In games, there’s a balance to be struck between realism and heroism. If the setting is too realistic, too much like the players don’t play a significant enough role, the game will feel pointless, with a lack of agency on the part of the players. If the setting is too unrealistic and caters to the players too much, it will feel contrived, like the world is just a set of facades without anything real behind them.

In a similar vein, agency is important. If your players have too much agency, they can run roughshod over anything you present, wandering the world and acting to their whims like callous, self-absorbed gods. If the world punishes them too harshly for any transgressions, the game can feel like a prison, where they must walk certain paths at certain times or get the lash.

I’m going to talk a bit more explicitly about tabletop games, but the kinds of things I’m describing can apply to other kinds of games as well.

Despite not ever running punishing, punitive games, I have a reputation among my players of setting up extremely worrying campaigns with a low margin for error. I chalk this up to me leaving a lot to my players’ imaginations, rather than being explicit about what’s going on. It’s the difference between saying “there aren’t any traps here” and “you detect no traps”. I take very detailed notes on the actions of my players in any given session, so that I know what information to present in later sessions. I drop a variety of vague hints as we play, but I like to leave it to my players to ask the right questions to accomplish their goals. This leaves me open to answer questions I didn’t anticipate and open up new paths, rather than proscriptively deciding how a puzzle or problem is to be solved before starting.

Much like improv theatre, it’s best to think of things in terms of “yes, and” rather than “no, but”. To use an example from a recent game session: the (Shadowrun) party is presented with a place to break into in order to spy on a pair of corporate executives who have been making their lives difficult. It’s a private casino that’s surprisingly inaccessible. The very first question I’m asked is “how do we get invitations?” This leads down an interesting path, where instead of a stealthy break-in, the team is looking at waltzing in like they belong. It’s a perfectly legitimate option, and there’s no reason they can’t make this sort of plan. What happens once they’re inside is going to be interesting, but it’s not an inherently flawed idea. The mission has just changed from a stealthy break-in to an elaborate masquerade.

I’ve had people comment to me that I’m extremely flexible when running games and never seem to be caught off-guard when my players take a random turn towards something bizarre. There’s a trick to this that I’ve used for years, that’s also how I keep my worlds feeling like worlds and not facades.

Behind the scenes, there are events that are playing out, based on a script. Mostly these aren’t things the players can influence, because they’re too detached from what the players are doing. Each session, every quest, mission, dungeon, and break-in yields more information about these events that are occurring out of sight. These aren’t the plans of the main villain of the campaign (if there even is one), they’re what’s going on in the broader world. There’s (rarely) any direct, earthshattering consequence to ignoring them, but they serve as my adventure hooks. Many are ignored, and the wheels continue turning in the background. Sometimes one comes to the fore, and the players can get ahead of it and start influencing the events either as they’re happening or before they occur.

The important thing here is that they don’t necessarily relate to the players. A lot of the loops resolve themselves without the players getting involved, and the world changes, and they may or may not notice. Sometimes they decide they have opinions about the world changing and do something to either hasten or stop the change.

It’s a trick I learned from reading Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series, which I still consider to be some of the finest longform worldbuilding out there. Over the course of the series, the Discworld changes significantly, and a lot of the changes have enormous repercussions, but aren’t necessarily traumatic. A lot of times, a game will only have one or two single, major events affecting the status quo, and those are the only things making any noticeable impact on the world. I prefer my games to feel like worlds in which the players are a part, but not the center of things (until they force themselves into center stage). Events and changes constantly occur, but aren’t necessarily directly threatening to the players. It lets my NPCs have lives and motivations outside of how they interact with the players that are more than just a prewritten text block, and can change over the course of the game without breaking things.

Above all, keep the world changing. Most of the games I’ve had that have petered out have done so largely because I finish a story arc and don’t have anything to follow it up with, and I haven’t made enough rolling changes to the world to introduce something new without it feeling contrived.

I get exposed to a lot of media, and I’m continually finding new stuff that I never thought I’d like, but turns out to be great. There’s very little that excites me like finding something awesome when I expected nothing at all, and a lot of it is because I have people very carefully introduce me to new stuff.

Very little turns me off of seeing something quicker than “OMG you HAVE to see/play/experience X, it’s about this and that and it’s totally up your alley and it’s AWESOME, you gotta watch it”. Possibly it’s me being obstinate, possibly it’s my desire to explore and find new things on my own getting in the way, but a lot of it is the weight of expectation that I must watch this thing and must love it. I’m familiar with a lot of media, and I see a lot of it from a lot of different people– it’s very, very rare that something grabs me enough to warrant capital letters.

Similarly, when I do gush about things, I tend to watch other people shut down– the same thing at work, I suspect. As a result, I try not to gush at people, unless I already know they’re into what I’m talking about or I already know it’s a lost cause and I just need to get the gushing out.

Instead, I try to curate my recommendations to people. There are a lot of things that I like that I don’t recommend to others unless directly asked, because I don’t really feel like people are likely to enjoy something just because I like it. I do keep an eye on a lot of media that I don’t personally consume, though, because other people I know might enjoy them. I’ve recommended games and TV shows that I’ve never played or seen to people.

The key, for me, is to keep mental notes of all the media I think someone would like, even if I’m not interested in it myself. It’s not just about picking things in the same genre, it’s about drilling down into the core and thinking about why someone likes the things they do and how some experience might meet that. When I suggest things, I bring that into the description– “if you liked Mark of the Ninja, you might like the new Assassin’s Creed: Chronicles game”.

