I finally lost my patience with Battle for Wesnoth, which I’ve been playing lately. While I’ve usually been able to endure playing a scenario per day, the latest scenario in the campaign, the Trial of the Horse Clan (or some such; playing the Finnish translation here) almost made me break my mouse in frustration. I doubt that I’m going to return to the game again.

The concept of the scenario is long distances and units with plenty of movement. Due to how the game doesn’t support real skirmish units (which you’d expect of plains nomads), the horse lords of the plains wield large numbers of heavy-hitting lancer units instead. This means that the whole scenario is a total bloodbath with units exchanged 1-to-1 with the enemy. Consider, the four methods of protecting your own troops in Wesnoth:

• Positioning the units into defensive lines that protect their flanks is not useful against an enemy that does not care about their own casualties and is capable of killing my units with one or at most two attacks. The best protective line the hex geometry allows still leaves each unit with two open hex sides; more than enough for the lancers to focus their attacks on the most valuable unit in the defensive line.
• Positioning the units in protective terrain is difficult, as such terrain is scarce on the plains. Furthermore, terrain only reduces opponent striking probability in this game, which isn’t that useful when most units the opponent wields are kamikaze stuff capable of taking all but the most robust units out in one hit. Even the best terrain only protects an unit at a 35% probability against a lancer who strikes 3 times for massive damage.
• Putting sacrificial units in front of your valuable ones still works on the plains, but you need humongous numbers of those units here: each lancer kills one low-level unit per round, so even if you always manage to kill the lancer after its initial charge, you’re going to lose something like 20 units before the scenario is through. I don’t know if I have the patience for this style of play after shepherding my army through a dozen scenarios with something like half a dozen fatalities in total. Actually, I don’t even know if I’d have the budget for that sort of thing in this scenario.
• The most efficient tool of defense in Wesnoth is to position your troops so far away from the enemy that the enemy can’t reach them. Unfortunately the concept in this scenario is mobile enemy, so this is not an option; fast light cavalry doesn’t hit hard enough to actually eliminate those lancers, while heavier-hitting units are all so fragile and slow that I end up trading one expensive elite unit for one of those lancers every time the enemy gets a turn with a lancer in hitting distance of my lines.

In some other game I’d enjoy this sort of challenge, but here the user interface of the game makes that pretty impossible; reloading the position takes so long that it’s practically impossible to try out a sufficient number of plans to figure out how to approach the scenario before I lose my patience. As cumulative bad luck can force a reload as well, I’m looking at spending almost an estimated hour simply waiting for the game to load in between attempts at solving the scenario. Not my understanding of a good time by any means, as I’d somehow have to know how to solve the scenario before I actually play it to avoid having to reload.

I could reduce the amount of load breaks by playing much more conservatively with the hero characters (the ones you aren’t allowed to lose) and by intentionally sacrificing low-level units to the grind, but I’m a bit doubtful as to why I’d want to. Surely I have better things to do at this point.

I’ve continued playing Wesnoth and trying to figure out what it is that annoys me in the game. I think I’ve got at least a part of the answer here: the issue is that what we call “games” actually consists of two different types of interactive objects, and mistaking them for each other is a recipe for disaster. Just an idle thought, let’s see if it goes anywhere.

Games

A game is (for our purposes here) a ritual space with simplified rules and objectives – simplified in comparison with reality. A good game has goals and performance, the players derive enjoyment from performing the skills necessary for the game. We can talk about good play and bad play, and about strategy and technique of play. Chess and tennis are games.

Toys

Some things called games are actually virtual experiences of various sorts of multimedia art. Playing them is not a matter of performance, but of experiencing content. Much of what passes for video “game” design is actually about designing toys. The issue is blurred by the fact that many of these software toys provide a default game embedded inside; it’s just that often this game is not very fun or functional, or it might be arbitrary, or it might simply get ignored by the player. Console rpgs are almost always foremostly toys in this sense of the word.

Conclusion

OK, so that didn’t turn out as sublime as I thought it would – a pretty routine analysis. Still, back to Wesnoth: the reason for why I wouldn’t want to resolve the annoying issue of dying units by simply making unit death a non-issue in campaign play is that it’d turn the game more toy-like. It would make improving units into a grind – a routine process with psychological values that is very typical of toys, but rare in games, and often reviled.

The fundamental problem of computer war game campaigns (and tabletop as well, in fact) is very important – it would actually deserve to have a name… let’s call it the Defeat Horizon. That deserves its own heading.

Defeat Horizon

Defeat horizon is the limit that prevents us from introducing genuine loss into certain types of games. It is caused by conflicting assumptions:

• A game needs to remain feasible as a challenge proposition through its entire length.
• A toy needs to remain fun and rewarding for the duration of the psychological process (f.ex. following a plot) that is engaged when you fiddle with it.
• Negative feedback cycles in games make players give up when they find the position untenable. In toys they give up when the toy refuses new content to them.

The above is not an issue at all for games that have graceful exit strategies from the play situation. Consider Chess: whenever you find your position untenable because of a stupid mistake, you ragequit (or just quit, if you’re an adult). This does not break the game, as it’s intended to end, and it would have ended even if you had won. You can start a new game and hope to do better. Compare with Battle for Wesnoth, in which the defeat horizon gets crossed every time I lose too many units for my liking and decide to reload; instead of the game ending conclusively like Chess, I just go through the arduous punishment of waiting for the game to reload and then giving my units almost the same orders as before, trying to hone my strategy.

The defeat horizon is a real issue in several types of game and toy design. For example, a bog-standard console rpg like Final Fantasy has a very strict defeat horizon, because it is very toy-like (you have to actively speedrun the game or something of the sort to find an actual challenge in these), with the plot and character advancement being the main axes of development. Consequently the defeat horizon resides on those axes: you the designer can’t feasibly punish the player by backtracking the plot or taking away character development, as those are the only things that are actually keeping the player there and playing. As we all know, this has led to a situation where these games actually have really wimpy and consequence-free gameplay: because there are no meaningful ways of punishing players without crossing the defeat horizon and making them quit, you don’t punish them ever. The closest these games come to punishment is really low-tech psych stuff, like having to sit through the same stupid monologue six times as you try to win the boss fight. I certainly hope this stuff is just design oversight and not intentional punishment for failing in the fight, anyway.

