of the dice you roll. So if I had a 3 in Strength and a d8 in Brawn and I wanted to lift a rock, my GM would determine the challenge of lifting that rock from 1-19, with 1 being nearly impossible and 19 being almost impossible to fail. Let’s say she said the challenge was a 7. I would roll 3d8 and if any of those dice came up as 7 or below, I would succeed. I am thinking about some things requiring multiple successes at higher levels of challenge, maybe to represent complexity, great danger, ect.

There are two more mechanics that come into play. The first is Action Points. Whenever you roll at least one pair of matching dice on a roll, you get a single Action Point, that lets you activate abilities and maybe even fudge rolls or change the narrative a bit.

The other mechanic is the Danger Tracker: whenever you roll and at least one of the dice is at the top of the die (4 for a d4, 6 for a d6 ect.) , the Danger Tracker goes up and gives the GM more ammo to mess with the players or maybe even makes the game generally harder. This gives us a nice “death spiral” that pushes the narrative along.

As a side note, as you progress, both Action Points and the Danger Tracker will become more common place. Maybe this represents and oncoming disaster? I’ll have to think about that some.  

Signed,

(This is by Elizabeth Lavenza and not by me)

Elizabeth “Linguafoeda Acheronsis” Lavenza Chances are, one of the first images that pops into your head when you think about Dungeons and Dragons is the classic lineup of a fighter, a wizard, and a thief exploring a dungeon and valiantly overcoming obstacles together (that is, if you aren’t a mid-90s fundamentalist christian who associates D&D with pagan orgies and human sacrifice). It’s a decent enough setup, and that combined with nostalgia and inertia have allowed it to persist as one of fantasy gaming’s most common templates. But if you ask an experienced D&D player to tell you how that setup has worked out for them, a lot of times their version will have the wizard (or cleric, or druid, both of which have been even more unbalancing) effortlessly blasting every obstacle out of the way while the fighter and the thief sigh and wonder if it’s too late to reroll. Their disappointment is understandable, not just because being useless isn’t much fun. None of the sources of inspiration- Lord of the Rings, The Princess Bride, Conan the Barbarian, Berserk, and so on- that they’ve brought to the table would have prepared them for this problem. Most fantasy literature doesn’t have scenes where the knight and the rogue sit around playing cards while the wizard solves everything (then again, most good fantasy literature doesn’t have perfectly delineated archetyped parties). You’ve heard the horror stories. Order of the Stick wasn’t lying when it had a Druid tell a Rogue that he had special features more powerful than her entire class. I won’t spend that much time on 3e caster stories (google “codzilla” or “caster supremacy” if you’re curious), but I’ll provide a short explanation of why the problem persists, particularly in D&D and related systems, for those who haven’t encountered it before. Basically, when fighters level up they hit things for more damage and can take more damage, along with some other things. When casters level up they can pretty much control reality at will. Even beyond overpowered combos and obscure feats and munchkin builds, the simple fact remains that the class that lets you fly, turn invisible, teleport, shoot fire really well, and pretty much anything else is going to overshadow the one that hits things hard. To zero in on one particular example, there’s the legendary Druid Bear Singularity. Basically, a bear is often stat-for-stat a bit better than most Fighters of equivalent level. A Druid can have a bear companion, and also turn into a bear, meaning that a Druid with just those two basic features is equal to about 2.5 Fighters. And as the Druid levels up? They get more bears and stronger bears. They can also cast spells as a bear, and cast spells on their bears. This is when the math breaks down and the Druid becomes a Borg-like swarm of invincible magical bears. Before I go into the general types of solutions, I should note that things are getting better. While the problem persists within D&D, Pathfinder, and other D&D-3.5-derived systems (OSR games have a fair amount of variance, “meat-grinder” early addition-likes tend to have less of a problem with druidgods and wizardgods), due to fanbase stubbornness, it’s much less present outside of those systems, and that is due in no small part to the rise of storygaming and rules-light or rules-medium games. While the overarching reason comes down to these games being willing to do things differently, if we zero in we find that one of the most powerful tools for combatting caster supremacy is one that rules-light gaming uses frequently: focus. There is no one solution for the superwizard’s trap, and to avert it you have to start with the thing you should always start with: asking yourself what kind of stories you want to tell. Each of the potential approaches lends itself to certain types of stories and foci, and resistance to them comes from the enemy of focus: grognards wanting their preferred game to have everything they’re used to in it simultaneously. So, let’s go over the scenarios in which caster-induced redundancy isn’t a problem, and their relation to the central idea of focus. These solutions break down into two main groups: tone down the magic, or share the magic. The first of those is one that resonates most with what the classicists among the grognard host want. After all, how many times were battles in Middle-Earth won by an itinerant sorcerer blasting orcs away with magic missiles? Magic was restricted to a few individuals, or inherent powers of magical creatures, and even when they showed it off it was often rather subtle. The Game of Thrones setting, another grog favorite, also gives us a setting where magic is rare, scattered, and rarely as overt as flying bears or