As an example, I suspected Bel would really like Shadows of Mordor, despite his general disinterest in the Assassin’s Creed series, because it’s more about stabbing orcs and combat than the sneaky politics of AC. Very similar games, very similar styles and gameplay, but Shadows of Mordor hits the right buttons. I was right, Bel enjoyed SoM rather more than I did.

It’s not always perfect. I have to know what I’m recommending better than I sometimes do. I suggested Warmachine to Kodra at one point, because I felt like it was a highly strategic “deckbuilding” style of game with a heavy emphasis on synergy and building engines to move forward and accomplish goals. What I didn’t consider was that Kodra likes building engines that get the chance to work properly, and that Warmachine is a game about trying to build your own engine while stopping your opponent from building theirs– meaning most of the time (read: in games that aren’t one-sided) you don’t get to see your engine functioning as it ought to.

One of the other things I try to do is undersell things and stay vague unless asked about whatever I’m recommending. I usually say something like “oh, I heard about X, you might think it’s interesting” and leave any further research up to the person I’m talking to. There are some psychological reasons for this relating to mental investment, but it boils down to “if you’re not interested enough after the first sentence or two to do a quick search, you’re probably not going to be interested by me telling you more about it”. Underselling is also important for me– more “you might like this” and less “THIS IS AWESOME YOU HAVE TO SEE IT”. I try to use phrases like “it’s worth checking out” over “you should/need to see this” because I think of it more like setting something down on a table for later perusal than pushing something into someone’s hands.

Very rarely do I see someone gush about something and have someone else pick it up and have the same reaction. It happens, but it’s rare, and it’s often disappointing for the gusher. By reining it in, I find that people are a lot more likely to check out stuff I think they might like, especially if they don’t feel like I’m breathing down their necks about it. It’s also much less impactful when a friend tries something I love and hates it– I’m a lot more likely to get an honest discussion than a “um it was cool I guess” reaction if they don’t feel obligated to be excited about it just because I am.

My current recommendation is Hero Emblems. It’s an iOS puzzle RPG without microtransactions, just a one-time-purchase. If you like puzzle quest or similar bejeweled-alike RPGs, you might like it. The translation is hilariously awful, but the game is fun.

I really, really loved The Secret World for a long time. My close group and I blasted through that game together, loving every second as we worked our way up through the areas and got new, better skills. I’m still of the opinion that some of the best atmosphere and best storytelling (covering the entire spectrum of ways to tell a story) can be found in TSW.

I stopped playing in an abject, frothing ragequit. Today I’d like to talk about degenerative strategy.

When playing a game, especially a complex one, you make decisions. Broadly speaking, the decisions you make in the moment– where and when to move, when to attack, what spells to cast and when– those are tactics. The decisions you make in the planning phase– what movement abilities you’re using, what weapons you have equipped, what spells you have prepared– those are strategy. This is something of a simplification, but it’s not terribly inaccurate, either.

When I played TSW, I focused heavily on the Blood Magic healing tree, and was my party’s healer. Through most of the dungeons, I used blood magic to keep the group alive and continued investing in the tree. Thematically, it was a great choice, and one I enjoyed a lot. As we reached more and more difficult content, notably the hard-mode dungeons at the endgame, I found myself brutally struggling to keep up and keep everyone alive. It became stressful, and I started to get burned out.

At the same time, some of my group was starting to feel like their choices (particularly: to play melee) were getting unduly punished in the higher-end content. At one point, Kodra, having saved up some unused skill points, dumped a handful into the Claws healing tree, a different healing tree that I previously hadn’t touched, because it wasn’t really the theme I wanted.

Instantly, he was a better healer than I was. With less than a tenth of the investment I’d put into my strategy and no practice, he’d exceeded the capabilities I’d honed over my character’s entire progression. The choice for me became clear: play a Claws-based healer, or don’t heal. Blood Magic was simply not good enough. I took a third path: quit the game in disgust. I had invested a lot into the theme of the character, putting together a specific look and an entire concept based around being a blood mage. The endgame for TSW wasn’t worth sacrificing that to use a strategy I didn’t enjoy.

I refer to that as an example of a degenerative strategy. A degenerative strategy is a strategy that, for one reason or another, limits the effective choices you can make. You are either playing that strategy, a strategy that can directly counter that strategy, or you are losing. It’s degenerative if other choices exist, but are so far behind in effectiveness that they are no longer competitive options. As players discover the strategy, the viable options for the playerbase as a whole diminish; the strategic playing field degenerates into a small number of “correct” choices and a rather larger number of bad choices.

World of Warcraft’s old talent tree system created degenerative strategies. There was at least one “correct” build for every class, and even when there were multiple build options in a given class, the actual distribution of talent points in that build had an incredibly small amount of variance. If you were playing optimally, and had a build that allowed you to choose which set of talents you wanted, it was because you only needed to spend points in that tier and the actual distribution didn’t matter, generally because none of the talents were any good.

If there is a “right” way to play that excessively limits other options that appear on the surface to be viable, that is a sign of a degenerative strategy. If there is only one correct choice, there shouldn’t be a choice. It’s really important to note that this doesn’t mean that every choice you can make in a game has to be viable, if the game design itself isn’t trying to support that choice. As an example, in FFXIV, you cannot functionally form a group that lacks a tank, a healer, and some DPS in content that is relevant to you (if you far exceed the intended power level of the content, you can largely do whatever you like). This is a design choice, and it’s reinforced at every stage of the game. It’s not a degenerative strategy because the game doesn’t suggest that any other choices are intended or supported.

