For the Birds

For over four years, I’ve kept a pair of lovebirds in my home, Merry and Pippen. Yes, I am aware of the spelling mistake, but that’s how I’ve always spelled his name in my head. I don’t write about my birds often.

Lovebirds, for the uninitiated, are not ideal pets. They are incredibly loud, quite messy, and they don’t take easily to training. Complicating matters was the fact that these two birds had a long precedent of not having been trained before I got them, and they were incredibly closely bonded to one another. See, a singular lovebird is a charming, personable friend. Two lovebirds form a clique, and if you happen to lack feathers, you are not invited to any of their best parties.

Still, they have filled my apartment with chirpings loud enough to occasionally wake the neighbors and a lot of strange, distant affection for a number of years, and I appreciate their company.

Today, Pippen died in my hands. Though I had only had him for four years, he was a pretty old lovebird. The previous owners had him for some seven years, and the average lifespan of a lovebird is between ten and fifteen years. So, to the best of my knowledge, he was eleven, and had a good run of things.

The event has made me understandably a lot upset. I was really fond of the little guy, and he was by far the friendlier and more intimate of the birds. He was a total sweetness and I really enjoyed having him around. I’ll miss him.

So… What does this have to do with games and gaming? Not too terribly much, actually. I considered making this an existential blog post about how death works in the current D&D cosmology, and while that would certainly be a decent article, I think it’s a bit much for me at the moment. I also considered writing a post about how the deaths of player characters are handled in role-playing games (a phenomenon categorized by “Oh, he or she is dead. Moving on to the next room”). Which also has some meat on it. Or I could talk about the deaths of animal companions in D&D, something we typically neglect as nothing more than a rules inconvenience. Any and all of these would be great articles. And maybe someday, when I’m not feeling like a sack of smashed assholes because my bird just died, I’ll get around to writing them.

An Open Letter to D&D Next’s Art Department

Everyone is talking about what features they want to see in the next version of Dungeons & Dragons. Personally, though, I understand that I will very likely not see my pet mechanics in the core of the game, or even in expansions, because I’m one of those crazy kids who grew up lurking on The Forge and has some pretty fucked up ideas about games, gaming, and game design. Also, I don’t think I have anything useful to add to the dialogue until I see the direction the design is going in. I can guess, and I can suggest a direction that I think would be beneficial to the game, but I can’t really improve a design I’ve never seen. I will be much more concerned with making D&DV the best it can be and much less concerned with pigeonholing it to fit whatever I think the essence of D&D is.

So instead, I’m going to talk to another very important part of the Dungeons & Dragons experience. I’m going to talk about art. Which is a pretty hefty step away from what I normally look at, because there are times when I write enormous posts (like this one) that don’t even have pictures. I’m very much a wall-of-text blogger, so it might seem a little unorthodox that I would be as worried about the direction of the art as I am. But I am very, very, deeply concerned about the direction of the art in this game, and I would like to invite the art department, particularly those in decision-making positions, to pay close attention to what I am about to say next:

Dungeons & Dragons is still seen as a sexist game, and you are the only people in the world who can fix that.

It’s not just sexist, though. It’s sexist, it’s racist, and it’s ableist in its artistic representation of people. Now, I’ve heard all the arguments against having people of color and women depicted in the art of a fantasy role-playing game, and I think they’re all hooey. And to be fair, there has been headway made. I have seen progress, especially from the chainmail bikini era of game art.

And I’m not accusing anyone of purposefully excluding people of color, the differently abled or women from their depictions of heroic figures. Anyone who is actively trying to exclude or belittle people from their game is a dickbag, and it is very likely that will come through in the game itself (Byron Hall, I’m looking at you). What is happening is primarily blindness to the issue. So I am going to make a request, and it is my sincere hope that you, the art department responsible for the look and feel of D&D Next will take it under advisement.

First:

Women make up 52% of the world’s population. They can make up 50% of the people in your game’s art. Moreover, the exact number of pictures in which a woman is standing in an Impossible Position is 0. For every piece of art submitted, have the artist attempt to pose him or herself in the positions of the people depicted. If either person’s position is painful, that pose is very likely held by a female character whose breasts and buttocks are pressed out to increase her sexiness.