teleportation. It’s a completely valid approach: set up your system and story for a group of characters with no magical powers, or immensely limited and narrow magic, and things fall into place nicely. The knight, the archer, and the assassin will all have niches to fill, and they won’t have to worry about overshadowed by the druid if all the druid can do is perform long and complex rituals that allow them to see through the eyes of animals (as opposed to summoning invincible armies of them). Of course, sometimes magic has quite a lot of punch behind it, but there are still clear advantages to those who prefer more mundane methods. The idea that magic is dangerous and costly is bandied about quite a lot, but what consequences does the average D&D wizard face from throwing around spells all day, other than potential GM ire? And sure, the Vancian system can be a drag, but once those levels climb up Wizards build up more than enough contingencies, not to mention those with ways around it all together. If all magic required costly materials and/or long rituals, then being able to swing a sword, sneak, or shoot arrows or bullets well becomes a lot more useful, even if the magic has amazing capabilities. And, if you keep the principles of story and focus in mind, you can use that setup to generate plenty of potential plots and conflicts. Imagine how warfare looks- rival sorcerers preparing their rituals in the keeps of the patrons who supply them with their materials, while both sides send their companies of sellswords and assassins across the line to try to interrupt the other side’s big ritual. Again, it’s a more fun scenario than bear-summoning munchkinry solving everything. And what about the other kind of cost, genuine danger? Like most of these solutions for the caster problem, it’s shown up in plenty of stories. This approach has been explored in plenty of tabletop role playing games, too. Both versions of the Warhammer RPGs have magic wielders who can do some pretty amazing things…but actually doing those things is truly, actually dangerous, enough so that they aren’t things that can be relied upon to regularly solve problems. Unknown Armies, another great example, even explicitly states that magic is almost always much less useful than a gun in a combat situation, and that’s not even mentioning the massive costs it leverages on its practitioners. But the grog barrier keeps these approaches from working their way into D&D, as caster players are loathe to give up their cool powers, even if they insist they don’t want to render the nonmagical classes useless. The grog problem brings us to the opposing approach, where the system addresses the issue of godlike mages eclipsing warriors and thieves by giving the warriors and thieves godlike powers of their own. Dungeons and Dragons, in fact, has even made its own attempts to go down this path via the Tome of Battle, which provided several new martial classes with quasimystical powers. It wasn’t really the best supplement, especially since the new classes were essentially just better versions of existing classes, but the writers were in sort of an awkward situation since actually doing what they had set out to do would require rewriting quite a bit of the rules and core classes. But the negative feedback the book generated (the feedback that specifically bemoaned fighters having these abilities, not the way in which the book implemented them) was what made me realize the role of grog in keeping caster supremacy alive. Attempting to give martial classes their own ways to, for example, attack large groups or alter local terrain or fly will always provoke the “it’s too anime!” grog-whine, which is stupid on a number of levels. Even if one tries to see eye to eye with what people mean when they describe something as “too anime”, the fact remains that the idealized game as it exists in their heads can’t really existed without restricting casters far beyond what D&D does (see the previous paragraphs for information on this approach). They’ll often bring up that Conan or Drizzzzzzt (no, I’m not going to look up how many z’s he has) or so on and so never shot air blades out of their swords or flexed so hard things exploded, ignoring that these characters either existed in worlds with vastly different magic from their preferred game systems or had massive amounts of authorial fiat on their sides. Generally, the best way to get grognards to accept the “make fighters magic” approach is to bring up comparisons to mythology, where sorcerers were generally pushed out of focus in favor of demigods or magically enhanced warriors with enough musclepower to lift and throw mountains or fistfight storms. But even if you use this approach, you’ll still get complaints that it isn’t gritty enough, or that it makes it hard to run standard dungeon crawls, and so on. But caster supremacy is a problem that can only be fixed with genuine change. You can’t have that specific kind of team-based gritty dungeon delving if one party member has nearly unrestricted godlike powers, and if you want to have party members with that level of power, the other players should be able to reach it to, even if that means basing your world around a unified system of supernatural power that can harnessed by warriors as well as sorcerers, or putting the whole thing in terms of mythical dream-logic where being good enough at something like weaving or lying means you can apply it to abstract concepts (as an aside, Exalted does do the “mythic” approach fairly well, and there are plenty of games like Don’t Rest Your Head or most permutations of World of Darkness where it’s assumed that each member of the party has their own formidable reserve of supernatural power). Narrative-based powers provide a more subtle way to balancing, by giving characters an in-game ability to invoke the narrative tropes that help fighters and rogues equal casters in fantasy literature. PBTA systems are particularly good at this, but it’s something that’s been worked into an increasing number of systems.