Conclusion the second

Wesnoth has a too strict defeat horizon because it is too toy-like, is my conclusion (which is based on what I like in games). If I played the game in multiplayer mode with other real people, then the single scenario would be the battlefield, esteem would be on the line and the defeat horizon would be far away out back; I’d fight until I couldn’t win the scenario anymore, instead of quitting when my first unit gets a scratch. Instead I’m playing the campaign mode, which is toy-like and really just about me micromanaging my ever-growing army towards higher experience levels. This activity has a strict defeat horizon, I find my position untenable after the slightest set-back and act quickly to rectify.

(I don’t claim that the multiplayer mode would be any good here, incidentally. I haven’t tried Wesnoth, but I’ve tried other games like it, and I personally don’t care much for arbitrary single scenario play in this sort of war game. The game-like experience is much more robust, but choosing your army without the constraints of campaign play is a pain in the ass in many games of this sort, as they haven’t really been designed with that in mind. Could be good if I really got into it at some point, don’t know.)

To fix this sort of thing would require making the campaign mode less toy-like by introducing real skill elements that actually would allow me a sense of accomplishment, and more importantly, relaxing the defeat horizon by making sure that while making mistakes made my overall position worse (to keep it game-like) and defeat more likely, they would also heighten the sense of urgency and hope, and a will to fight. When I play table tennis and am one serve from a loss, I don’t quit the game, because the game’s defeat horizon is correctly adjusted: as long as the game continues I have an obligation of sportsmanship towards my opponent and a slim chance of victory, which both make me play the game until its conclusion – and I might even start a new game right afterwards, it’s that well-designed. This is not true of the Wesnoth campaign mode, which presents me with an uncertain future towards which my only safeguard is manic army improvement in the hopes of growing a strong enough army to keep up with the rising scenario difficulty. In these conditions I will of course find my position untenable after most minor losses, as I don’t know how good I should be doing in comparison to the next scenario in the campaign (or the last one, for that matter).

Looking at it from this viewpoint, the situation is actually pretty simple: the whole concept of a string-of-pearls wargame campaign with incrementally improved army sucks, because the player can’t know (in most implementations) how well he is doing, and is therefore reduced to either obsessive optimization or actually playing for 40 hours only to find out in the last scenario that he’s hopelessly outmatched by the enemy (this one actually happened to me in FF7, I think). Both are pretty sucky outcomes.

The above issue is not that difficult to fix when we understand it, of course. We could introduce some real information about the future for the player, for example. I’d find it pretty cool if this sort of campaign set-up gave me an army list for the last scenario’s enemy forces right off the bat at the start, for example, allowing me to run my own comparisons, or even allowing the game itself to tell me how I’m doing in relation to the expected level of performance. The classic strategy game Colonization did this, allowing the player to track the development of the king’s continental army in real time. (Of course if we’re copying Colonization, we might as well go full-hog and allow the player some say in when the final battle is going to take place. I’d find that sort of thing pretty cool in a game like Wesnoth – you run through this gauntlet of preliminary battles not because the plot dictates them, but because you’re trying to set the parameters of the decisive confrontation at the end to be to your advantage.)

I’ve been playing Battle for Wesnoth lately. It’s a light hex-based fantasy war game that mixes influences from western war games and Japanese skirmish war games. Wesnoth is free software, and really quite impressive for that – it has nice graphics and sounds, plenty of cheesy fantasy dialogue and everything else you’d expect of a game in this genre.

For all its good sides, though, I’m quite dissatisfied by this game overall. The project workflow obviously has worked well, and the production quality is good, but the game’s fundamental design tenets seem faulty to me. Let’s see if I can figure out why.

The Red and Blue armies are arrayed into battlelines. The numbers indicate the number of vulnerable hex sides each unit in the battleline presents towards the enemy. Given identical units and terrain, the optimal solution is a line perpendicular to one of the three hex axes, as then each unit is equally vulnerable to enemy force concentration; however, units and terrain are often not equal, and enemy positioning might encourage pushing certain units more or less forward as well. Usually your goal is to arrange your units (and enemy units) on your turn in such a manner as to leave the enemy no likely openings for fruitful attack on their turn.

An example of a retreat movement on enemy turn. The blue unit attacks the red, forcing a retreat. This might or might not be what the red player hoped for, but now the unit that was attacked is in a more secure position, while the two units partially behind it have a new exposed flank.

Hex-based positioning

The base activity in Wesnoth and other games of its ilk is positioning your various troops against the terrain and enemy forces in such a manner as to

1. Drop as many enemies as you can before your turn ends; every enemy killed now won’t be dealing damage on their next turn, so this is the most direct method of achieving step two.
2. Minimize damage and risk of dying for your own troops on the enemy’s turn by controlling who the enemy can attack and with which units.
3. Usually as distant third, you’re trying to fulfill scenario goals within a time limit. A more difficult game or scenario gives you less time, forcing you to sacrifice the above points to make haste.

I’m not a big war-gamer, but I do like the basic precept when I don’t need to study WWII era artillery history to play the game. This lack of interest in gun porn is the basic reason for why I consider Fantasy General the best game in the seminal General series of hex-based strategy games. This is relevant here, because the General games are essentially very similar to Wesnoth in terms of basic activity – you do that same optimization of troop positioning against terrain and enemy locations under a turn limit.

Now, I like the General series of games a lot. One of my favourite features in them is a small rules detail: troops under attack can retreat from under fire automatically now and then, the probability depending on the unit type and the success of the attack. This rule runs counter to the general notion that units only move on your own turn. It is sometimes beneficial to set up a retreat, as that allows a unit damaged in defence to move into a less vulnerable position. Other times the retreat becomes a hindrance, as units that do not have a venue of retreat available will disband, instead. This means that a good defensive arrangement actually is not just a big blob of units; you need to leave holes for units to retreat to, while also thinking of your defensive lines in depth – which unit ends up under attack when and if this unit retreats? Where does this unit end up if it retreats, will it be able to defend itself on the new terrain from further attacks?