Wizards of the Coast has very clearly established that sexiness is not something they believe Dungeons & Dragons needs. If there were room for sex in D&D, the Book of Erotic Fantasy would have been updated to Fourth Edition. You specifically precluded the possibility of that happening in your licensing for a reason. If sexiness is a factor in how D&D art is chosen, something has gone terribly wrong.

Second:

Human skin comes in a lot of colors from black to white to yellow to red to brown. Human features come in a huge range of styles and types. I understand that we’re playing in a fantasy world where the various skin tones in reality may not be as prevalent. But I also know that in said fantasy world all of the monks look Asian. Even the elves.

Have some fun drawing black dudes in mage robes or brown chicks in plate mail. Evenly distribute the skin tones across the whole of your books, and the problem of racism mostly disappears (except, y’know, the “Goblins are evil because they’re green,” issue). And this doesn’t just go for the humans, guys. Elves obviously have some skin tone variation going on (Oh, hey Drizzt.). Dwarves can go from chestnut brown to fair skinned. I love the idea of charcoal-skinned halflings and a range of skin-tones for half-orcs from phthalo green to honeydew. All this does is make the art more interesting, and add depth that might otherwise be missing from the depiction of the game world.

Third:

Ableism is a tough thing to address in a role-playing game. I get that. It’s tough to be a bad-ass knight if you can’t walk. Being an amputee isn’t cool… Wait a fucking minute, yeah it is! Ahab lost a leg to a whale and was a total badass. Bran Stark is paralyzed from the waist down and he’s one of the most interesting characters in A Song of Ice and Fire. Rick Grimes loses a hand and goes batfuck crazy, but he’s one of the toughest assholes to survive the zombie apocalypse.

Making the differently abled a part of your game world is easier than it sounds. Hell, one of my players built a character whose hand had been cut off and some asshole was out there wearing it around his neck. It didn’t come with any penalties or anything, it was just a flavor thing that made him a total badass, and it was all description. Characters that are Big Damn Heroes despite having challenges above and beyond the norm are awesome, and should be shown to be so in game art.

Fourth:

This is sort of a minor point, but it’s one I’d like to make anyway: having characters of various sizes and shapes is not at all unrealistic, nor does it reduce the heroic aspect of the fantasy. Look at any successful fantasy series ever, and you’re going to find a bunch of different body shapes, because different body shapes are something we understand, something we _get_. Moreover, it doesn’t hurt to reduce the impact of stereotypical, hyper-sexualized imagery in the media you’re creating. Give me some pudgy mages and some scrawny fighters, please.

All I’m looking for, what I’m really asking you for, is to look critically at the message your art sends to the people who will be looking at it. ALL of the people who will be looking at it. Ask yourself, if you were in the shoes of a feminist, what would you think of this illustration? If you lived in a wheelchair, how would you feel about seeing nothing but able-bodied folk?

And you can argue, if you like, that this is just the opinion of a privileged white guy. Because, y’know, it is. I’m not a woman, I’m not a minority, and my only disability is depression. But I’m just the voice for a silent riot, guys. There are others like me, and there are some who have made a great show of picking apart the inherent sexism, racism and ableism of your art. And we’re speaking for a much larger group of people you will never hear from, but who feel uncomfortable playing your game because it depicts women, minorities and the differently abled as something less than the able-bodied white dudes on page after page.

Sincerely,
Kristoffer Hansen
Games Manager
Warp One Comics and Games

Further Reading:
Go Make Me a Sandwich
Women Fighters in Reasonable Armor

Yu-Gi-Oh! is a Bad Game (But Doesn’t Have to Be)

This is a really long post…

As a person who plays games for a living, I take them pretty seriously. And usually, I can check my emotions at the door about a game; the fact that I dislike a game does not make the game “bad.” Whether or not I like a game is a matter of personal aesthetic, and I’m willing to recognize that. To be fair, there are a bunch of games I like that aren’t good. I’m quite fond of Exalted, for instance, and for all that I laude the Game Master’s Guide, 7th Sea, as a game, kinda sucked.

