To the Table: Borderlands

Some of you may remember that post I did awhile back about tabletops and video games.  I had a lot of fun writing that post and a lot of you seemed to really like it.  So I decided to do a follow up series called To the Table where I'll analyze various video games and show why they would make good tabletops.  Also I will explain how I would translate some of the mechanics found in these games into a workable tabletop format.  First on the list is Borderlands.

For those of you who are not familiar with Gearbox's random gun generator with a first person shooter theme, Borderlands is a first person shooter role playing game with tons and tons and TONS of guns.  Shooting bandits and leveling up are satisfying and fun and the loot keeps flowing.  Furthermore, the Borderlands games are based in co-op.  Up to 4 players can work together to shoot their way through the planet of Pandora to get the best loot possible and find the legendary vault.  Some people might ask how would a first person shooter translate into a tabletop RPG?  Well think about tabletops like Cyberpunk 2020 and Shadowrun.  Those are games that are kinda like what would happen if you translated a first person shooter into a tabletop.  But here are some good reasons why Borderlands would work.

First off: it's an RPG.  It may be a first person shooter, but at its core Borderlands is an RPG.  There are distinct classes, distinct powers for each class, distinct roles and ways to build each class, and a leveling system to progress through the game.
Second: it is built around co op.  Some games may say they are "co-op", but they're not built around actually helping each other.  Borderlands is one of those co-op games that really encourages the players to stick together and work together.  Help each other out and you will succeed magnificently.  Plus by having so many distinct ways of playing a character ensures that you will almost always be a necessary part of the team.
Third: a world to explore.  Pandora is massive.  There are a wide variety locales to visit, from dusty deserts, to luscious grasslands, to snowy tundras, to radioactive sludge pits, to eridium infested wastelands.  There are people to meet, things to see, stories to tell, and most importantly loot to find.  On top of that, if you don't want to use Pandora as the backdrop to your story (SPOILER ALERT), the ending of Borderlands 2 opened up the entire universe for your gaming pleasure.  Make up your own planet, stories, and characters to use.  No need for using the already given world.

Now how would you make this all work with a tabletop mechanically?  I have a few ideas.  First off you would need to determine a dice system to use for the game.  Easy: d100.  Why d100 you ask?  For gun-play.  All the guns in the Borderlands games have an accuracy rating on them to tell you in generally how wild your shot is gunna go when you pull the trigger.  So put that into a d100 system and roll below to the percentage to hit.  Easy peasy.  Next up I would say you would want an action point system in there.  Different actions take different amounts of time for different characters and different guns.  The system should recognize this and accommodate for it.  Hence action points.  Different tasks would require a different number of actions points, like reloading or firing different weapon types or switching guns.  Now the really tricky part would be maintaining that sense of fast paced action that a first person shooter has.  For that I would throw out the usual initiative system most tabletop RPGs have in favor of what I like to call simultaneous initiative.  Essentially you would have someone leading off the action, they would do whatever they're doin before everyone else.  Then everyone else declares their action.  All of these happen simultaneously.  If 2 actions conflict you roll off to see which happens first.  For example, if a psycho is charging at you to whack you over the head but you wanna run away and fire at him so he can't reach you, you would roll off to see which of those happens first.  Could be a mess could be absolute genius.  Anyway you would then need classes.  I would say have the Gunzerker, the Psycho, the Mechromancer, the Hunter from BL1, the Assassin, the Commando, and the Siren be your classes.   Each would have their own set of skills as well as some generalized skills that everyone could take or groupings of them could take.  For Sirens you would have a bunch of powers to choose from  but you could only pick one.  At this point you could go wild with powers so long as they were balanced and could be worked with.  As for how you would do guns, you would probably just make tables for generating random guns.  Heck, if you had someone good at programming you could probably make an app for GMs to randomly generate loot for their games.  Interesting idea that a friend suggested to me would be to generate the loot before game then put them on cards with all the gun stats that you would then give to players so they could actually hold all their guns and compare gun stats without having to flip through tons of pages of character sheets or write down tons of gun stats.

Anyway that's all of my ramblings on this.  Also just a note this is a thing!  I am currently designing this tabletop system and if you are interested in helping out post in the comments!

Thanks for reading!  As always leave a comment to let me know what you think of the blog!  Like the topic?  Let me know because I have more of these in mind that I could do.  Got an idea for a game you think could be translated into a tabletop?  Post it in the comments and I'll give my analysis of it guaranteed!   Signal boosting is always appreciated so post the link everywhere and invite your friends to read!