This might sound picky, but much of the time when playing Wesnoth I find myself nostalgic for Fantasy General (both being fantasy games that don’t require me to distinguish between different calibers of Russian artillery). Wesnoth has almost all the rules of unit movement from the General series, such as unit zones of control, but it does not have the retreat rule. I thought at first that I could overlook that, but the more I play, the more I’m annoyed by the lack of this small rule. Lacking retreat means that battlelines in Wesnoth are completely static on enemy turns; your forces are completely vulnerable to enemy attack, leaving you much less opportunity for using multiple units in a synergistic manner. You can still benefit from having many units by forming battle-lines where units protect each other from excess concentrations of enemy force, but in my experience this tends to not be enough; forces are fragile and casualties are taken despite the best plans. Setting aside the fact that play is annoyingly simple-minded when there are no retreats to worry about, one might think that casualties are just something I need to play around and live with. However, I have a second issue with Wesnoth, one that plays into this.

Incremental Advancement

Wesnoth can be played as single scenarios against other people, but that’s not the way I swing; I play the campaign mode, in which you develop an army through many fights, managing resources on the way. There are many things I like about Wesnoth’s campaign mode; for instance, the game engine allows for delicious rules-breaking on the part of the scenario designer, so we get stuff like sea monsters suddenly attacking both sides of a fight, turning plans awry. I also like how the game’s internal reference only allows you to view unit descriptions for units that you’ve seen in the campaign; this means that you get to discover new units as you play, which is exciting.

However, the campaign mode has a dark side, one that it shares with Fantasy General. Your valuable, well-loved army improves by fighting and gaining experience, which allows the units to develop into more powerful version of themselves. All well and good and slightly addictive, except that now that I’ve played the game for several days, I’m growing sick and tired of having to shepherd the troops to prevent them from dying. Psychologically I’m completely stuck on preserving my experienced units, which means that the slightest mistake with the unforgiving, static unit positioning scheme leads to me reloading the game (which seems to take over a minute with this computer) and replaying, trying to figure out a different set of moves that’d save the valuable unit I’ve painstakingly developed from dying in the hands of capricious chance and stupid AI that seems to only care about causing casualties instead of protecting its own assets.

The real question here is, why am I so absorbed in saving individual units that I actually reload turns to find an optimal play? Specifically, why am I doing this when it slows the game down into a crawl, and ultimately ends with me quitting in frustration? My current theory is that this is because the campaign model in this genre of war game is flawed: the only kind of genuine advancement you can have as the player is development in your army of playing pieces, while the thrust of the game itself is nothing of the sort. Consequently my goal in a given scenario is not really to win it, but to win it without losing any of the elite units I’ve myself decided I wouldn’t lose. This is frustrating because the game does not care about my internal state and about which units I want or don’t want to sacrifice. Play degenerates into masochistic optimization when inevitable casualties trigger reloads. Meanwhile the campaign drags on as a linear narrative that I’m not really invested in, being that I’m lost in this army management reward loop. From my viewpoint as a player the only achievement there is is to improve my army; the scenarios themselves come and go, and what you do in them doesn’t matter that much as long as you manage to finish successfully.

Conclusion

I have nothing bad to say about Wesnoth in general terms; the game looks good, the price point is excellent (the game being free), and the Finnish-language translation is just zany, considering that usually only children’s games get translated around here. Despite this I don’t think that I can stand playing the game a lot more – it’s just too frustrating to try to improve and preserve a growing number of units in an army that is doomed to die because there are too few tools available for protecting and preserving units. Something in the game is working at cross-purposes.

Thinking of similar situations in other games, I notice that players do not get stuck in frustrating reload loops when playing games that feature only simple pass/fail conditions. In other words: losing is fine, but unofficially losing because you managed to win the scenario but failed to preserve your real measure of progress, your elite army, is annoying. I don’t think that the game would be feasible if losing any units at all were an official loss condition, but at least then the designer would have to account for this psychological drive he creates by making army improvement such a central part of the game.

Thinking further, how would I approach this genre, then? I like these hex-based games, and I certainly like the idea of arranging game content into campaigns – if for no other reason, then because that allows me to not choose the scenario I play next myself. It also helps that in a campaign game I grow familiar with my army, and therefore don’t need to spend two hours at the beginning of every scenario familiarizing myself with the 50 units at my disposal. So campaigns are good for these games in this regard.

One interesting approach here would be to take a page from the roguelike playbook – that’s another genre I’m very fond of, and I never get this sort of frustration in roguelikes. One basic design precept of these games is that there is no saving the game aside from time-transfer of play; if you fail, you begin again. I love this strict design sensibility, it enforces good design habits much better than almost any other conceit you’ll encounter in video games. One of those habits is the fact that in almost any roguelike you’ll care to name the player is never disadvantaged by surviving: you’re almost always better off continuing to play after the most awful set-backs. That’s probably a principle I’d pick for this sort of hex-based wargame campaign mode as well: you don’t want to make the game less fun for the player when he’s doing badly, which is exactly what happens when the player loses his fancy special units and has to regrow them from scratch. It’s a death by thousand cuts, something you never see in a roguelike: in those games the play-state only ever grows more interesting as play progresses, whether you do well or not.

As for how to get that sort of behavior within the framework of a hex-based war game campaign… I’d probably start by having dead units trigger interesting extra stuff. Survivors from the lost battles come back as scarred commanders, to pick a simple example; this way you actually benefit in a backwards manner from bloody losses, which is cool. I’d probably also try for a more ambitious campaign model than these games usually have; I don’t care for the plot that much, I’d rather have macro-level strategic choices than a plot railroad. Or, if plot railroad is mandatory, perhaps it could become more interesting when you lose, rather than just becoming impossible to finish. All sorts of options when you realize where the problem lies.