There are a few games, though, that are both Games I Dislike and Bad Games. They’re pretty few and far between, honestly. FATAL. Racial Holy War. That role-playing game about the bishonen boys with sea anemones for penises. All three of these show up on any Worst Role-playing Games Ever Published list. The Star Wars collectible card game is on my list. Steve Jackson’s non-collectible Burn in Hell was atrocious. Most of these games, though, don’t have a huge fan following, either because they are bad, or because whatever cross-market synergy the designers were trying to build never really got off the ground. (For example, I love Star Wars, and I love collectible card games, so a collectible card game about Star Wars has to be the next best thing to perfect, ne?)

Yu-Gi-Oh! is the beneficiary of one of the most successful cross-market synergy campaigns ever created. There is an animated series based on the already-successful manga, there are video games and toys. There is really no better way to tap into their target market than to toss a cartoon at it. Chaotic tried the same thing, and for a while the game was wildly popular (the game was kinda meh, and the production schedule mishaps kept it from attaining any real popularity).

So Yu-Gi-Oh! is wildly popular. In the mass market, it’s the most popular collectible card game in the world. Sadly, being popular does not make the game good.

Understand that my issues with Yu-Gi-Oh! have nothing to do with the game’s rules. Honestly, if the game were played as it was originally designed, it would be pretty solid. The rules are simple and elegant, and the strategy has the possibility of real depth. I remember being pretty impressed with the game when it first came out (back when there were a lot of creatures with no abilities, and trap and spell cards were the tits). There are some things that strike me as entirely arbitrary (monster levels, for instance; you could simply separate monsters into three different levels: normal, tribute, double-tribute, and be done with it), but none of those things are enough to break the game in horrible ways.

No, the issues I have with Yu-Gi-Oh!, the reasons I think it is a bad game, are these:

1) Card and Set Irrelevance
2) The Banned List
3) Game Speed
4) Solitaire

1) Card and Set Irrelevance

In any given pack of Yu-Gi-Oh! cards, there is a miniscule chance that you will open a card that is good. This isn’t to say that the card you open is amazing or jaw-dropping, just good. I sell packs of Yu-Gi-Oh! in my store, and I cannot count the number of times I have found entire packs of cards just sitting opened on tables or counters, nothing having been taken from them because even the rare card in the pack isn’t worth anything. This is a problem frequently encountered in eternal-format card games. Only two or three cards released in an entire set of Yu-Gi-Oh! are any good. Out of over a hundred cards per set. And sets are released every three months or so.

Imagine how many trees have died to produce cards people aren’t even using in their decks.

And it’s never the commons that are any good. It’s always the rarer-than-rare cards, the so-called Secret Rare or Ghost Rare. You might find one of these cards per box. Which means that twenty three other packs of cards are a complete waste of paper, foilwrap and money. When each booster pack costs $5, that turns into a lot of cash, fast.

And older sets are completely irrelevant now. There are boxes of the earliest sets that have one or two cards that used to be good but aren’t anymore that will sit on a shelf forever. Legend of Blue Eyes White Dragon packs are worth almost nothing save the nostalgia value of opening a pack and seeing a bunch of monster cards with no effects and trap and spell cards that simply aren’t very good. Entire sets of cards have been obsoleted, making the eternal aspect of the game completely ridiculous.

2) The Banned List

When I play Magic: The Gathering, I play Limited formats or Type 2 (Standard). I like having a smaller, more stable card pool, and there hasn’t been a time in recent memory that they’ve had to ban a card from Standard (skullclamp being the example I can think of). Having a limit on the number of sets allowed in a format means that there are fewer ridiculous synergies to look out for when publishing new cards, so the development team can focus on rooting those synergies out, and then worry about longer-winded formats later. You can work on balancing a set against itself and the most recent iterations of the game.