Hello, Palliddata readers! I’m J Song, one of the writers for this zine. I am a graduate student, gaming lover, and horror fanatic. Most of the articles you will be seeing from me will cover the topics of horror gaming (surprise, surprise). That is when I manage to find time between work and class, of course. This being my first article here, I wanted to take the time to introduce myself. Now, for what you actually came to read:

When I was thirteen, I read Stephen King’s It. Ever since I had first seen Courage the Cowardly Dog, I had been a horror fan. This novel resonated with me in a way that nothing else I had read before did. These seven children, all losers, could overcome an eldritch monstrosity that fed off their fear of itself, and I rooted for them every page of the way. Being a fat, Jewish boy who suffered from speech impediments, child abuse, and massive amounts of bullying, I attached to each of the characters personally. But this is not an essay about the power of representation in the horror genre. Many other writers have already discussed that to great length. Instead, I want to discuss the horror genre’s staunch refusal to acknowledge one of its greatest strengths: portraying people that have been othered.

Eight years later—unfortunately not any of the numbers of power from the story—and the same day I am writing this, I sat in a theater to watch the movie of what I found to be a childhood-defining read. Luckily, the movie was fantastic. Knowing how much I enjoyed the film only made what was disappointing about it that much worse for me. While the book had leaned so clearly into its portrayal of small town suffering when you are deemed to be different, the film chose to de-fang the rather frank portrayal from its source.

The clearest example of this must be how Mike’s entire character is reduced to being the token Black friend. Having barely any lines, we get no defining feature to his character. His role as the town historian is entirely removed from him, instead given to Ben. His Blackness too is entirely removed from the narrative, with the Bowers gang only attacking him since he lives outside Derry. When the horror genre has such a storied history of killing Black characters and representing monsters as Black stereotypes, a main character like Mike that confronted these issues, both in character and through the narrative, was extremely powerful. Now he is hardly a character. Many more issues exist with the characterization, but I do not want to bog myself down with explaining each one.

First off welcome to Palliddata, if you haven’t been welcomed already. I’m Mythossanta aka Benjamin Paulson, editor in chief and writer for this zine. We publish on a variety of subjects, primarily games but also TV and Movies. Our schedule is lazy, writers publish when they can and hopefully something comes of it. When we get enough articles we will attempt to fold everything together and set up a PDF for download.

Anyway, this article is the start in a series called “Development Cycle” where I will develop a tabletop game, free to play and test, and publish the process on this zine. It might take a while, but I think it’s a great way to contribute to the community and to get some of my design noticed.

