Design Concept Fusion

I was thinking yesterday about one of the real draws of Roleplaying games, both of the in-person at a table and guided by computer types... for me, Exploration is a huge hook. it's not solely RPGs that I enjoy it in, however - Any game can grab me with the slow introduction of new intriguing maps, or a change of the visual palette tying a new region together.

From there, I wondered about what it would take to create a game about exploration. Some already have, but these are niche titles in many ways. A hell of a lot more people know abotu the existence of Modern Warfare 2 than, say, Journey. But the step beyond that... There is a strange place where Little Big Planet, Journey, and Dragon Age find a confluence, and that sort of shared creative world for role playing games has really existed since the beginning, with multiple authors contributing novels and modules to worlds like The Forgotten Realms.

An exploration game with a shared universe of user-created content sounds like just what would scratch this particular itch, and I began to think about the tools and my own creative process for RPGs. Even with tools like Neverwinter Night's GM's tools, creating worlds that stand up in a modern game system is hard, as many many maps and mods from Counterstrike to the tens of thousands of not-quite-popular Little Big Planet maps attest. The success and failure of such a game then, would probably rely on the usability and power of the toolsets that all of those common creative minds building new places to explore have to use.

And then, I wondered, what if this creation of new terrain was pitched as a game in itself, just abstracted? Imagine a tool that creates worlds for Third-Person explorers which begins with a tower-defense style map, where instead of enemies like toughs, hordes and flyers, you have abstracted player types that you need to place features to entertain. Different 'minigames' could handle different levels of detail for newly explored places, latching onto the sort of interest in terrain and design which lead many of us to turn backyard mud-pits into hotwheels racetracks, or an unconnected pile of backyard refuse into a potential gravity-driven marble track. I'm not sure what the details would look like, but using open-ended minigames to create content for fellow explorers seems like a fascinating way to continually expand a world to explore through the guise of a game.

Changeling character concepts.

I've decided that next weekend, I'll likely be running a Changeling: The Lost oneshot for some friends. You can find out more about Changeling on Wikipedia or White-Wolf.com, but suffice to say it is a supernatural game of personal horror, or as the book itself tries to explain, A Storytelling Game of Beautiful Madness.

Changelings are people who, somehow, were lured, abducted, escaped or wandered into the alien realm of Faerie, ruled by beings of unassailable power over their own pockets of causality, with inhuman, unknowable emotions and motivations that rarely turn out well for humans who end up before them. A Changeling player character has 'Escaped', or at least returned to the human world via cunning, accidents... or, perhaps scariest of all, being allowed back by their 'keeper'. On returning to the world however, they realize two things. They have been indelibly changed in ways both visible and not, and for one of many reasons, they can never truly go back to the life they once lived.

These write-ups of Player Character backgrounds are kept short, sweet, and ambiguous in order to give the player who picks them up a solid grounding in the game's themes, without pinning down their specific details.

As a storytelling game, all of these are told in a very formulaic, symmetric form to each other, befitting Changeling's fairytale-gone-wrong themes.

Once upon a time you risked your life every day, saving carefree beachgoers from the danger of deceptively calm Miami waters. Then, one stormy, summer night, you fell from your boat at the marina and were carried out through the harbor’s arch-covered mouth by wild rip-currents. Torn at by coral and rocky shoals, you washed up on the deck of a galleon, run by an alluring gentleman known only as the Generous Captain. The Captain never quite understood how a lifeguard sacrificed themselves to save others – instead of swimming out and helping the ‘people’ seen daily in the waters, you’d be thrown to the waves, swimming futiley after them until drowning yourself – An act which would suddenly leave you both rescued, barely alive, on the deck. You don’t know how long passed, but one day, you ignored the burbling cries of a drowning woman to swim away from the boat, and found yourself ashore in a swamp with other scared, confused people intent on running as far from here as they could…