I just finished adding new games to our Finnish webstore, here. This is something of an annual event for me, as we get new games after Gencon, after which I read the games and write some short descriptions for the site. I usually update the code base of the site at the same time, too, which might take a while when I have other things to worry about as well. Regardless, now I’m done; it seems that all told we have 26 new games in the webstore this year. (In total we have 150 titles in the database, roughly.) I’m thinking that now that I’ve read everything I’ve bought I might make note of some of the more interesting titles here.

Noteworthy new games

The following is not an exclusive list of quality titles, it’s just what strikes me as particularly good in value/price department in this year’s catch. Not all games are even published this year, and not everything published this year is on my list; this is just based on what I’ve decided to retail and managed to get my hands on this time around. The links are to my Finnish-language introductions at the webstore, of course.

• Death Frost Doom is a very refreshing and original D&D adventure that is completely unconcerned with balancing the consequences of the adventure for the campaign world while not getting stuck with pesky realism, either. It’s like playing Russian roulette with Dracula, insofar as the stakes go. The only question in my mind at this point is whether this is a fluke, or if the author should have more of this caliber stuff to offer; one adventure is a bit sparse, after all.
• Misery Bubblegum is very pretty, as befits a game where the designer made the art as well. Furthermore, the game seems totally frank in how it tries to convince us to play stories about teenage romance with a clever and quick cards-based rules-set, stories that take just an hour or two per play. What’s not to like, aside from the horrid way the rules are written?
• MSG™ was a completely unknown thing for me when I encountered it, so I was very positively surprised by the acidic political awareness and cynical way that turned into a darkly humorous, interestingly designed office politics roleplaying game. It’s like if Dilbert worked in a place where your choices actually mattered and caused lifes and deaths in Africa.
• S/lay w/ Me and Trollbabe were basically what Ron Edwards published this year, and I like them both to an unhealthy degree. The slash-monstrosity is so ambitious for its size and simplistic approach that you can’t actually believe that it’ll pull off a full-fledged fantasy story until you try it, while Trollbabe could be the best game text I’ve seen for narrativist adventure gaming so far, procedures and all. Both are very interesting reads even if you don’t care for the genre, which I do.
• Time & Temp is a novel time travel adventure game with quite many original ideas packed into some few pages. The numbers-subgame that controls everything is so clever that I can’t wait to play this thing, especially as the whole purpose of the game seems solidly simulationistic: the GM’s job is pretty much to put up some fun milieu adventure in various historical eras. Easy fun, that.
• World of Near isn’t getting much attention from the Internet, but I still think that it’s a great book. I probably should re-read it just to be sure. We’ll see if anybody in Finland wants it; the last edition of TSoY hasn’t done too well in Finland, all told.

There were other games that were good as well, but the above ones are such that I have little compunction for recommending them to others who are interested in reading and playing games with fresh ideas and solid execution. Some other quality titles disqualify from my list due to their extremely narrow appeal or confusing writing, for example.

I don’t have too many copies of some of these games (MSG™, for instance, was a total speculation purchase, so I just got a couple of copies), so readers of my blog get the first pick of the stuff now, I guess. I’ll write a customer email of some sort this week, once I pretty up the site some more and have Jari double-check the prices.

Today the editor of the Finnish Roleplayer Magazine (Roolipelaaja-lehti) Juhana Pettersson declared that the magazine will end publication, effective immediately. The cited reason was chronic unprofitability – despite the best imaginable attempts, a Finnish-language roleplaying magazine of high production values could not be sustained without incurring constant losses in the operation. Apparently the guys at Riimuahjo (the company behind the mag) consider the hobbyist base in Finland sufficient for a magazine of the kind they made, but for some reason or other not enough people were dedicated enough to subscribe to the magazine.

I think that a couple of words are certainly in order here.

Roolipelaaja started publication around the beginning of 2006, I think. The last issue was its 23rd, making it the second-longest running magazine in the history of Finnish roleplaying. Although the core production team does not discuss financial specifics, it’s widely known that the magazine could never reach an acceptable level of profit – the first publisher of Roolipelaaja, H-Town, abandoned the magazine to its production staff after the first nine issues in 2007, after which the guys continued on their own as an independent magazine.

From the beginning Roolipelaaja was created basically like a fanzine, with the majority of the content coming as contributions from various Finnish roleplaying activists.  The core production staff consisted of our leading clique of southern immersionist larpers (Juhana, Mike Pohjola, Mikki Rautalahti, etc.), but the editorial policy of the magazine was always very even-handed and open-minded; there was constant effort towards not only publishing content interesting to the audience, but also to reporting about roleplaying in an ambitious manner. The strategic goal was the creation of a magazine with such a wide appeal and quality that the great masses of Finnish roleplayers would decide to take up a subscription.

What made Roolipelaaja different from other fanzines were the unprecedented production values: full color from the start, and glossy paper for most of its run. Roolipelaaja was distributed through magazine racks at the beginning, but as H-Town abandoned the magazine, it was left to depend primarily on its subscriber base. I seem to remember that the magazine had around a thousand readers at one point – don’t remember where I got the number, though. Probably Juhana told me or something.

Roolipelaaja as journalism and content

Through its run Roolipelaaja was critiqued in real time by its readership, or at least the most active 20 people. This forum-active readership was strongly slanted towards activists of roleplaying culture and old-timers with plenty of roleplaying experience, which might be why the magazine was so often compared with Magus, the grand old Finnish rpg magazine.

Even more perennial in those discussions, however, was the issue of content. My sense is that everybody was always more than satisfied with the external parameters of Roolipelaaja, but everybody always had their own, differing opinions on the content. Many issues were hashed and rehashed again and again: should computer games or boardgames be involved in the content, should actual gaming material have a more prominent place in the magazine, should the material be more friendly towards newbies and so on and so forth. I find that while the magazine ultimately failed to capture my own interest in a permanent manner, the editing staff did good in balancing the different audiences against the fact that often half of their content consisted of whatever voluntary activists cared to write for the magazine.