On the other hand, claw-based healing in TSW was a degenerative strategy, because it was so much better than the other healing trees that (at the time) there was no other viable option. As your understanding and skill at the game increased, and you sought to play as best you possibly could, you would have to move away from options like blood magic in order to play the more powerful, more effective, and thus more optimal claws build. Blood magic still *appeared* to be a supported option, but in practice it wasn’t effective and was, in essence, a “trap” build.

Game balance is a touchy thing, and is honestly not as relevant as people might expect. It’s less important that everything be equally balanced against one another and more important that degenerative strategies don’t exist. Certain games offer options that are very high-risk, high-reward, where a high degree of skill lets you outperform other options, but low-skill players will lag significantly behind less risky options. Perfectly optimal play would suggest that everyone should play the high-risk high-reward options, but in reality this isn’t that necessary, because balance is achieved through the demands of player skill.

When players get upset about game balance, it’s often paired with a claim that “everyone should just play X”, which is an implied suggestion that X is a degenerative strategy. Most of the time, this isn’t the case, but it’s very important that a game designer keep an eye out to see if a particular strategy is degenerative or not. It’s usually important to leave the strategy in place for a certain amount of time to see if it actually *is* degenerative– it takes time for the strategic geography of the game to degenerate, and a strategy with a functional, accessible counter is not degenerative.

In general, a good way to determine if a game is struggling with degenerative strategies is to look at how the game is played at the highest tiers of play– the most competitive, most optimal players– and see if there is a downward spread of those players’ choices to lower tiers of play over time; essentially, is the strategy causing degeneration in the game? If the highest tiers of players are making the same (small number) of choices out of a (much larger) selection, it’s a good indicator of a degenerative strategy.

Frost Mages, waaaaaaaay over to the left.

Fixing this problem is difficult. A direct nerf (reduction in power/effectiveness) of the degenerative strategy isn’t necessarily the way to go. If Claws had been nerfed to the functional level of Blood Magic, it would have been impossibly punishing to heal at the higher tiers of content in TSW. Sometimes, bringing the noncompetitive options up to par with the degenerative strategy evens the playing field and stabilizes the available strategies. Sometimes, introducing a new element to the game that shakes up the geography simply by existing can shake loose degenerative strategies and stabilize things.

One of the places I’ve seen this done very elegantly is in League of Legends. Oftentimes, a new champion will also bring other, older and less-used champions to the fore. The new champion may work very well with the older champions, or the older champions may be a strong counter to the new champion that is otherwise very powerful. The new champion may simply be very good at shutting down the existing dominant strategies, forcing new ones to be formed. It’s not a perfect process by any means, but it’s a very elegant one.

The main thing to remember is that fixing degenerative strategies is EXTREMELY difficult, and is a slow process. Discovering and refining a degenerative strategy takes time, and allowing it to take root and then watching to see if acceptable counter-strategies arise takes even more time. Since the changes required to fix the issue are generally not subtle, it’s important to be sure to collect enough information to correct it properly. Sometimes this is easy. Sometimes it is very, very hard. Games have rewritten their entire ruleset, sometimes multiple times, just to hammer out degenerative strategies.

I normally write these entries relatively late at night, as a way of processing my thoughts about each day, then schedule them to post early in the morning the following day.

Today, as a bit of a departure, I wanted to try writing a post in the afternoon, to see how it changed my outlook.

I’m a big fan of breaking from habit and trying different approaches to things, because I feel like it’s very easy to get into a rut and just do the same thing over and over again. I like to think that continually breaking the habits I fall into lets me reform them in ways that work better for me, and keeps me aware of the various mental loops I sometimes get stuck in.

It’s been suggested to me that my anti-habit mindset is indicative of discontent– that I try to change things because I’m not happy with how they are. I don’t necessarily think that’s wrong, and I think that analyzing my own habits as well as how and why they form lets me find out what I’m unhappy about and why.

I read the above book recently, and found the first section of it extremely interesting. It talks about how we form habits and how we can change them.

This blog itself is me attempting to rewire my own habits– I’m notoriously bad about doing anything on a daily basis (see above, about me being anti-habit), and I used the book’s concepts and suggestions to flip around my own habits so that I could start blogging five days a week.

It’s been an interesting ride thus far; I’ve blogged every day for about a month and I’ve found it relatively easy to do. I have missed some days, but I generally find I have something to say each day.

I will say that I don’t think I’ll be writing and posting at this time in the afternoon in future– my thoughts are scattered and I’m a little too distracted by the lovely day outside. Something about it being dark outside focuses me and helps me hone in on a topic, whereas I feel like this post is a little all over the place (certainly my mind is).

Late post today, sorry. I was up late diagnosing issues with the site, only to find out (around 4am my time, when Ash got up and helped out) I couldn’t actually do anything. Alas.

Searching for help in resolving a particular error was interesting, and paired with some other conversations I had earlier inspired today’s post. In searching for tips online, I had to filter through multiple pages giving tips like “repair the DB” and “try to resolve localhost”, without any indication whatsoever about what those actually mean. In my extremely-late-night mind fog, I was having trouble remembering how to do those things, and it got me thinking about how the language (and lack of details) was getting in my way.

A professor of mine once described jargon as “a shorthand language used to create haves and have-nots”, and separated it from professional shorthand while noting that the two look very similar. Jargon is useful when time-to-communicate is a valuable factor, but this is surprisingly rare. We’re in love with efficiency of communication, but I’ve commented before that we have a very reductive culture surrounding it, and I think that we often think we’re making communication faster and more efficient when what we’re actually doing is denying access to anyone who isn’t as in-the-loop as we are.