Yu-Gi-Oh! solves synergy problems by banning them. When a particular card or deck becomes too powerful, the players who have invested in those cards and decks no longer get to play them. Sorry, Monster Reborn, you’re just too good. Bye bye, Judgement Dragon, you’ve appeared in too many decks. Oh look, Lightsworn is getting too powerful, let’s ban half the cards on the list. I don’t even play Yu-Gi-Oh!, and this pisses me off. People pay for those cards, people search for them for months, just to have them torn from their fingers because the card is too good. At least with a rotation, you can plan for it; you can see that a set is going to be leaving the format soon and sell the cards that will no longer be legal for that format. Or retire them to a casual-deck pile. Or set them aside for a different format that you play.

3) Game Speed

Last year, there were three or four decks that could kill you on turn one in the Yu-Gi-Oh! metagame. That is terrifying. That isn’t a game of strategy, that’s a game of chance. A couple of weeks ago, one of my customers went to the Canadian Nationals. He finished third, and told me that the deck that had beaten him did so on the first turn of games one and three. This was after a huge banned-list update that had gotten rid of all the previously discovered first-turn-win decks in the game.

A first-turn win is the first indicator of a broken meta-game, in my opinion. Even at its slowest, Yu-Gi-Oh! sports a consistent turn-three win strategy. It’s too fast. There’s no time to strategize, it really comes down to whether or not you’ve drawn the cards that will allow you to “go off” on the earliest possible turn. I don’t need to worry about attack or block positions, what traps or spells you’ve set, or what you have in hand. If my deck goes off, I win. If yours goes off first, I lose. Which brings me to point four, and my biggest issue with Yu-Gi-Oh! as a game.

4) Solitaire

One of the biggest reasons I think Burn in Hell is a bad game is that it rarely effects your opponent’s side of the game. You collect your bits, you make the best sets you can, and your opponent does the same. You strategize and plot and plan, sure, but you do it independent of your opponent’s actions. A good game needs to be interactive on all sides. I need to be able to effect what my opponent is doing in a meaningful way, set them back, make them lose the board advantage, make them ditch cards from hand, or from the top of the deck. And they should be able to do the same sorts of things to me. In a game like A Game of Thrones, there’s a lot of that; the whole game is about interaction with other players, from the job I take at the beginning of the new round (“Oh, sorry, you needed to be the Hand this turn? Oh, and look at that, you’re supporting me…”) to stealing Power from an opponent’s House card and then beefing it up with Renown. Every part of the game involve some level of player interaction, and that is what makes A Game of Thrones so incredibly deep as a game.

Magic is actually a pretty poor example for this, because combo decks don’t really rely on interaction at all, and combo decks are a long, proud history in Magic. When your deck goes off, you sit on one side of the table playing it through, doing whatever it is that wins you the game, and your opponent just sits there and takes it for a while. One of the most gracious thing I’ve seen a Magic player do is start running their combo, look across the table to their opponent, show the opponent their hand, and then ask: “Do you need me to play this through?” It wasn’t asked as a snotty remark, it was a concession that watching a combo deck explode in your face fucking sucks. There’s nothing fun about watching someone play solitaire while there’s nothing you can do about it.

Every good deck in Yu-Gi-Oh! is a combo deck. It is designed to kill you regardless of your own actions. It has answers to all of your actions, so that you don’t even get to make them. I watched a guy recently throw down a combination of cards that removed everything his opponent had on the table and then swung in for lethal damage. Just to make sure his opponent had no answer. On turn three. If that were a Magic game, his opponent would be pissed, and rightfully so. When a Dragonstorm deck goes off, and a million things happen on one side of the board on turn three, and someone loses, it’s a piss-off. But what makes these two decks different is that the Magic deck was legal for a couple of weeks before the key cards rotated out of the format. And as soon as the deck was in the meta-game, for those few weeks people developed answers for it. Dragonstorm didn’t take the Worlds because it was amazing; it took the worlds because no one saw it coming. It was a masterful metagame call. In Yu-Gi-Oh! it’s just the state of the game.

So how do you make Yu-Gi-Oh! good?