Looking back at the magazine I can’t say that it would have included much content of lasting import; this was often my own main feedback on the mag, that it was too focused on lifestyle journalism and not enough on roleplaying. Naturally I remember my own microgames best when it comes to the contents of the magazine, I found those appropriate and interesting content for such. The D&D 3rd edition adventure in one issue was also a high point. The comic + adventure idea series that ran in the magazine towards its end was also good stuff, I’d support a whole book of that stuff most vehemently. Aside from those, Roolipelaaja published many introductory articles on a variety of interesting subjects, such as history of D&D. Nothing that would set my own heart racing, but I could appreciate the quality.

(It’s notable that I almost forgot to mention the product reviews, which were a large part of the contents of the magazine. Although there were individual reviews that had a spark of interest in them, I never was too fond of this part of the magazine; the reviews were too superficial, ignorant and short in the main to work as serious critique, which left them mostly meaningless for me, considering that I could find plenty of superficial data about those games in the Internet.)

Roolipelaaja as a channel of communication

The greatest single success of Roolipelaaja was that it allowed us to talk to each other. In this the attendant forums were as important as the magazine itself, I find – no other Finnish roleplaying media has had such a comprehensive number of the Finnish roleplaying activists represented at one time (except perhaps the sfnet roleplaying newsgroup in its heyday), from so many different schools of thought. The glory of the new magazine attracted even folks who are not very prone to forum participation, such as myself, and the diverse quality of the forums combined with a good spirit made us stay. I can remember a couple of times when I was attacked pretty savagely on those forums for my opinions, but I never considered this a failing of the forum community in whole. In a word, the forthcoming closing of these forums will have considerable effect on our discourse from now on.

Roolipelaaja and I

Ultimately my relationship to Roolipelaaja magazine developed into something of a two-fold thing. On the one hand I could appreciate the approach of the magazine, hoping that it would prosper, but on the other hand I couldn’t stand reading it myself. There was simply too little interesting content from my viewpoint, opening the magazine was always a personal disappointment. I recognize that this is mostly due to my own preferences and position in the hobby field: if I’m already an expert on most of the topics covered by the tabletop articles, skip over the larp stuff and just get my blood pressure high by reading the ignorant reviews section, then it’s pretty obvious that I’m not getting a lot out of the magazine. The staff of the magazine apparently lost my subscription towards the end of the run (I never got the last couple of issues), which I didn’t even care about myself – at that point I’d been subscribing to the magazine as a form of support, mostly.

Roolipelaaja was also a good medium for the publication of certain sorts of things. I never had a major motivation myself for utilizing it for all its worth, which I’m sort of sorry about: I considered writing more game material of different varieties for the magazine, but never got around to doing that.

Why Roolipelaaja failed?

This might come off pompous, so let’s remember that it’s always easier to be smart in hindsight. I can’t criticize Roolipelaaja too harshly anyway, considering that I planned for a similar publication myself early in the decade; it was just in 2005 when we toured the country with Ben Lehman that I garnered enough of a sense for the Finnish rpg scene to abandon my then-current vision of how a rpg magazine should work.

Regardless, the way I see it, Roolipelaaja had these problems:

• As it turned out, the audience of Roolipelaaja did not come to include curious occasional dapplers in roleplaying; insofar as I know, the majority of its audience consisted of committed hardcore roleplayers. Consequently the production quality and lifestyle focus of the magazine were wasted on us, the reading audience – we would have bought the magazine in black and white just as well.
• The journalistic lifestyle content did nothing to provoke buying interest among the core audience. We talked about this often on the forums; there’s no way of knowing, but my own current sensibilities would indicate that a more content-focused magazine would have not only retained higher levels of interest among the playing population, but also improved the long tail marketability of back issues. “More like Magus”, in other words.

Of course those can be summed up much more succintly: the magazine started from the proposition that there is in fact an unitary, committed audience of roleplayers with money to spare on a lifestyle magazine. The experiences of Roolipelaaja, my own Arkenstone Publishing and other recent Finnish rpg publishers flout that presumption in hindsight, of course. Finland has something like 200 committed hardcore rpg enthusiasts who’ll buy stuff for its perceived cultural value and are in the Internet looking for it, and 2000 other folks who buy things they actually want and like when and if they stumble upon it. The rest of the rpg-related markets seem incidental to me – there are things that sell well, but they’re random exceptions from the baseline, often directly explained by a non-hobbyist buying audience.

(For those who don’t know: numerology is a favourite pastime of Finnish roleplaying activists, we’re always calculating and guesstimating the rpg demographics of our country in different ways. The above numbers are based on looking at available sales data, stripping away titles that have sold outside the subculture and roughly averaging the rest. I do not comment here on the “black matter” issue, this being the popular theory of explaining the seeming discrepancy between estimated large number of Finnish roleplayers and their low visibility with secret roleplayers who hide from our divination attempts; those folks aren’t going to be buying anything based on internet hype anyway, so they’re besides the point here, whether they exist or not.)

The Future

I remember well how the scene reacted when Magus ended its publication in the early parts of the decade. I suspect that while we won’t see similar outcry here, one fact remains: while our national roleplaying scene is annoyingly small, it’s just large enough to want and require some sort of mediums of communication. I wouldn’t be surprised if we saw more effort poured at fanzines now that Roolipelaaja is out of the way. It could be that the time of magazines proper is past, considering how nothing stops us from communicating in the Internet, instead. We will see.

I’ve considered writing some sort of sequel for Zombie Cinema for a couple of years now, mostly because I’m personally a bit bored of playing Zombie Cinema and want a bit of variety; it’s a tricky business, considering the number of constraints that I take on in any such design. I’m pretty happy with my latest effort mechanically, it’s just that the game lacks in really functional genre. Here’s how it works:

Components and preparation

The game has a Stakes Board, 40 Chips, a round marker, a die for each player and a playing piece for each player. Would have some sort of chargen oracle as well if I knew what genre the game is supposed to be. Similar components to Zombie Cinema, except that there’s a bunch of chips that are used as a sort of character resource. At the beginning of the game you set aside 10 chips in the Bank and share the rest equally between the players (put any remainder in the Bank). Put one chip from the Bank onto the Stakes Board.