First things first, what’s this game going to be about? Well, I was going to do a competitive haunted hotel game in time for Halloween, but my heart wasn’t really in it. On the other hand, I’ve been on a bit of a caveman movie kick lately, so why don’t we do something with that?

I’m not a fan of keeping to history or myth, but rather using it as a jumping off point. So I see a lot of dinos, sabertooth tigers and weird stuff that defies scientific explanation. Lots of ice caps alongside jungles, swamps and magma fields. In generally, lots of extreme environments.

So what do that tell us? The system will both be unrealistic and heavy on survival mechanics. Players will have to keep track of food and water, maybe even ammo. For research I’ll have to probably take another look at land of the lost and those old Ray Harryhausen movies about dinos. Not that I mind really, sounds like a ton of fun.

So, how can I back that up with mechanics? I see some sort of system where things happen on doubles, to represent the wild and random nature of the environment. Not certain what dice will be used, but hopefully not too many at a time.

I’ve also had this idea for modular character design. The idea that instead of picking a bunch of skills and traits like in gurps or picking class and race like in Dungeons and Dragons, you pick up a bunch of different things. Star sign, god, species, homeland, archetype, ect. Could all be good things to pick from that end up changing where your characters starts mechanically while also informing roleplaying.

So yeah, basically that’s what one of my brainstorms look like. Hopefully more should be incoming soon. If you have any comments, please send in a message. Also, feel free to reblog and comment and you please.

Good evening everyone. Allow me to introduce myself: My name is Tiger Louck, and I’ll be covering videogame industry and design related topics during my time here. I should have some pretty interesting stuff lined up here, so let’s begin.

What’s the point of the majority of games? Fun. What’s the other point of games? To make a developer money. You wanna know what’s Fun and Makes People Money? Gambling. But of course, in a similar fashion to cigarettes and alcohol, the dangers of gambling are well-documented and the industry is heavily regulated. But gambling is only considered gambling if you put real money in and get real money out, at least legally speaking. But speaking in terms of actual design, the Gachapon system, which recently appeared in a litany of high-profile games accross the industry, is absolutely gambling. If you’re not familiar with the system, or haven’t given it much thought when you’ve encountered it, this will come as a surprise, so allow me clue you in on this dumpster fire of an industry trend.

Gambling is, as I mentioned, supposedly fun. Fun as a concept is more nuanced than most people will ever think about, which in most cases is fine, there’s better things to waste your time on, but there’s a good number of cases where uncertainty in the one’s personal understanding of fun can be exploited. Gambling is one of these, because gambling isn’t actually that fun. How interesting is it, really, to determine success or failure using a device which gives you a random, evenly distributed number between one and six? What about using the contents of a deck? The fall of a ball into a spinning wheel? Exempting sleight of hand and card counting (which casinos will throw you out for, anyway) there is literally no way to control these outcomes. Success or failure does not reflect upon the player in any way: failure is not your fault, but neither is victory, so both feel hollow.

And yet people play.

Part of the reason why is pretty reasonable stuff: casinos have atmosphere, and people, and lots of fun entertainers and alcohol. All perfectly reasonable things to find fun. Gambling always tries to be a party, or, in less commercial contexts, a hangout at bare minimum. But there’s other psychological phenomena at work here; have you ever been asked to kiss or blow on a pair of dice? Why is it traditional to shake them around in your cupped hands before throwing them on the table? Humans are aggressive pattern finders, and it is at this juncture that this finally bites us in the ass. Victory is not expected in gambling, but it is possible, so when it happens, the player becomes very happy, and tries to find out what caused the victory in the first place. If this were spear hunting, there’d be enough information in the course of the event that the hunter would be able to construct an accurate-enough picture of why the hunt was successful, and that picture would be mostly truthful to the reality of the situation. But that information was never present in gambling, since the bare act of throwing dice is simply not complicated enough to have things with understandable cause and effect. Because the player can’t reliably attain success, the natural instinct is to experiment, and the moment a thing you do coincides with a successful outcome of the dice (or cards, or marble on that stupid spinning thing) the player latches onto that event. A man at a craps table asks the woman at his left to kiss the dice, like he sees people do in the movies all the time, and it just so happens that the cascade of unknown variables says “YOU WIN” this time, and so he does it again and again and again, every loss ignored because he only cares about the victories, and the victories say the kiss works.