What I find interesting is what happens when two different types of jargon collide. I’ve spent a lot of time around highly technical people, and the idea of impenetrable technical jargon among engineers is pretty well known. What I’ve been discovering lately, as I delve deeper into business, is the jargon that exists in the business world, that’s every bit as complicated and detailed as the technical jargon.

If you’re reading this, you’re probably looking at the above image and alternately laughing or rolling your eyes. What’s really interesting to me is that every single one of these terms is functional, useful business shorthand that often gets used to exclude non-business types, in the exact same way technical jargon is. It’s used and misused in all of the same ways, and from the other side, the use of highly technical jargon gets the same not-always-so-gentle mockery as “business-speak” does.

What I wonder about is how the functionality of the two different types of jargon interact. One is operating on a (mostly) macro level, another is (mostly) operating on a micro level. An engineer can, after several minutes of someone being unable to process the language being used, just push their audience aside and say “look, let me just do it”. The same is not true in business, generally speaking– the jargon is used as shorthand for very large, slow processes and in many cases are more about applied psychology than technical skill– something that many people like to think they’re immune to and will resist as a matter of course if they see it in action.

One of the things I’ve been trying to do in my own communication is to be very precise with my choice of words, avoiding both technical and business jargon unless it’s precisely applicable and I know the person I’m talking to is aware of what I mean. It’s a surprisingly difficult thing to do, because the coded languages we use get very deeply ingrained.

I hope you’ll forgive me if I talk a bit about current events. I used to live in and around Baltimore, so seeing places I know and used to hang out at in the news is somewhat poignant. No pictures today, there is little I want to do less than look for context-appropriate images for this post.

I really, really wish Baltimore had been a surprise. I think the only uncertain thing is the specific location. The messaging has been around for, at the very least, about a year, since Ferguson, and it’s painfully apparent that lessons have not been learned. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about and evaluating my feelings on the series of situations, and honestly my takeaway is that they’re complicated. This isn’t a shock to me– it’s a whole bunch of people and people are complicated.

What bothers me is that the conversations that are bubbling up are following the same trends as before. They make an attempt to simplify the situation into a word, a phrase, a tweet, or a one-liner, paired with a single, still image if possible. We have evolved a communications culture that values pithy lines and simple, straightforward messages delivered precisely and at high speed, and in that we struggle with issues that aren’t so easily boiled down.

I’m also put in mind of this article, which I thought was excellent. In essence, it points out that we conflate “happy” with “good”, such that if something makes us happy, it must follow that that thing is good, and if something makes us unhappy, it must not be good.

Games put this in stark relief, even the most cursory look at games forums will make that apparent, but games have no monopoly on the concept. People like to think of *themselves* as good, and therefore if they’re happy, things must be good, because if things weren’t good, then they wouldn’t be happy. If someone else is unhappy, they must be doing something incorrectly. This filters down to every level. I’ve heard myself wondering what I’m doing wrong so as not to be happy, and becoming uncertain about my own life choices — my own “goodness” — as a result. When I’m happy, and someone points out that things are wrong, my immediate instinct is to rationalize them– I’m happy, so things must be okay, somehow. My mind will flail at any thread to find that rationalization. Similarly, if I’m not happy, but my situation is objectively “good”, I find myself trying to rationalize to myself why I should be happy. Happy = good, and it’s really deeply ingrained.

We see both things in Baltimore. The quick, not-whole-picture snippets that make for one-liners and tweets and one-word descriptions of feelings reduce the situation into rationalizable chunks. I’ve seen a lot of people post the same pictures, latching onto one image or another as support for their viewpoint. Others try to take a middle ground between the two. The reality is that there is a lot going on, and that there are human beings involved at every point. Human beings are incredibly complicated; there’s not some line of Good People and Evil People, or even Mostly Good or Mostly Evil. We like to think of ourselves as good, but we all do or contribute to terrible things… but the terrible things we do don’t wipe away the good we do, either.

Further complicating things is that we all have different worldviews– often not just a little bit, either. I think of couples where one person likes, say, nachos and the other doesn’t, and the delicate struggles and occasional arguments that arise from just that one little difference in worldview. At the point at which one person looks at a thing and fears for their life, and another person does not, that gap is immense, but importantly, those two vastly different worldviews are no less valid. It’s cliché at this point (but no less true) to say that everyone involved is a human being, but more importantly, I think, is understanding that different people see the world in often extremely different ways, with sometimes no overlap.

We understand that at some level when we think about people far away from us– “it’s so different there, of course they’d see the world differently”, but it’s a lot harder when they’re walking the same streets and going into the same stores and living apparently very similar lives to ours. I’ve been trying to clearly understand my own worldview, understand how and why I think and feel things the way I do, and try not to take it all for granted. I think that if I can manage to grok my own perspective and recognize it as my own personal one and not the default, I’ll be better equipped to understand other people’s, including ones that are totally different from mine.

Maybe once I can do that I can get closer to figuring out how we can collectively stop clashes like Ferguson, or Baltimore, or Gamergate.

This weekend I played in my first tournament in my new local scene, which was awesome and a great way to ring in the new edition of Infinity.

I’ve had some strong opinions about ITS listbuilding in the past (even wrote a tactica on it), as well as which factions/sectorials are competitive in the format. For my first ITS 2015 tournament, I wanted to intentionally break a number of my own rules, as well as bringing a sectorial that I’ve had some unkind things to say about in the past as far as ITS viability. New city, new season, new sectorial.