The Stakes Board is used to track the current value of the stakes. I’ve just been piling chips on a specific spot in playtest, but presumably I’ll be doing something with the board once I figure out the genre of the game. The stakes start at 1 chip and go up as the game proceeds.

Conflicts

For the most part the game runs just like Zombie Cinema: players frame scenes in turn, and conflicts are handled using the same dicing mechanics. The big difference is in the narratology: instead of being threatened by outside forces, the player characters are each powerful individuals working at cross-purposes in the plot of the story. They end up in conflict with each other so that only one may remain in the end. Representing this we have the pile of chips each player has: your character is in the game as long as you hold chips, but once you run out, he dies or gets otherwise sidelined as a meaningful actor.

Whenever a conflict is declared between two characters, the procedure is otherwise the same as Zombie Cinema, except that the two parties have to each bid chips equal to the current stakes into the conflict. If a side has multiple participants, they can share the bid by each bidding in part. Any of the participants may raise the stakes before the dice are rolled, in which case the opposing side has to match the raise or forfeit the conflict, losing their bid. Players can go all-in by bidding everything they have, in which case the stakes are set to that level. Essentially similar to poker bidding in logic, this.

The winning side in conflict splits the winnings. In the case of a tie the bid chips go into the Bank, as everybody loses. Just like Zombie Cinema, you get to narrate the scene if your character is played out of the game.

Companions

This is the heart of the game: normally the game would run until only one character remains, but the players can modify this situation at will by having their characters become companions to each other, aligning their interests. The game ends whenever all the remaining characters in play belong in the same company. In other words, your goal in the game is to find out who your character can befriend and who he has to remove from the game.

A player may declare that his character aligns with another at any point by paying chips equal to the stakes into the Bank. Use the playing pieces to represent who’s allied with whom, just move your piece next to the one you want to accompany. The only rules-effect of being companions is that when the two characters have a conflict, the current stakes limit is the upper limit of the stakes instead of the lower; either player may raise the stakes, but if they raise them over the stakes limit, then the companionship is cancelled unless either side immediately forfeits.

(I’m also considering that companions could share chips freely with each other. We’ll see.)

If a character ends up in a conflict with both companions and enemies against him, the stakes have to be exactly equal to the current stakes level; if anybody raises them, the companionship breaks, unless either companion forfeits.

Using the Bank

Chips are leached from the players into the Bank in ties and when they pay for companionship. The players may also get chips back from the Bank by claiming them: whenever a scene ends without a conflict, the characters who participated get to share chips equal to the stakes between them (returning the remainder to the bank). It used to be that you could only do this when your character demonstrated badassitude or character depth etc., but I haven’t been too fond of the critical facets, so right now I’m happy with making the effect automatic. This can’t be done if there are not enough chips in the Bank to match the stakes.

Players whose characters have been removed from the game can use the Bank in conflict to finance the side of community in any conflict, provided that they’ll use their own die to ally on that side as well. “Side of the community” is still a bit vague due to how I don’t know what the genre of this thing is supposed to be, but presumably it’s the one on which the police helicopters would be when and if they get to the scene of conflict.

The rising stakes

The mechanical core idea of the game is that it ends due to the probability swings caused by the increasing minimum stakes, just like a poker tournament. In other words, having the minimum stakes go up ensures that somebody runs out of chips sooner or later.

I’ve tried out various options in regards to when and why the stakes should go up. My current bet in this regard is to have the stakes go up each time chips are claimed from the Bank as well as after each full round. This is essentially a playtest issue, as the math has to be matched to the desired game length. With 40 chips in the game we can roughly assume that the game ends on average when the stakes are around 10 chips high or so. (Pretty complex math in practice, this; better for most to just approximate this stuff.)

When the stakes go up, just move a chip from the Bank onto the stakes board. If there are no chips in the Bank, take the chip from the player with the most chips.

Problem

The above Zombie Cinema variant works pretty well as a mechanical framework, but it sucks ass in narrative terms. As I explain elsewhere, I lack a solid genre for this thing. It looks superficially like it’d create superhero stories of some sort, but that’s not in fact enough – there also needs to be an implicit political/societal issue that polarizes player characters and motivates them into beating the shit out of each other. Wuxia worked well in playtest due to how naturally it ties onto issues of good governance and such; when one player makes his character a mongol conqueror, another makes a peasant rebel and a third makes a loyal bureaucrat, the conflicts are pretty obvious and natural, especially when you remember that everybody at the table is expecting the story content to include plentiful duels.

I could create specific steps of play preparation in which the players choose a milieu and genre and some societal stakes over which their characters will be fighting; that’s probably the easiest way out here, as the game’s structure fits several dozen genres while not being exhaustive towards any of them. Still, I’d like to have one specific genre towards which to fine-tune the game, as I think that’s one of the best things in Zombie Cinema, the specific genre and scenario.

Luckily this isn’t a very serious project for me. The game I really should be working on is Eleanor’s Dream, after all. I’m also not entirely happy with how much the game still runs on character-vs-character conflict, just like Zombie Cinema; I wouldn’t mind figuring out how to do some entirely different sort of structure as well.

I stepped off the plane yesterday. Got a flu of some sort on the return trip, will probably wait for it to clear up before continuing towards the north. Let’s have some notes and impressions on the trip, meanwhile.

Personally most important is that I got my World of Near books, which we’ll mail to pre-orderers this week. IPR also started selling the thing in the USA, here. At this writing it’s the hottest thing in the webshop, we’ll see how long that continues. Apparently you get to be the hottest for a couple of hours on the strengths of just a couple of sales when the product is still young, or something like that.

Gencon itself was largely the same as last year. I liked the booth set-up better this time around, although it might not have been as efficient as a sales environment. The product quality was high, though, and the Ashcan Front is made to go with the Forge booth: we had a very strong line-up of exciting ashcans at the booth, such as People’s Hero, Purgatory Bay, Principia, Black Cadillacs and others that I forget. The finished product featuring at the booth wasn’t bad, either: aside from World of Near we had Trollbabe and S/lay w/me, both of which I’m very fond of, as well as a bunch of other stuff. Sales were not very high all around, and I think I made a loss of something like 500 dollars on the trip all told; depends on what you count into the columns, ultimately.