Gamer out.

Helpful Access

So my roommate told  me a little while ago that apparently the internet has been having a fit over Steam Early Access Games.  I thought it might be a good thing to talk about and here we are.  This may be a shorter post but I feel this needs to be talked about, so let's get down to it.

For those of you who don't know, or don't have steam, Steam Early Access Games allows developers to essentially sell people their games before they are actually done.  It's sorta a paid beta access or paid alpha access in some cases.  This is not terribly uncommon a practice, plenty of games in the past have given you beta access as a part of pre-order packages.  Steam Early Access Games just makes it easier for developers to do so and is an official system to do it.

The point that has got so many peoples' panties in a twist is a simple hypothetical possibility: what if you're just paying for a crappy game that will never be "finished"?  People are suspicious that this could just let developers release a half baked game and say it's in "beta" or "alpha" and then never really work on it to make money.  They'll say they are but they're really not and just collecting on the goodwill and trust of innocent gamers.  Now this is a legitimate concern.  This is an entirely possible outcome of this system and would be a despicable thing to do.  Some developers may do this to make a quick buck and this could potentially be a huge problem.

But then again lets look at all the positives to SEAG (Steam Early Access Games, I'm tired of typing all that out).  Actually first off let's look at the fact that, once again, pre-orders already do this.  People DO BUY games that are not yet completed in the form of pre-orders.  The difference is a pre-order doesn't always give you an instant gratification of being able to play the game in it's current build and being able to help the developers in making the game better.  Instead, a pre-order just gives you the promise of a game to come who's quality is unknown until you eventually get it.

Second of all there is a perfect example of early access games that has already been used to great success.  I'm talking about Minecraft.  Minecraft started selling back when it was still in alpha.  People bought it to support its continuous development as well as to give feedback to help it improve as it continued to be made.  Now Minecraft is one of the most well known and well loved games out there, and is STILL having updates being released for it. This is what early access is going for.  The model of early access does work, and gives fledgling indie developers the ability to market this more readily, which is fantastic.

Third, if you buy the game in it's early access stage, you are basically saying "yes I like this idea, I want this game to be a thing, and I want to make sure it comes out good."  It's like kick-starting a game except with instant gratification of access to the current build and the ability to give feedback to help perfect the game.  It's a good way to have more communication between developers and gamers as well as to make sure games that gamers want to be released get released in a better state.

Finally, if you support a game through early access you're helping a developer to continue to make the game.  Most of the developers who use early access are indie developers.  They may not have a huge budget, but they had enough to create this alpha/beta build.  From there the proceeds from purchases of the early access version gives them a budget to continue making the game.  In addition, as I said before, they have a much larger testing group for feedback on bug fixes and game updates.  In short, early access is one of the best things that can happen for an indie developer on a low budget.

In conclusion, SEAG is not some horrible monster that is going to eat all our money and give us nothing in return.  It's a good system for indie developers to continue getting interesting, unique, and fun games to us as gamers.  In addition, we become a much larger part of the development process, helping to make sure the games that we buy become quality products that all can enjoy.  So don't be fooled by the cynical paranoia of the internet, SEAG is a system that we should continue to support.

Thanks for reading!  As always post in the comments to discuss the topic further and give feedback!  If you want me to talk about a specific topic or review a game, let me know in the comments!  Signal boosting is always appreciated so share with your friends!

Gamer out.

Infinite Marketing

WARNING TO ALL.  THIS POST CONTAINS MANY MAJOR SPOILERS FOR BIOSHOCK INFINITE AND BORDERLANDS 2.  READ AT YOUR OWN RISK.  I REPEAT: SPOILER ALERT.

Okay I'm just going to start with the fact that I loved Bioshock Infinite.  I may have been a bit scathing in a previous post, but don't mistake that for me thinking that Bioshock Infinite is not in fact fantastic.  And who could forget that ending?  I'll bet no one could.  Infinite parallel worlds, infinite possibilities, all similar but all linked.  On top of that, the ending was a brilliantly subtle marketing ploy.