Once upon a time you were a gifted, but destitute artist, selling your sculptures to wealthy tourists on sunny Miami boardwalks. Then, one crisp, spring night, barhopping took you to a woman who convinced you to stick a needle in your arm, before leading you beneath a barbed-wire archway. Torn at by rusty, twisted steel, you awoke in a prison yard-like pen, overseen by a cruel slave-driver known only as the Warden of Rusted Nettles. The Warden never quite understood lasting artworks – Instead of tough sculptures of stone or bronze, your artistic talent made lasting marks in the flesh of your fellow inmates with henna and ink, lest your own be marked by scorching brands. You don’t know how long passed, but one day you found the artistic filigree of the ‘8’ tattoo you had just finished contained an intricate number and a map, showing you the key-code and route to escape the chainlink forest. Running past steel trunks and rusting barbed leaves, you found yourself emerging in a swamp with other scared, confused people intent on running as far from here as they could…

Once upon a time you paid tuition delivering for gangs, taking messages and packages anywhere in the dark underworld of Miami streets. Then, one chilly, winter night, a rival gang put a bullet in your leg for the bag of cash you carried, hunting you through parking lots and forgotten garden arbors. Torn at by broken trellises and rusty tomato cages, you stumbled out onto a cold plain, chased by the shapeless Tireless Terror of Tundra. The Terror never quite understood that pursuits needed a reason – Instead of chasing you out of a prized garden or for sustenance, it simply chased you from garden to garden, exhausting, then shooting or savaging you, before the juices of the trampled fruits would slowly heal your wounds for the next day of the hunt. You don’t know how long passed, but one day you just stopped running and let it catch you. The Terror left you battered, bruised, but alive, before leaving you to die… or maybe just lack of interest. You limped into a cramped, wet warren between gardens, and when you crawled out, you found yourself mired in a swamp with other scared, confused people intent on running as far from here as they could…

Once upon a time you fought for your country and came back lost, until your benefactor hired you as a bouncer, guarding lairs of Miami glitterati. Then, one windy autumn night, they invited you to their office, texting IM SORRY as you passed through the revolving door. Torn at by long-tail office ferns and proactive silk flowers in the stairwell, the rooftop door revealed an old stone aerie, lorded over by a majestic, predatory count known only as Baron Raptor, who explained anything that came to the Aerie became His. The Baron never understood hospitality – Instead of greeting his guests and settling them in, you distracted them with gregarious niceties, and then betrayed them to ensure their stays became permanent. Over time, you grew to be a regal monster, just like the Count. You don’t know how long passed, but one day there came to the aerie a guest of such beauty, you could hardly lift your gaze to their face. Overcome by their comeliness, you broke down and warned them of the Baron’s plans, to which they simply smiled and turned to walk away. Furious with your failure to keep this guest, Baron Raptor struck you, banishing you down the mountainside. Climbing past shrubs and broken cliff faces, you descended to a swamp with other scared, confused people intent on running as far from here as they could…

Upcoming Project

After a startlingly busy week, I'll be aiming to discuss a little bit of my ongoing design of a major RPG campaign I want to run over the summer.

I will try to be generic and not spoil anything for my players, but just in case, players - POSSIBLE SPOILER ALERTS. I will pointedly try to put up biger warnings anyplace where I get so far under the hood player enjoyment and surprise might be threatened, but this is my blanket warning.

Here's a teaser, the RSS Feed, and a link to the Obsidian Portal account I'm working to fill up. Feel free to leave comments, questions or requests.

Madness Spreads as Winter Grows,

Forests withered, Oceans Froze,

Centuries gone Cold and Dead,

The hand of a Dark God felt with Dread…

Dreams of Ice and Madness RSS Feed

Dreams of Ice and Madness on Obsidian Portal

Experience Overflow.