I was travelling with a couple of Finnish friends, Sami Koponen and Olli Kantola, both of which were reasonable about my eccentricities, such as requiring the use of their luggage to ship World of Near books back to Finland. I hope the trip was and educational experience for them, they got to see Indiana and American geekdom in all their glory.

I got around dozen new titles for my Finnish retail project, too – have to put those up in the webstore at some point one my flu goes away. In general I’ll probably have to invest a couple of days of work on the Finnish and English Arkenstone websites before the month is out. All sorts of annoying updating and outright repair to do there.

Today I updated our English website a bit. You can now order the new book there, for instance. I probably should do some more updating as well this weekend, before leaving for Gencon – for instance, I still don’t have a proper resources section in the Solar System / TSoY pages.

If you’ll look at the website, you can see that I learned a new trick (took most of the time I spent with this thing today, actually). Let’s see if it works on this blog… how tragic, apparently the WordPress software here at WordPress.com censors Javascript. Works at our website, which runs WordPress as well.

Anyway, my trick – which you can wonder at on the website – is collapsible content made with Javascript. This is not the first time I do Javascript, but it’s always a chore – I need it so rarely that I always have to reteach myself when I use it. It took me a while to debug my code and find out that it wasn’t working because of wrong capitalization. That’s the sort of small thing that makes programming a pain in the ass.

It’d be nice to have more time for fine-tuning websites. I like doing web programming, but it tends to take a lot of time. In practice the best website is consequently always the one that takes the least amount of work to keep up to date and functional. I’ll have to do something about our Finnish site, for instance – it’s just too much of a pain in the ass due to my accumulated php solutions and whatnot. Maybe I’ll have time after Gencon.

As I wrote in my last post, there were a multitude of rpg products published at Ropecon. Only one provoked me to play immediately, however. I haven’t more than skimmed most of these products, but I can already tell you which makes the greatest impression to me (aside from my own book, presumably).

“Old School Renaissance” is the name I tend to use for this Internet cultural phenomenon where very old-styled gamers write and discuss their playstyle for the benefit of us young hipsters. (Not to be mixed up with the Finnish “old skool” terminology, incidentally: we tend to use that term for late 80’s style adventure gaming, the kind contemporary with 2nd edition AD&D.) I’ve been doing challengeful adventure gaming for the last 1-2 years now, and sort of flirting with this material. I don’t have any old school friends or anything, but I read blogs from the activists now and then and like what I’m seeing.

Old-school renaissance: for those who aren’t in the know, this is very traditional dungeoneering adventure, and other gaming taking its theoretical cues from it. There are some really culture-hostile people involved, but I also adore the historical sensibilities, cultural knowledge, nuanced D&D mastery and other good qualities of many people involved in this. It’s a joy to read and learn about what those old game texts are even trying to say; it’s very difficult to understand how those dungeons are best utilized for imaginative, exciting challengeful adventure gaming without modern commentaries. I recommend this stuff to everybody interested in new and different ways to roleplay.

Anyway, one of these guys happens to live in Finland: James Raggi from the Lamentations of the Flame Princess lives in Helsinki. I don’t know the guy – I’d noticed his location before from reading his blog, but I didn’t even know what, if anything, he’s actually doing in the scene. It was a pleasurable surprise when Raggi sent a bunch of his works to me as a professional courtesy, to see if I’d be interested in retailing them at our little webstore. I got the booklets at Ropecon, having been invested in my writing work earlier in the summer; they’re garage style fanzine things, perfectly adorable and functional little saddle-stitched booklets. I especially like Death Frost Doom with its detachable cover, with the dungeon map on the inside.

The products themselves include two issues of the community fanzine Green Face Devil and Raggi’s old school epic adventure Death Frost Doom. Both are excellent, challenging works, exactly the sort of thing I’ve wanted to see. I’ve been asking around for a while now for new old school product that I could play, speak about and sell; as I’ve told people, I’m personally convinced that this is a big deal for culturally aware roleplaying, full of valuable insight and new venues – I want to see this knowledge productized, but so far the stuff has proved elusive to find and nobody seems to have an answer when I ask for new stuff approachable to the modern roleplayer; everybody just suggests trawling EBay for old D&D books, which is not what I’m looking for.

But, those products: I can’t use Green Devil Face as is, it’s immensely provocative but I just can’t hack it. I need to write a whole new game (hey, I’m new-school, that’s what we do when we figure things out) just to justify the quirky situations and set-ups, something that involves travel to distant dimensions that include the sort of diabolic, whimsical dungeons the fanzine paints. Completely different from my usual fantasy aesthetics, but clearly, absolutely usable and fresh. Then we have the small dungeon module Death Frost Doom, which sells me immediately with its opposite qualities: the dungeon is completely faithful to the setting and its purpose, caring not at all of mechanical rewards, challenging the group’s old school logistics (provisioning, mapping, risk-evaluation, so on) more than anything else. Its genre is like a crazy mix of Tolkien, heavy metal, Lovecraft and three doses of sword & sorcery; I’m completely in love, and want a whole campaign book of this stuff. The dungeon is full of absolutely insane, epic poetic stuff, like the book of 40,000 sacrificial names (I’m not exaggerating, and insofar as I understand, neither is the module), the sheer number of enemies in the module, numbering in the thousands (not revealing details; this I really don’t want to spoil), the cruel game design, the epic boss monster interaction… mind-blowing.