Irrational Games set up their ending perfectly to allow them to make as many more Bioshock titles as they feel like making while keeping them all connected.  Not that I'm complaining.  I love the Bioshock series and am happy to see more.  Furthermore the great part is they can do something completely different with the next game while keeping it continuous in universe.  Infinite realities with big differences but some things staying consistent, aka general mechanics, strong plot lines fueled by ideologies, and philosophies taken to their extreme.  I'm excited.  We're all excited.  But that's not what I"m talking about today in this post.  What I'm going to talk about is how they did it so cleverly.

Bioshock Infinite's ending was a beautifully perfect way to cap off the story.  In addition it gave plenty of creative freedom to allow for entirely new worlds.  Rapture and Columbia are just the beginning, at least that's what Infinite's ending promises.  However it does not come right out and say this.  It blends the message smoothly into the ending, subtle and sweet.  Now lets compare this to another game that did the same marketing ploy except in a way that I don't find as smooth or lovely, Borderlands 2.

At the end of Borderlands 2, they show the locations of a bunch of vaults that have opened up on a bunch of other planets.  They give no doubt in any player's mind that they're going to stop making Borderlands games any time soon.  Which is fine.  I love the Borderlands games.  However the way they presented it just didn't feel right.  It rubbed me the wrong way somehow.  It was too obvious, too in your face about how they were going to do more and more and more.  I don't know maybe it's just me,  but Borderlands 3 seemed like a given after the extreme success of Borderlands 1 and 2, did they really need to throw out that they have plans for an indefinite number of games in such a blunt manner?

I think the key difference between these two games is just in how they approached the same marketing ploy.  One was subtle and you may have even missed that they were advertising, the other was blunt and in your face about making sure you knew there were plenty of games to come after the fact.  A wise man once said the best marketing ploy is the one that no one notices, because if you did everything right it will be as if you did nothing at all.

Thanks for reading!  As always, comments and sharing is appreciated!  If you have any games you'd like me to review or topics you'd like me to discuss, post em in the comments!

Gamer out.

Review: Vampire The Masquerade: Bloodlines

This one has been a long time coming.  My friend got this for me around Christmas time and I told him I would review it as soon as I beat it.  Which is a deal I actually have ongoing.  If there is a game you would like me to review and I do own it, you can request it and I'll get right on doing so.  If I don't own it, you can send it my way and I shall drop what I'm currently playing for fun to get through it for a review.  But anyway on to Bloodlines.

Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines (here on out referred to as Bloodlines) is a marvelous RPG from Troika Games, published by Activision.  Based off of the World of Darkness Live Action Roleplay and tabletop system, Bloodlines has you playing as a vampire in the World of Darkness universe.  The whole idea of the World of Darkness system is that you get to play as the things that go bump in the night, you are the monster and loving it.

The Tremere clan.  Blood sorcerers. 

As far as character creation goes, Bloodlines gives you plenty of options.  There are seven "clans", or races, of vampire that you can choose from.  Each has it's own strengths and weaknesses and special abilities that they can employ.  Nosferatu are sneaky and physically powerful and can gain more blood from animals than other clans can, however they are physically disfigured and therefore cannot improve their looks or have any skill in seduction.  Tremere have special access to blood magic.  Toreadors are socialites and are amazing at talking their way through situations.  Malkavians are plain crazy and are one of the most interesting clans to play (apparently there is literally a point where you can talk to a stop sign).  However if you don't know anything about any of them and just want to dive right into the game, there is an option to take a personality test that will generate a character based on your answers. The amount of replay value that this system provides is incredible.  Each clan is completely unique in terms of how they play and the experience you will have by playing as them.  In addition to gameplay mechanics being different for each, characters in the story will respond differently to your character depending on what clan you play as.

 Which brings us around to the story.  The story is fantastic.  It's engaging, rich, and actually makes you think about what you say to various NPCs.  There is a lot of politics going on in Bloodlines between the clans, and if you want to stay ahead you need to be careful about what you say and to who you say it.  Dialogue and your actions throughout the game will change the ending, but only in the sense of what options are available to you.  Otherwise it is still a push button to choose ending, which honestly is fine for this game.

Vampires DO NOT like fire.