“Yeah, I had some losses this time, but there’s hope, because I know my method works, so I’m gonna come back.” He says, walking out of the casino with empty pockets

Then the operant conditioning starts to kick in. He keeps going to the casino because going to the casino is where the success, and the rewards, and the happiness is. His bank account says one thing but he’s more inclined to trust his brain, which is saying another, and by god he swears by his methods. They call this fun, but I have my doubts

So what, then, is Gachapon, and why is it gambling?

The roots of the phenomenon are old, at least compared to most videogame trends. It started in japan, in the 90s at the latest, and rapidly spread throughout the world. It’s those small vending machines that you put quarters into and get a small capsule with a toy or figurine in it. The name is also spelled Gashapon, and it’s actually a romanization of a japanese onomatopoeia for the sound of the crank and plop of the mechanism and capsule. The idea was that players would try to collect every figurine in the collection, and as they neared a complete collection, they’d get duplicates instead of what they wanted, prompting them to purchase again, or resort to trading if they could.

The gambling psychology at play here has to do with the unexpected victory when the player is at the point where they get lots of duplicates. Players don’t remember getting duplicates, but they do expect them, so when they do get a capsule that they actually wanted, they get just enough motivation to continue, and forget the fact that they’re getting duplicates. The naive user feels justified in their purchase, as they’re basing their judgement on how they feel, as opposed to the math of the situation, which says they just spent ten dollars to get a small plastic figurine.

It turns out this system works really well in videogame monetization. It’s already been present for years in games like World of Warcraft and rogue/roguelike RPGs in the way the loot that drops from enemies is randomized, forcing players to redo boss fights to get the gear they want, but it was unexamined as a mechanic; accepted, but not scrutinized. Until recently, the most effective use of this system was by the very same World of Warcraft, which had a business model based around getting a player invested and then stretching the amount of time it takes them to do things (thus standardizing the exponential experience curve in RPGs in favor of a linear one).

It was an effective way of forcing the reuse of content. Then Team Fortress 2 went free to play.

If I remember correctly, the game’s revenue something like quadrupled near-instantly. The core of the monetisation wasn’t something anyone else was considering monetizable: appearances. Turns out people will pay real money to look good in a virtual environ, who knew? In terms of gachapon systems, TF2 is actually the least straightforward and, frankly, a bad example of the system when you compare it to something like Overwatch, because while TF2 introduced the system, Overwatch didn’t so much perfect it as they did corporatize it (see the next article for more on that).

Overwatch has a wide variety of ways to customize the look of its many heros. All told, there are skins, emotes, voice lines, sprays, victory poses, and highlight intros, plus player icons independant of the character being played. Putting aside the issues i have with not letting players make their own player icon and spray, the system has a large possibility space for personal expression. All of these cosmetics are acquired through a randomized “loot box” system. Instead of creating duplicates when trying to fill a set, the overwatch gachapon system floods the pool of available items with items the player is likely to not want, like boring sprays and generic voice lines. The “bad outcome” is different than normal Gachapon, but the effect and principle is the same. The only thing it’s possible to buy on the Overwatch store is the lootboxes. While the boxes do give players in-game currency which can be used to buy skins, this money is doled out in very small amounts, and so if a player wants a lot of items, or a very valuable one, the best they can expect is to get it via the boxes. This, combined with the usual sales and events, means that a player attempting to get an item worth a dollar or so on its own may spend $40 on loot boxes attempting to improve their chance of getting it, and then rationalize the expenditure through all the other items they got (which even discounting the truly undesired items will be a fair few). In this way a player will spend more money attempting to get an item than they would have if the item was simply available to purchase directly.

(Note: This is a guest article by a friend of mine named DDV. It is not my work.)