I know that this is a personal value judgment, but this was the only product that really felt fresh to me; it was the only one (perhaps aside from Itran kaupunki and Ikuisuuden laakso) that I would have bought as a pure civilian gamer, thinking only of my own play. I immediately set up a game on Sunday at Ropecon. We got half-way through the dungeon during our session that lasted until midnight or so. The session consisted mostly of logistics and paranoia, but some treasure was found, curses were triggered, a character died and fun was had. I like being the GM in this sort of game, but am painfully aware of how thick the veil can be, how blind the GM can be to the player experience in this sort of game; the other players confirm, however: the game didn’t have lots of content due to how we didn’t finish the dungeon and bring out the main payouts, but the atmosphere and logistics were enjoyed, and we could imagine playing a whole campaign of this stuff. This one session already established for us an original fantasy setting resembling 17th century North America recently liberated from a crazy aztec empire, with player characters a mix of indian braves and musket-wielding puritans.

(In case anybody cares, I used my own far-evolved D&D set-up for the rules system. This sort of old-school material is trivial to interpret into other rules-sets that share the D&D assumptions.)

Ropecon is the large annual rpg convention here in Finland, with some 3000-4000 visitors each year. I missed it last year due to Gencon scheduling, but this time around I again managed to participate.

Ropecon is the traditional time for Finnish rpg publication, and people usually hold publication lectures for their new products there. Around the beginning of the decade we used to get one new product per year from one or other rpg enthusiast, ranging from garage-creations to mainstream bookstore publications. This year we have something like 6-10 different products published here in Finland, depending on whether I count stuff published outside Ropecon as well; perhaps it’s the indie ethos or some such, but we’re clearly getting more rpg products than we used to.

Ropecon itself went fine from my viewpoint, although I’d like it if people had more time to stop and just talk there. The convention organization has finally accomplished my long-term project: a room specifically dedicated to demos, playtesting and other interaction of game designers coming to the convention. I found that this works very well in practice, not the least because I could just hang in one room for the whole convention and have all the interesting stuff happen right there. I hope very emphatically that this set-up will be retained in the future, with perhaps other designers spending more time on location as well. I met many newbies with questions, and people came there often to ask about designers or products they wanted demos for, which I couldn’t provide because some designers only visited to run their scheduled material.

But, products. These are the new publications I’m aware of:

• There was Itran kaupunki, a translation of the Norwegian rpg Itras By (“The City of Itra”, more or less), designed by Ole Peder Giæver and Martin Bull Gudmundsen, published by the new “Nordic Roleplaying Association”, a Finnish society dedicated to cross-cultural rpg exchange between Finland and other Nordic countries. (I don’t know much about the association’s nature at this point, aside from the fact that it’s spearheaded by the same people who publish the Roolipelaaja rpg magazine, well-known rpg activists all.) I’ve mostly skimmed the game so far; I like the surrealist setting, but haven’t found any rules material yet – I’ve been told that the game has some sort of oracular freeform system. We’ll see.
• Another game published by the aforementioned association was by its chairman Juhana Pettersson, by the name of Ikuisuuden laakso (“Valley of Eternity”). I skimmed most of this as well already, seems like a very specific fantasy setting coupled to simple adventuring rules set. The setting is an impressively low-profile fantasy about a penguin caste society in the Antarctica; the rules seem incoherent, I’ll probably need to examine the material in depth to figure out how the game works. My first impression is that it tries to be a simple introductory adventure game, but I don’t know how the setting plays to that.
• E.N.O.C. is a new game by Miska Fredman, the erstwhile creator of Heimot, one of the more ambitious roleplaying games in Finland through this decade. I’ve still to read the game in detail, but the purpose seems to be to provide a compact traditional adventure scenario with quick rules all in one place; Miska calls this the “ready to play” concept. From what I’ve heard the game seems to lose my friends with the encumbrance rules and such, but I’ll have to look at it myself to judge.
• Hounds of the Sea is a light, oracular pirate storytelling game from Jukka Sorsa and Ville Takanen, two Finnish rpg hobbyists. The rules are available on their website, the game itself consists mostly of a deck of cards. Very compact and nice-looking, I just fear that the guys don’t have enough distribution muscle for their large print run. I’ve read the game and can pretty much see how it plays; this might be the mechanically most robust design from this Ropecon, although it might suffer from oracular exhaustion at this point: we’ve had many similar games both here and internationally through the last couple of years. I’d have liked to sell the game at Gencon this year, as it’s published in English; maybe next year.
• Efemeros #2 is the second issue of a journal headed by Sami Koponen. The last issue was a strongly Forgey thing with theory articles, while this one is a supplement for the most popular Finnish rpg ever, Praedor. The distribution model is very modest and feasible (insofar as Sami remains happy with his limited audience), and the product has already been judged excellent by most authorities; Efemeros might be the product with the most punch out of this lot, albeit with extremely narrow appeal.
• I also got a look at not one, but several, product ashcans at Ropecon! The pirate guys above are creating a fantasy game, the good ol’ Witch Court is already at ashcan stage and there are not one, but two small companies pushing out boardgame releases here. Also, Glorantha people are considering a translation of the new Heroquest while also preparing a new issue of Zin Letters, their zine – major activity all around.
• What else, what else… other things published this year in Finland include at least Aulos by Karoliina Korppoo, a minor game created as a part of her diploma work; Death Frost Doom (and other publications) by James Raggi, an immigrant old school gamer; my own World of Near, which will technically be revealed at Gencon, but legally published in Finland. Then there is the Finnish rpg magazine Roolipelaaja, still coming out regularly even if I don’t get it anymore for some reason. And I’m probably forgetting something or other here.

As can be seen, the Finnish rpg publishing scene is going through quite a renaissance here! I expect that most of these products will be frustrated by our small markets, leading to stagnated sales and little feedback; I urge the designers to look for international contacts and start preparing their translations; a well-made game is too good of a thing at this day and age to not make it available internationally. If it’s what it takes, I’ll personally reserve a Gencon booth for y’all for next year. If any logistical advice is required, I’m at your disposal.

(The above doesn’t quite go for those of you who want to seriously try to crack the Finnish mainstream distro, which I sort of smell from some of these products. It’s a fine endeavour, and one I would consider myself with the right product. Let me know if you need help with ideas or execution.)

Also, I need to write a separate post about our play experiences at Ropecon. It’ll follow soon after this one.