My roommate plays neverwinter Nights - a Dungeons and Dragons computer game hosted on a public server. He's a DM, and one of his other DMs gave his 30th level sorcerer - Who had around 250,000 XP - 2.7 Billion with a B XP.... And suddenly, the game claimed he had negative 2 Billion XP. Whoops.


Aha. I knew exactly what happened.

UPDATE: Unexplained Phenomenon Google Trends?

Turns out, it's just Google being silly.

See This Post for the gritty details.

Short Version: Google had it's 'O' abducted by aliens, possibly a reference to the Exeter Incident, bandied the phrase 'Unexplained Phenomenon' about, and will do something whacky again on the 15th, probably as a tie in to H.G. Wells birthday.

The Will of the Hive Mind

Apparently, as mused in my prior posts, I am not the only one talking about the usage of the term geek in modern culture.

But while I'm generally talking about the multiclassed, multidisciplinary cross-over phenomenon among geeks and the phenomenon of chaining from one interest to another through social circles, Jess is tackling geek-dom from the direction of a discussion on manners in the modern geek. Take a gander at One Geek To Another tag and see what I'm talking about.

Clue is spread pretty thick across the internet, although I suspect Jess hoards her share of it.



On the subject of the gestalt here, I figured I'd point out Google Trends. Er, Google Trends. I always find a quick glance fascinating, although I'm still looking on a smaller scale. After all, I'd rather find out what the most common search term alongside 'Roleplaying' is, than know that people on the internet spontaneously searched for Unexplained Phenomenon at about 2 pm today (Although I find the concept Very meta.) Nor, did I really need to know that tons of people wanted to know about the female lead in Inglorious Bastards (Which I still need to see...) Although, I can probably guess why. Thanks, Internet.

I think the part I like best about Google Trends is trying to figure out why something became popular suddenly. Which is usually followed by the realization that my gut feeling is usually quite off from real factors. Still, Trends is a tool to try and help dispel such assumptions with Data. Or maybe it's merely because Trends is such a fine tool to get data at your fingertips... And we can't all have virtual worlds full of text to fly around in. Yet.

Braggin' and Defraggin'

My Saturday morning project was simple, and useful, even if my initial task proved to be a failure. This discussion might be a bit technical, but, suffice to say, if you know what Page Files or Disk Defragmentation is, you might find it interesting.

Quick Disclaimer:
I'm not, in theory, a hardware professional. This is personal knowledge, and I might, gasp, even have things wrong. I've been doing things this way for awhile without glaring system instability or trouble, but this risk is warranty-free. YMMV.

I may have spoke too soon on not having hardware problems - As it turns out, Mirror's edge is the first game I've bought in awhile that taxes my systems. I went digging for ideas on ways to improve my performance, short of upgrading my machine with a new video card or RAM, and recalled some ideas for page file tweaking, and defragmenting.

I spent the rest of the morning seeking ways to clear my hard-drives to that crucial 15% that Disk Defragmenter wants, but I found a few other tidbits. Here's a quick rundown of the idea behind defragmenting, and my experiences with the process:

Defrag 101

The idea is, that if a big file is in a contiguous block, it's basically in one place on your hard drive and easier and faster to retrieve. Otherwise, the system is jumping around, trying to find the different parts. On a full Hard Drive, big files tend to be heavily fragmented, and so when a game or program seeks that big file, it has to look more places, seek time goes up, performance goes down.

Defragmenting, in theory, takes all of your scattered files, tries to make a spot on your drive big enough to stash it in one piece, and moves it. So defragmentation works best when you have a lot of empty space at the end of your hard drive, so it can move those big files to the end, then compress the rest back into those gaps that open up.

Page File 101

Your computer needs space to put things it's working on. That's Memory, usually RAM, Random-Access Memory. More is better for most computers, Especially when gaming, since the machine has to juggle tons of textures and graphics and other information.