The tournament scenarios were Annihilation, Lifeblood, and Transmission Matrix, and I brought the Imperial Service. In N2, I felt like cheap, easy Kuang Shi wasn’t worth the lack of good specialists, expensive playmaking troops, and overall jankiness in listbuilding– vanilla YJ was more versatile and there was little reason to go for ISS. I also insisted on using models that I’d particularly disliked in N2, some of which are noticably different in N3– the Pheasant, the Crane, the Bao, and the Wu Ming.

Without further ado, my lists:

Imperial Service

Group 110 0 2

WÚ MÍNG HMG / Pistol, Knife. (2 | 39)

WÚ MÍNG Combi Rifle, Light Rocket Launcher / Pistol, Knife. (1 | 37)

WÚ MÍNG (Forward Observer) Boarding Shotgun / Pistol, Knife. (31)

WÚ MÍNG (Forward Observer) Boarding Shotgun / Pistol, Knife. (31)

WÚ MÍNG Boarding Shotgun + 1 TinBot B (Deflector L2) / Pistol, Knife. (0.5 | 33)

SUN TZE Lieutenant (Advanced Command) MULTI Rifle, 2 Nanopulsers, Flash Pulse / Pistol, Knife. (65)

KUANG SHI Chain Rifle / Pistol, Knife. (5)

KUANG SHI Chain Rifle / Pistol, Knife. (5)

NINJA Hacker (Assault Hacking Device) Combi Rifle / Pistol, Shock CCW, Knife. (0.5 | 40)

CELESTIAL GUARD (Kuang Shi Control Device) Combi Rifle + Light Smoke Grenade Launcher / Pistol, Knife. (0.5 |13)

Imperial Service

──────────────────────────────────────────────────

Group 110 0 1

IMPERIAL AGENT (Chain of Command, X Visor) Boarding Shotgun / Pistol, Monofilament CCW. (35)

CELESTIAL GUARD Combi Rifle / Pistol, Knife. (13)

CELESTIAL GUARD (Kuang Shi Control Device) Combi Rifle + Light Smoke Grenade Launcher / Pistol, Knife. (0.5 |13)

KUANG SHI Chain Rifle / Pistol, Knife. (5)

SOPHOTECT Combi Rifle, D-Charges / Pistol, Knife. (31)

YUDBOT Electric Pulse. (3)

HSIEN Lieutenant HMG, Nanopulser / Pistol, AP CCW. (2 | 61)

IMPERIAL AGENT Hacker (Assault Hacking Device) MULTI Rifle, 2 Nanopulsers / Pistol, DA CCW. (0.5 | 51)

BÀO TROOP MULTI Sniper Rifle / Pistol, Knife. (1.5 | 30)

BÀO TROOP MULTI Sniper Rifle / Pistol, Knife. (1.5 | 30)

BÀO TROOP (X Visor) Boarding Shotgun, Contender / Pistol, Knife. (28)

6 SWC | 300 Points

Open with Army 5

Bao, Crane, Pheasant, it’s everything I expected not to like. The Hsien HMG Lt was there because I tend to play very defensive, hidden Lts and I wanted to force myself to play something a bit more aggressive.

Neither list is more than 10 orders, and I was very light on the Kuang Shi. Both lists are focused on bringing things that only ISS can bring. Here’s how it went.

Game 1: Annihilation

My opponent was JSA, something that concerned me somewhat right away. I put a lot of stock in JSA as a competitive ITS faction, and a Keisotsu link can seriously threaten anything I had.

Furthermore, the table was a (fantastically gorgeous) cityscape, with multiple highly accessible levels and catwalks everywhere connecting things.

I pulled Telemetry (succeed at a Forward Observer roll) and Data Scan (use a Hacker to tag an enemy model) as my classified objectives, opt into the Wu Ming/Sun Tze list, and won the initiative roll, choosing to take first turn. My opponent took a slightly more advantageous side of the table with better sight lines and I deployed first.

I placed the Wu Ming link front and center, putting half the team on the bottom level and the LRL and one of the Observers up top, prone. Sun Tze went way off to one side, away from the bulk of my forces, with a Kuang Shi nearby to watch the approaches to him. The Celestial Guard went prone on top of a building, blocked by a much taller building, leaving plenty of space for her to drop smoke. I held back one of the Kuang Shi and my Ninja.

He deployed a full Keisotsu link on a rooftop, mostly prone, with a Missile Launcher pointed directly at my Wu Ming — problematic. He also dropped multiple extra Keisotsu, making it easy to refresh that link. More problematic. He also dropped a trio of Karakuri– unlinked but easily linkable. An engineer, sensor bot, EVO Repeater, and cheap repeaterbot all drop next, in hugely inaccessible locations. Rounding everything out was a Smart Missile bot. All told, it looked roughly like this:

Japanese Sectorial Army

Group 19 0 0

KEISOTSU Combi Rifle / Pistol, Knife. (9)

KEISOTSU Combi Rifle / Pistol, Knife. (9)

KEISOTSU (Forward Observer) Combi Rifle / Pistol, Knife. (10)

KEISOTSU (Forward Observer) Combi Rifle / Pistol, Knife. (10)

KEISOTSU Missile Launcher / Pistol, Knife. (1.5 | 14)

KEISOTSU Combi Rifle / Pistol, Knife. (9)

KARAKURI Combi Rifle, Chain Rifle, D.E.P. / Pistol, Knife. (35)

KARAKURI Mk12, Chain Rifle, D.E.P. / Pistol, Knife. (40)

KARAKURI Heavy Shotgun, Chain Rifle, D.E.P. / Pistol, Knife. (35)

