Grim Darkness is Grim...And Slightly Broken

So my weekly gaming group has been checking out Dark Heresy, a tabletop role-playing game set in the Warhammer 40K universe, and published by the well known game designer, Fantasy Flight Games. The characters play as acolytes to an Inquisitor for the Imperium. For those of you who aren't familiar with Warhammer 40K, Starcraft is the best correlation (mostly because it ripped the idea off, blatantly, back when the first one came out).

We've enjoyed the fluff, and story, but we've had a great deal of issue with the mechanical aspect. The basic rules run off a percentile system with your target numbers defined by your characters attributes, leaving most beginners with a 65% chance of failing at any given task. The real problem is that modifiers for the game are capped at +/- 30. This means that shooting a dime at a range of a mile without a scope is penalized by a tiny amount, and that kicking in a basic wooden door with three people helping you still has a 25% chance to fail miserably.

So we grabbed some errata off Fantasy Flight's website and doubled the possible modifiers, allowing us to fail by fewer degrees, if not necessarily succeed. These larger caps seem to have fixed most of our issues, but we're still experiencing difficulty on a couple of fronts:
1) We have a tenuous grasp of the fluff in some cases. The Imperium has a contradictory dogma to say the least. The object of most missions is to root out "heresy" in whatever location of population you're assigned to investigate. But the definition of heresy in a simultaneously cosmopolitan and totalitarian society is basically left up to the characters, both PC and NPC. And while that freedom to think is not a bad thing by far, those unfamiliar with the setting are left wondering what they're supposed to be fighting.
2) Role-playing cliches abound, one of the most well known being the direct relation between the quality of a female's armor and how much skin it shows. In world of Dark Heresy three things have led one of my female players, Rini, to declare the entire system "a boy game." First is the penchant for making all the male characters hideously disfigured and then conveniently allowing the females to avoid losing limbs, eyes, acquiring scars, or having a cup size smaller than a C, no matter how tight the body glove. Yes they have a body glove. Second, crafting skills, although poorly defined, are listed as requiring strength for many tasks which I would deem don't make a lot of sense. Like applying a laser sight to a lasgun. I've watched an entire company of Infantrymen wrestle with their red dot sights, trying to muscle them on until one of them realized the screws weren't retracted and then the whole lot of them had a brain-wave. So strength just doesn't mesh with my perceptions of reality. And third, the one I attribute more to Rini than to any flaw in the game itself, the dire possibility of failure. Yes, it doesn't make a lot of sense to fail at tasks that you can do easily in real life, such as kicking down a door, with or without training. But you are playing a fictional character who is distinctly not you. In real life, you possess nearly no combat ability, few if any contacts on other planets, and you don't work for the government, nor believe in a distant God-Emperor. So roll the dice, and pray the Psyker doesn't roll 9's.

Stay tuned for Part 2 of Rules of Warcraft, coming Wednesday...

The Rules of Love and Warcraft: Part 1/3

I've had a turbulent relationship with the iconic MMORPG we all know and love. I started playing in '07 just after Burning Crusade came out. Some of my Air Force buddies played and I, a long-time fan of the Warcraft series, joined up and tried it out. I started with a Tauren Hunter, mostly for the pets, and like all RPGs with character options, proceeded to make one of everything. And I started a guild. With just me in it. And then I realized that this co-op gameplay experience required skill, social ties and above all dedicated work. So I gave it up. A few months later I was ready for more and I went back to find they had changed the game. A patch they called it. Except in my previous experience patches meant they were fixing bugs, not altering the fundamentals of game balance and play styles.

Over time I would take long breaks, come back and rebuild my shattered guild, level like mad for a few weeks and then jump back into the real world when I burned out. My last stint was probably my most successful. I had a mount, so travel times weren't death marches anymore, and I made the inevitable grinding a game in and of itself by tracking time spent playing and the tiny victories and goals on a homemade spreadsheet graph, with different colored lines for all my character's progress. And I had my wife start up an account, and my good friend Gus switched servers and helped me manage my guild. I played consistently for nearly a year and a half before having to shut it down again when I went to Basic Training.

When I got back they'd nerfed everything I loved into the dirt. As with all patches I found the bits I liked, and the ones I loathed and attempted to curb stomp them into a tolerable whole. So I played Wrath of the Lich King for about a month, decided I had better things to do with my money and gave it up again. Now Cataclysm is out, and with all the hype (and a tasty looking guild leveling system) I decided to give it the good ole college try this one last time. With no more foreseeable interruptions of internet access/cash flow/free time I embark on a quest for MMO gold.

I will grade Cataclysm on five scales from one to ten, hereby declared Base Ten Grading Scale. The catagories are:
1) Game Balance - If I wander through the broken husk of Azeroth and find that Paladins are still healing better than Holy Priests, or that anything else is fishy I will be most displeased.
2) Social Potential - I love playing with my friends and wife, so if the Guild Leveling isn't well done, or any particular gameplay elements make the social aspect of the game unpleasant or unworkable then my shiny new toy isn't so shiny. Also, my buddy Gus is likely to cancel his account as well since he has no one else to play with. Never let it be said that the social aspect of MMOs is undervalued by the players.
3) Intelligent Economics - If arbitrary gold sinks for nigh-critical features such as the ability to fly over a certain continent, or prohibitive costs for mounts, dial-spec talents, or any other advertised feature exist, I will not play. If the game feels like work, it is no longer a game. It's a job I'm paying to do.
4) Hunter Skillz - If I play my original main and no longer enjoy the level of proficiency and excellence I worked so hard to achieve, my ire will be kindled.
5) Loremastery - I'm a huge story buff in this game world, so if the new races are stupid, the cool flavor of the old world defiled beyond recognition, or some new weird add-on breaks canon too badly, I will no longer be playing a Warcraft game, I'll be playing a Warcraft spin-off. Not what I signed up for.

So with that said, I think my patches are just about finished patching and I'm off to enjoy some cool new exploration. Let the Legion's banner fly!