So the story is good, what about the gameplay?  Gameplay is great.  The game can be played in first or third person, though sometimes it forces you into one or the other, namely first person when using a gun or other ranged weapon and third when using a melee weapon.  Honestly what I love the most about this game's gameplay is the fact that there is so much variety to it.  One level you may be busting in and knocking heads together and defending a location, another level may play out like a survival horror experience.  Then you're on to an investigation to track down a serial killer, then you need to manipulate someone into doing what your quest giver wants, then you may be off to steal an artifact without being noticed and without killing anyone.  This game is all over the map in terms of mission types.  But the great part is that it does all of them very well.  The variety does not affect the quality of each experience.  In addition, there is no set way to do each mission.  You could stealth your way through, talk your way through, even just bust in and start shooting.  It's up to you on how to do it, and the game will reward you for going the extra mile and finding creative ways to do missions and completing side objectives.  This adds even further replay value to the experience, testing out all the different ways you could go about doing a mission.

Blood sorcery is fun.  

In more specific terms of gameplay, most of the mechanics work really well in bloodlines.  Sneaking can actually be effective and the HUD provides a meter that tells you how likely you are to be spotted if you haven't been already.  Powers are fun and effective, having everything from mind control, to invisibility, to summoning spectral animals, to supernatural strength, to animal forms, even blood magic.  Everything has a purpose and everything works well, and as your powers and stats increase you really feel the change and the power growing.  Which brings me to character advancement.  Bloodlines uses a point buy system instead of the traditional level up system of most RPGs.  Each mission will give you experience points which you can then spend on improving stats, skills, or special powers.  You can also spend these points whenever you like, so if you encounter a challenge that you need more sneak for, or maybe need to be stronger, or more persuasive, or you just can't afford that new gun you want and need some more bartering, or can't quite open that lock, you can spend some points that you have lying around to get you past the challenge.  In addition to this we have the blood system.  Everything in Bloodlines revolves around blood.  You need blood to fuel your powers and you need blood to quickly recover health.  You can get blood by drinking from blood packs or directly feeding on humans or rats (though rats are not very effective, unless you're a nosferatu).  To feed on someone you can grab them, sink your fangs in, and have at it.  But if you want to do it this way you have to be very careful that you do it when no one else is around.  There is a system in place called the masquerade system.  If you are seen doing vampiric things outside of a combat zone, such as feeding or using obvious powers, you will violate the masquerade.  Each time you violate the masquerade, the world becomes a bit more dangerous.  Hunters will start coming after you and such which is a bad time for all involved.  You can get masquerade violations back by doing certain quests.  If you're in a combat zone, you're not at risk of violating the masquerade ever so go nuts.  However, if you really need blood and have a high enough seduction, you can seduce people to feed on them.  There is a good reason for all this feeding outside of the fact that you need blood for your powers.  If your blood drops to really low points, you risk going into a frenzy.  When you're frenzied, you lose control of your character entirely and an AI takes over that will fight and attempt to feed at all costs.  As it should sound, frenzy is really bad.  But you can avoid it by having a high humanity.  Humanity reduces the risk of frenzy, and the lower your humanity the greater the risk of frenzy.  You can get humanity from certain quests where you do "good" things for people, but you can lose humanity by killing people outside of combat zones and doing other "bad" things.  It sounds like a lot to keep track of, but it is relatively easy to do so and adds up to a very unique and enjoyable experience.

However, while this game may be excellent, there are some aspects that are not so excellent.  The main thing is combat.  The combat is...well lets just say it's pretty bad.  The gunplay is loose and iffy.  It doesn't really have a satisfying punch to it and gunfights turn out to be either you popping up out of cover to fire off a single shot, hope you hit, and drop back down before you get return fire to the face, or running backwards trying to fruitlessly hit an annoyingly fast melee combatant who will drop your health like a rock if he gets within striking distance.  Melee combat isn't much better.  If you're in melee combat you're already right up in an enemy's face, giving them an easy target to go for.  If you're going for ranged opponents they will just keep running away and unloading into you, making your health drop quite significantly before you can get a hit in.  The best you can hope for is to knock them over as part of your three hit combo and keep wailing on them and chaining knockdowns together.  In addition, the melee combat does not have much variety.  It pretty much boils down to mashing the attack button and hoping you can knock your opponent over.  The developers tried to mix it up by saying that you do different stuff if you hold down a movement key while doing your attacks, but they just feel like animation variations on the same three hit combo.  Overall, combat pretty much just boils down to exploiting the system as much as possible.

All in all, this game is amazing.  I would highly recommend it to anyone who likes RPGs or the World of Darkness as a tabletop/LARP.  Actually, I would recommend this game to just about everyone, it has a little something for all gamers.  The only people I could think to not recommend this to would be to people who would get impatient with the less than stellar combat and might give up easily from some of the problems this can cause.