After watching about half of season 1 of Bojack Horseman I described it to a friend as “feeling  like a personal attack”. By that I meant it felt as if the writers had dissected my life and produced a show in a thinly veiled attempt to make me feel awful had all the wrong I had done in my life, the failures and regrets.

That said, it’s one of my favorite shows of all time…yet like many of my favorite shows (Twin Peaks, Breaking Bad, The Wire, etc), it’s not something I can recommend to everyone. It’s heartbreaking, often brutal to the point I’ve grinded my teeth and paused multiple times from mini-fits of anxiety…but it’s also given me hope in a lot of ways and made reevaluate myself and different aspects of my life.

Here’s the premise for those uninitiated; the story centers around Bojack Horseman (voiced by Will Arnett of Arrested Development fame), anthropomorphic horse and former actor of 90’s family sitcom Horsin’ Around, who struggles to find happiness despite having fallen out of grace with everyone around him and Hollywood at large due to his consistently self-destructive nature.

On paper, the concept is ludicrous, as if An Extremely Goofy Movie had a sequel where a depressed Goofy struggled to deal with the pitfalls and temptations of fame, while undergoing a midlife crisis and the struggle to remain relevant in world that’s moved on without him.

Yet Bojack embraces the ludicrousness; a good chunk of the show’s humor is based around the the concept of animal human hybrids acting like animals (dog-men harass mail carriers, sloth and turtle people move at a snail’s pace, etc) and cartoonishly slap-stick gags, but the majority comes from razor sharp satire to to pick apart the bizarre culture of celebrity worship.

But the shenanigans also serves to both soften the blow of the show’s main goal; to follow the journey of a man at times so unlikeable he can be deemed an anti-hero, and even a villain. It also becomes a vehicle to analyze broader issues such as existentialism, abortion, mass shootings, often in a way that remains ridiculous but executed with a surprising amount of tact and taste.

Without the humour, the show wouldn’t be a dark comedy–it would simply be dark.

Also to the show’s credit, the narrative integrity remains solid throughout. Each season is well paced with a couple plotlines that gradually explore the motivations of the cast, with the writing, animation and acting quality remaining consistent and arguably getting better over time.

And yet the cast itself, the core of any show or media, is something of a mixed bag, and that’s where a viewer’s mileage will vary wildly.

As stated, Bojack can be unlikeable, but he’s also aware of just how unlikeable he can be. As a matter of fact, most of the cast are frequently unlikeable, but are also cognizant of their issues to the point that they’ll blatantly tell other characters exactly what their issues are with precision that one usually don’t come across in the real world. Bojack in particular frequently loves to “fetishize [his] own sadness” and martyrize himself while falling into same emotional pitfalls over and over. This can lead to bounty of frustration in the short term; it’s hard to watch characters who’ve become attached to slide back into their old ways, destroying the fragile relationships they’ve  worked hard on building.

But to the show’s credit, this process mirrors real life; a large amount of people are self aware enough to know the source of their emotional issues, yet continue to make the same mistakes time and time again, all while exclaiming on how the fault lies with others, with “bad luck”, with life itself. In a way it’s cathartic to see the this animated cast of anthropomorphic animals act how they would in real life, but in an easy to grasp and consistent way.

In addition, it’s satisfying to see the rest of the cast and world move on even if one character finds themselves emotionally stuck, because time’s arrow keeps marching forward regardless of the actions of any one person.

Overall, as someone who’s recently finished season 4 (the most current season as of writing this), I can firmly say that there is a definitive sense of progress; characters grow emotionally as often as they have setbacks, becoming even more nuanced and complex over time. It takes looking at the series as whole rather than its parts to really appreciate the struggle they go through.

Altogether, enjoyment of Bojack Horseman, like all media, relies on how much the viewer can relate to it’s premise, message, and execution. Personally I found myself resonating strongly with the show as a whole; like Bojack, I’ve sabotaged myself plenty of times, anguishing over my mistakes and regrets, with that voice inside my head chiming in that I’ll only amount to being a failure. But I’ve also overcome many of the challenges I’ve faced, I try to do good when I can and keep growing as a person despite my setbacks.