Anyone who frequents my store and plays a lot of Yu-Gi-Oh! has already heard me rant about this, and it’s nothing I haven’t been saying for months. The first and most important fix is that the organized Yu-Gi-Oh! tournaments need to branch into multiple formats that focus on different releases for the game. The organized play that is currently standard should stay; there will always be people who love playing in eternal formats, and there’s nothing wrong with them. But for those players who are new to the game, or those who are looking for strategy that goes deeper than “My deck goes off, you lose,” having a smaller card pool makes the game a lot more entertaining. It slows the game down, as well, because the crazy one-turn-kill synergies exist spread out across a bunch of different sets from all over the Yu-Gi-Oh! timeline. My personal suggestion has been “Go two years back.” The cards that have been released in the past two years, those cards are legal in the narrower format; this includes all of the new booster sets, the new starter decks, the new premium packs, what have you. If it’s been printed and sent out in the past two years, you can use it. For a slightly broader format, go back five years.

Where the organized play goes, the casual play will follow. Though, to be honest, casual players will play whatever the fuck they want anyway, with no thought wasted on what’s going on in the tournament scene (past: this is a good deck, so I will thief it).

Konami needs to rethink the way their sets are released, as well. Each set needs to have something to offer to whatever decks they want to support from now on. If Gadgets are going to be a thing, every set is going to need to see some Gadgets. If Lightsworn is the new hotness, having some Lightsworn cards in each set doesn’t seem like a terrible idea. But it’s more than deck archetypes, too. The Magic guys have figured out what players want from their game, and they try to provide those things in spades. There are cards for guys who love smashing face, and cards that need some creative thought to break into something good. There are cards for people who love to lock their opponents down, and cards for people who want to stop that from happening. When you know what your players want, and you design your game’s expansions around those things, the sets you produce become a lot more cohesive. Also, understanding the new formats is important so that you can design cards for each of them; giving the eternal formats a bomb (for the sake of funny, let’s say there’s a new Toonworld printed that is strictly better than the current Toonworld), the narrower formats aren’t going to be able to use it effectively, which is fine, but you need to provide the narrow format guys some love, too.

And having a healthy testing/development team together to make sure that the cards aren’t broken before you release them is a much better strategy than simply banning the cards that are too powerful. When a card like Judgement Dragon is able to take over the game because it is simply that good you probably shouldn’t have released the card in the first place. This happens occasionally in every large-format card game (Bitterblossom, I’m looking at you…), but the chances of it happening are far reduced when you limit the synergies available in most organized play events. Fully testing your cards before you send them out to the public is a good way to trim down an already glutted banned list, reducing the number of cards that cost $700 two days ago and are now just a chunk of foiled cardboard.

Mixing a narrower format with better set design increases card relevance, too. When I open a pack of Legend of the Five Rings cards, there is something relevant in that pack for nearly everyone. Honestly, though, L5R is a bad example of card relevance; a lot of people only play in a single clan, and if you don’t get any good cards for your clan in that pack, it was a useless pack for you. It’s still more likely to be good than a Yu-Gi-Oh! pack! This is because commons and uncommons are relevant in L5R in ways that they are not in Yu-Gi-Oh!. The number of good common cards in Yu-Gi-Oh! in the whole history of the game is drastically close to zero. The few that are “good” are often barely playable, and will more likely than not be replaced by a Ghost Rare that does a better job of whatever it was the common did. Making each card relevant is important in a collectible card game, because it increases the chances that the metagame will need to account for it. If every card in even a single set is relevant to the most common format, then the number of deck archetypes will explode.

Honestly, people should be able to play a game directly out of two packs of cards. I should be able to sit down with two packs and play a game of Yu-Gi-Oh! against an opponent who has done the same thing, and have a good time doing it. This is the narrowest of all possible formats (barring playing out of a single pack, which in Yu-Gi-Oh! would be impossible because of the size of a pack). When you can have fun playing out of fresh packs of cards, your game will probably be good.

*For the record, I don’t own the copyright to anything except what I’ve written on this post. Every game I’ve mentioned belongs to someone else, and I am making no threat to their copyright at all.