Group 26 0 0

KEISOTSU Hacker (Hacking Device) Combi Rifle / Pistol, Knife. (0.5 | 17)

TOKUSETSU KOHEI Engineer Combi Rifle, D-Charges / Pistol, Knife. (14)

CHAĪYÌ Yaókòng Flash Pulse, Sniffer / Electric Pulse. (8)

WÈIBĪNG Yaókòng Combi Rifle, Sniffer / Electric Pulse. (16)

SON-BAE Yaókòng Smart Missile Launcher / Electric Pulse. (1.5 | 18)

PANGGULING (EVO Repeater) Electric Pulse. (0.5 | 13)

Imperial Service

Group 19 0 0

CELESTIAL GUARD MULTI Sniper Rifle / Pistol, Knife. (1.5 | 21)

CELESTIAL GUARD Boarding Shotgun / Pistol, Knife. (12)

CELESTIAL GUARD Boarding Shotgun / Pistol, Knife. (12)

CELESTIAL GUARD Hacker (Hacking Device) Combi Rifle / Pistol, Knife. (0.5 | 21)

CELESTIAL GUARD (Kuang Shi Control Device) Combi Rifle + Light Smoke Grenade Launcher / Pistol, Knife. (0.5 |13)

LÙ DUĀN Mk12, Heavy Flamethrower / Electric Pulse. (22)

RUI SHI Spitfire / Electric Pulse. (1 | 21)

SUN TZE Lieutenant (Advanced Command) MULTI Rifle, 2 Nanopulsers, Flash Pulse / Pistol, Knife. (65)

CELESTIAL GUARD Boarding Shotgun / Pistol, Knife. (12)

Morat Aggression Force

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Group 19 1 5

MORAT Hacker (EI Hacking Device) Combi Rifle / Pistol, Knife. (0.5 | 22)

DĀTURAZI Combi Rifle + Smoke Light Grenade Launcher / Pistol, Shock CCW. (0.5 | 21)

DĀTURAZI Chain Rifle, Grenades, Smoke Grenades / Pistol, AP CCW. (14)

DĀTURAZI Chain Rifle, Grenades, Smoke Grenades / Pistol, AP CCW. (14)

DĀTURAZI Chain Rifle, Grenades, Smoke Grenades / Pistol, AP CCW. (14)

ZERAT Combi Rifle + Light Flamethrower, Antipersonnel Mines / Pistol, Knife. (21)

ZERAT Combi Rifle + Light Flamethrower, Antipersonnel Mines / Pistol, Knife. (21)

T-DRONE Smart Missile Launcher / Electric Pulse. (1.5 | 18)

GAKI AP CCW. (4)

RASYAT (Martial Arts L3) Boarding Shotgun, D-Charges, Zero-V Smoke Grenades / Pistol, DA CCW. (28)

Group 25 0 0

MORAT Hacker (EI Hacking Device) Combi Rifle / Pistol, Knife. (0.5 | 22)

RODOK HMG / Pistol, Knife. (1.5 | 27)

RODOK HMG / Pistol, Knife. (1.5 | 27)

RODOK Paramedic (MediKit) Boarding Shotgun, Antipersonnel Mines / Pistol, Knife. (21)

RODOK Lieutenant Combi Rifle, 2 Light Shotguns / Pistol, Knife. (26)

6 SWC | 300 Points

Open with Army 5

I don’t really know Morats very well, so I see two potential links, the Daturazi starting in a link, and a pretty widely divided order pool.

I deploy very carefully, securing one antenna with the two Celestial Guard and putting the Sophotect in position to claim the other. The Hsien and Crane are carefully positioned in the thin strip between the two hacking areas of the antennae. There’s a huge wall as part of a building along the halfway point, with the antenna just inside. My plan is to get my troops to contest that middle one, hold my two, and keep things clear.

Round 1:

My opponent’s Gaki moves up, as one does, and he moves his Daturazi forward to get better positioning. I can see one with a Bao sniper, so shoot and drop it through the dodge. Next, he swaps the link to the Rodoks and jumps one up to get into an HMG battle with my Bao link. The Bao stay frosty and drop the Rodok with a well-placed shot. The Rodok paramedic starts jumping, however, to revive the fallen Rodok, succeeds on the second try, and a second sniper-vs-HMG battle ensues. This time, the Bao hits twice and puts one of the Rodok HMGs down for good, straight to dead.

A Zerat moves forward to threaten the Sophotect, and I completely miss that I have a shot at her with the Bao sniper through a window. However, as she opens fire with the Zerat, the Sophotect manages to answer with a crit on an 8, dropping the Zerat quite effectively. My opponent goes to move in with the second Zerat, but this time I’m paying attention and he can’t safely move forward without taking sniper fire, so he hangs tight. A number of models reposition, but I can’t see any of them. He reforms the link with the Daturazi.

On my turn, the Kuang Shi moves forward, then a coordinated order with the Crane, Hsien, and Sophotect puts them all further up the board, with the Sophotect contesting an antenna. I’m not careful enough with the Hsien, and he gets immobilized. I carefully scoot the Crane up to get in range to Data Scan a Rodok through the wall and manage to succeed. He then moves to within 4″ of the antenna and is promptly hacked and immobilized. I swing around with the Kuang Shi and start chain rifling Rodoks. A few dodges are attempted, but I’m able to drop the combi Rodok, leaving the center antenna uncontested. I score two points in the first round..