RAM is fast. It is like thinking about something - you pretty much just have to think about it and you know it. However, Ram is expensive, and Windows can only handle so much of it. So, Windows wants a Page File. This is like a notepad on your computer that windows writes down things to remember on. At first, this seems awesome. You have Gigabytes of space on your hard-drive, but only 1 or 2 gigs of RAM. But, using the hard drive is an order of magnitude slower. As if you had to go look things up in a filing cabinet when you wanted to think about them.

Windows thinks it can manage paged memory for you, and knows what's best. Windows is actually retarded, and in high performance experiences, it's really not that good at this. So, the best bet is to make your 'page file', the scratch file of 'virtual' memory that Windows writes to, a specific size, so it's always in the right place, and always open to use. I think the recommended size is like, twice your system RAM, give or take. It's my rule of thumb anyways.

However, like files, the chunks of your hard drive you set aside for page files can become fragmented. If each piece is, like, 500 megs, this isn't bad. But if it's in tiny slices all over your hard-drive, then seek time becomes even worse.


The Procedure

The theory is, open up tons of space at the backside of the hard drive, turn off page files, defragment, and then turn the page files back on, allowing them to settle into the big chunks at the end of the hard drive. The process took me a good part of my day and about 2 system restarts. There's a few basic steps.

1. Turn off the page files.
This is done by right clicking on my computer and then clicking properties. under the 'Advanced' tab, there's three buttons. You want the one up top, under 'Performance'

The second tab of performance is 'Advanced' again, and then once in there, you'll see Virtual Memory at the bottom. That's where these page files are. In order to turn them off, you need to set each drive you own to 'No Page File'.

!WARNING!
If you have a gig of ram or less, this may make Windows XP run like a dog. this is okay - You won't be doing much other than defragmenting, and after that, it'll all be over and back to normal, or better.

Restarting turns off these page files, and allows for the hard drive space they locked up to go free. If you have defragmented before and seen big green lines, those are, most commonly, page files. Or so I think.

2. Defragging
Once your page files are gone, and you have at least 15% disk space free, the boring part - Defragging. This is the most straight forward, but most tedious portion. The defragger is under start menu > system tools > disk defragmenter.

Got that going? Good. Go get lunch or something.

When you get back, you'll want to look at the report. This is sort of the defragmentation equivalent of hypermiling. You look and see what files remain fragmented, then consider if you can fix that. If the files are very large, you might just need more free space at the end of your drivespace to move it in one piece. For me, I found that TF2, Counter Strike, Guild Wars, and Beyond Good and Evil were my big offenders. By uninstalling the latter three (Which I hadn't been playing lately) I made enough room that the huge 2.5 gig datafile for TF2 that was broken into literally 980 pieces could be put together and defragmented.

I ended up tinkering with this, but when Disk Defragmenter tells you you don't need to defrag, it's usually right, and there's little performance gain to be had.

3. Turning On Pagefiles
Hopefully, you'll have pretty blue bars at this point, with maybe just a little red or green mixed in. Now, you can go and re-enable your page file(s).

You go to the same place as before (right click my computer, properties, advanced, performance, advanced, virtual memory)

This time, you want to set the page file to a specific size, rather than letting XP handle it. If you're a typical gamer with 2 gigs of ram, 4 gigs (That's 4096 MB) is probably in the right ballpark. I'd stick with twice your ram.

Give your page file a custom size - And make sure that the initial and max sizes are identical. This keeps XP from having to screw around with allocating sizes or changing anything.

Restarting allows Windows to actually use these page files.

Quick note: if you go to defragment without turning off page files, you'll see big green bars. This is unmovable disk space, such as that allocated by a page file. You can still defragment around it, especially ig you have lots of free space, but for a thorough compacting spree, it's probably best to repeat the procedure.

The above is my defragment dialog for my two partitions, a 33 gig system partition and a 116 gig applications and games disk. This is a day after my defrag sweep, with some of those bigger games re-installed. Already fragmentation creeps back in, but I should be reaping performance benefits in seek time for awhile yet before trouble brews again.