As always, thanks for reading!  Leave a comment on your way out and if you'd like me to review a game or discuss a topic let me know in the comments!

Gamer out.

To the Table: Tabletop RPGs and Videogames

Sorry guys it has been a long while since I posted last.  Various things have barred me posting including final exams, Christmas, and New Years.  But now I am back and bringing you more discussions and reviews.  And for my first post of the new year I have a discussion about something near and dear to me: tabletop RPGs and how they relate to video-games.

So for those of you who don't know what a tabletop RPG is I'll refer you to the image at the top of the post.  Dungeons & Dragons is one of the most popular and well known tabletop RPGs in existence, so if you know about that then you know what a tabletop RPG is.  For those of you who don't know what that is I'll give a brief explanation.  A tabletop RPG is sort of a mash up of board game, RPG, and improv acting.   Players create characters with stats, abilities, equipment, etc and play through a story created by another person known as the GM, or Game Master. Players use dice to determine if their character succeeds in a task, varying from spotting things to picking locks to hitting and doing damage in combat.  If it sounds familiar it should, a tabletop is very similar to video-game RPGs.

However there is a key difference: tabletops are a tad more free form and loose in terms of what you can do in game.  See in a video-game you're sort of locked in in terms of how much interactivity there is with the world.  The game developers determine what all you can do in game and you can't do much else.  In a tabletop the only limit is what you can imagine and what the dice allow you to do.  So if you are interested in video-games it is not too much of a jump to try tabletop RPGs and you would most likely find them highly enjoyable.  But now on to the real topic of this post: how tabletop RPGs relate to video-games.

There is a surprisingly large number of video-games that are influenced by or directly made using the mechanics of tabletop RPGs.  Many of them are regarded as classics in the video-game industry.  I'll name a few: Planescape Torment, Baldur's Gate 1 & 2, Neverwinter Nights 1 & 2, Shadowrun for the SNES, Vampire The Masquerade: Bloodlines and Vampire the Masquerade: Redemption, and the more recent Neverwinter and Shadowrun Returns.  All of these are based off varying tabletop systems and all are quite good games.  The video-game industry has a surprisingly long and lasting history with making tabletops into video-games.  There is good reason for this.  Tabletop RPGs provide developers with a world to work with and mechanics to translate into the game.  With these pieces already worked out the developers can just tell their story.

With these factors in mind, the tabletop industry makes a perfect wealth of source material for making video-games.  So the real question is why don't developers take advantage of this more?  They used to do it all the time.  There are tons of old Dungeons & Dragons based games and while games based off Vampire The Masquerade are few they are amazing.  But these are just a few of the vast number of tabletops in existence.  Tabletops can range from being high fantasy to dark horror to cyberpunk to steampunk to action/adventure to just plain old storytelling.  There is such a wide variety of tabletop systems that you could probably find a tabletop system for any sort of video-game you would like to do.  In fact there are tons of tabletop systems I would love to see made into video-games.

But this is also a two way street.  You could just as easily turn a video-game into a tabletop system and it would be gloriously fun.  It has been done before.  There is a final fantasy tabletop system in existence.  There is also a Pokemon tabletop that has been made and is quite fun.  There are not really any others that I know of, but there are plenty of video-games that I would love to see be made into tabletops.  For example, one of the DLCs for Borderlands 2 is basically a giant parody of Dungeons & Dragons, in which they made up their own tabletop system called Bunkers and Badasses.  That would be a fun tabletop to play!  And it could easily be done. Or how about a Legend of Zelda tabletop RPG?  Exploring and creating your own stories in Hyrule?  Playing as a goron, or a kokiri villager, or a Zora?  There are so many possibilities for turning video-games into tabletops.  In fact, if anyone could make these tabletops I would be extremely excited to playtest them.

In short, tabletops and video-games are very closely related.  They are both highly interactive mediums of storytelling and can mix between each other very easily.  Indeed, making more video-games based off of tabletops and more tabletops based off of video-games is a practice that should be encouraged and supported as much as possible.  As gamers it is our job to show what we want more of by showing our support and effort in making these things happen.

Thanks for reading as always.  I look forward to another year of discussion and review.  As always leave a comment in the posts and requests for reviews and topics of discussion are always appreciated.  Leave a comment about games that you think would make great tabletops or tabletops that you think would make great games!

Gamer out.