Round 2:

My opponent swings the Gaki around towards the Kuang Shi, and I chain rifle it on the way in. It dodges, but the HMG Rodok is caught in the blast and goes down. The Paramedic Rodok brings up the Combi Rodok. At this point, the Rasyat drops in right behind the Sophotect. He can’t get to her without being seen by the sniper, so he drops Zero-V Smoke, but can’t put it in a position where he can threaten the Sophotect without getting shot at by a Bao or CG, so he hangs tight, repositioning to a corner where he can get cover. The Gaki melees the Kuang Shi, who manages to successfully dodge out of melee. He repositions to ensure antenna coverage. He also Spotlights my Crane and drops smart missiles on it, leaving it unconscious, and drops a mine with a Rodok.

On my turn, I get squirrelly. The Kuang Shi has to move towards the Gaki, triggering the mine, but this is okay, and he manages to chain rifle the Gaki and HMG Rodok along the way.The HMG Rodok finally dies for real, but the Gaki is okay. I bring a Bao with a boarding shotgun around to threaten the Rasyat, using a boarding shotgun and getting outsmoked. I take a long shot with the CG and put my own smoke down, blocking sight to a building entirely on my opponent’s half of the board. I then go nuts with my Sophotect, moving forward and shooting the Gaki, who explodes but catches no one. While moving along with her Yudbot, the Sophotect manages to reach the building, place and detonate a D-Charge, and get back, healing the Crane along the way and retaining cover against the Rasyat. The Hsien, no longer immobilized, moves up to within 4″ of the antennae and declares Reset to avoid being Hacked, but fails and is Immobilized again. At the end of my turn, I control three antennae to my opponent’s two, and score two more points.

Round 3:

My opponent brings both Rodok forward to contest the antenna, one of whom shoots the Sophotect, causing a wound. Having made a save, she fails Guts and hops the wall, keeping cover from the Rodoks but not the Rasyat. The Rasyat shoots her. Alas. Hackers Spotlight my BSG Bao, succeeding on the second try and dropping smart missiles on him until he is severely dead, breaking my link.

On my turn, I pull the Pheasant out and spend my entire order pool bringing him around to shoot the Rasyat in the back with a boarding shotgun, then moving forward to contest the antenna. Nothing else matters here, I just needed that last one. I’ll pause here to point out that this was a textbook case in which the Pheasant could actually have used his monofilament CCW, and I STILL DIDN’T because the shotgun was a better option.

With two 55+ point HI contesting the center antenna, the Rodoks can’t compete, and I take 3 antenna in the final turn, for a maximum score of 10.

Results and Thoughts:

ISS performed really well. I was running 10-order lists with bare minimum specialists– three in one list and effectively two in the second (the CoC Pheasant doesn’t really count, since he’s tied down by the Bao).

Bao are damn good. They serve little purpose other than a sniper link, but on the right table that’s all you need; they provide deadly AROs while the rest of your list does work. I don’t know what I would drop to get to a full, scary 5-man link, but I don’t think it’s that necessary. I wish there were more Bao profiles, though.

The Crane is a serious workhorse, as is the Sophotect. I already knew that about the Sophie, but the Crane is surprisingly badass, despite getting ignominiously blown away by a Celestial Guard.

Wu Ming give opponents fits. They can’t get close, because boarding shotguns, but I also have HMGs to scare you with. I don’t know if I think the LRL is worthwhile, but I definitely feel like the Tinbot isn’t. Breaker ammo just doesn’t impress.

Overall, I had a great time, taking away first place with a total score of 26 OPs and several really good games.

Failure isn’t adequately addressed in games. The reality of failure, the immediacy and the high probability of failure in the real world is not well expressed in the games we play. We fail at a task and we have to return to a point earlier in time, from before our failure, and we have to then try to execute “properly”, avoiding the failure. It’s very artificial, we just hand-wave it away like a story whose details you can’t remember (literally this, in the case of a few games).

To some extent, I think this is why Dark Souls and Bloodborne have taken root in the collective “hardcore” gamer psyche. Failure is inevitable, frequent, and harsh, and for a lot of people I suspect it fills the void created by success without the threat of failure. There’s an interesting duality there: it is far more satisfying to succeed at a thing you thought impossible, and far more demoralizing to fail at something you know you’re capable of.

There’s a certain school of thought that latches onto this, and says that games should always be played at the highest difficulty setting, with the underlying though focusing on maximizing the former and minimizing the latter. I don’t ascribe to this particular point of view, because I don’t think that every game necessarily has “difficulty” as a relevant part of the experience, but I also don’t ascribe the opposing view that playing games on the highest difficulty is exclusively an expression of ego and machismo, a paean of the “hardcore”, as it were.

Failure is healthy for the psyche, much like change. We fear it, and avoid it, but it is in our failures that we learn and grow, and it is in continual assured victories that we stop progressing and stabilize. There are advantages to the latter; I had originally typed “stagnate” and “regress”, but I think that’s an overly harsh evaluation– there is value in stability and headlong, unceasing progression leaves little time for self-evaluation. Too much of anything is unhealthy, but especially with games it’s easy to fall into a state where you simply consume content without investment, accruing victory after victory without context.

Unfortunately, I don’t think games as a medium address failure well. Failure isn’t fun. This isn’t just a function of failure; failure can be incredibly fun, it just needs to be designed that way. I don’t think we’ve found a magic bullet for it, and we’ve created a paradigm in which even the slightest failure leads to an instantly reloaded save game.

I remember the old Hitman series, with limited saves (or no saves) on each level, forcing you to either play through a lengthy level from the start or to live with your mistakes. It’s that latter that I want to see more of. Games don’t let us live with our mistakes and attempt to right them; we either fail and GAME OVER or we fail and the game reminds us of it, but we cannot ever make things right.

Interestingly, I think the place where failure is best expressed is in the MMO space, where you can’t reload to a previous save but you can go back and right your mistakes. There’s a certain reality to that fantasy space that’s compelling to me, and I think why I spend so much time in MMOs compared to other games.

This month is my month for the Aggrochat GOTM, and I’m having some difficulty deciding on a game for everyone to play.

I really want a game that sparks discussion, particularly in our approaches. We’ve had games where we talk about our different takes on the experiences we had (Citizens of Earth, Trine 2), but we haven’t yet had a game where our approaches to playing it differ dramatically. I feel like that demands an RPG of some kind, but one that’s relatively consumable in the month allotted.

I’ve also waffled back and forth on whether I want to select a game that I’ve already played and know is good (to recommend to the rest of the group) or a game I haven’t played or have barely touched, so my experience is as fresh as everyone else’s.

There’s a tie here to an issue I have that comes up frequently when I deal with other people– I very much want to offer the best experience I can to other people, regardless of my own personal interests. It comes up a lot in certain social situations: I’m very reticent to introduce myself to someone I don’t know, because I generally feel like people don’t need to be bothered by me coming to take up their time and space. This extends to even my close friends– if I’m choosing the thing we do, I want to make sure it’s an enjoyable experience for everyone, no matter what my own personal interests are.

I have a game I would pick if I only cared about myself, and I’ve already eliminated it from the running because I know two other people wouldn’t really enjoy it, even though I think it would be a fascinating game for us all to play and share notes on. It’s just a game I crave spoiler-heavy discussion on, because I’ve had very little of it.

It’s an interesting conundrum, because I’m trying to be more aware of the underlying reasons behind the decisions I make. Do I choose something *I* really want to play, or do I try to pick something that I like less and that is less interesting for me to talk about because I think it’ll be more interesting for everyone else? Which of the two is a more arrogant decision, thinking I can get inside my friends’ heads or steamrolling their desires in order to get my way?

Difficult. I suppose tune in to Aggrochat this Sunday to find out what happened.

Last night, in FFXIV, we failed at winning our raid.

It was some of the most fun we’ve had raiding in a while. We were laughing and joking and while we didn’t win, we made progress. It was a stark difference from the last time we were in there, a few weeks ago. There’s been some various shakeups, what with people’s schedules being scattered, moving, etc, and so we haven’t had the team together to hit Turn 9 since the end of March. We’ve still raided every week, but haven’t quite gotten back to Turn 9.

The last time we were in there, the team was burned out. We pushed, and I think we more effectively reached later stages of the fight, but we shut down. We were more focused on perfect executions of various phases and we had irritation (though never outbursts– the team is way too good for that) at minor mistakes that led to us falling behind. The huge amount of adaptability that I think of when I think of our raid crew had given way to a steely focus on perfect execution, because we’d been working on execution for the last several weeks prior to that. Last night, by comparison, we were less focused on execution and more focused on just making it to the next phase. It’s the first significant progress we’ve made in the last 5-6 nights of fighting that boss.

(not my group, just a good picture)

I got to see the same in thing in action over this past weekend, in a much more rapid-fire scenario. The goal was to get 11 people up and over a 15-foot wall, and each of the 11 people could only help (read: make any physical contact with) a climber twice over the entire run. An “assist” was consumed only when a climber made it over the wall, but one assist was consumed for every person who helped. Some people get “bonus” assists based on height and weight, the concept being that those two factors affect how useful an assist might be– a very tall person with a lot of mass can boost someone up rather high, whereas a very short, light person isn’t going to be quite as effective at that.

On the surface, it looks like an optimization problem wherein you practice getting people up with a minimum number of assists– ideally no more than 2 per person. It’s tempting to work on this execution, trying to get people up and over the wall with fewer and fewer assists until you hit that optimum number. It’s a trap that (we were told) a lot of groups fall into, and indeed, caused some minor issues for the other group running in parallel with us (the morning team; we were the afternoon team).

Our group managed the wall in one run, simply by going and working out the details as we went. It was obvious to everyone that each person needed to go up with a minumum of assists, but it was equally obvious that fatigue was going to be a real factor. Given enough time and practice, a person might be able to get up over the wall with one or two assists, but by the time that was achieved that person might be exhausted, as will everyone else helping them. Better to use the assists when necessary and minimize fatigue, rather than becoming paralyzed trying to plan in advance and being inflexible, resetting when the “proper” execution isn’t achieved.

It’s left me considering making an executive decision for the raid, something I very rarely ever do: no more than two consecutive weeks focusing on a single boss– too much time on the same encounter and we shift from adapability and focus to tunnelvision and frustration, because we’re thinking about it too much. Rather than trying to perfect execution (a focus that led us to wipe for an entire night on the same transition of Turn 9), I want to keep us on our toes and flexible, used to working together and handling situations rather than trying to perfect a particular step-by-step process.

I’d rather get to 37% and wipe on a messy attempt than get to 47% perfectly and wipe repeatedly on the same transition because we can’t *quite* get our execution right.

It might wind up being an unpopular decision, and I can already think of a few people in the raid who are going to be tight-lipped at me about even the suggestion, we’ll see. What I know is that the last time we were in Turn 9 I was wondering when we would finish so I could do something fun, and this time I didn’t realize we were on our last attempt of the night until someone went “whoa, there’s only 11 minutes left”.

If I have any job as a team leader in a video game, it’s to do everything in my power to make every night like that latter, rather than the former.