… There was one very consistent influence and theme on the early work of nearly everyone: Dungeons & Dragons. Not surprisingly, many of the people I corresponded with had been big fans of the game, and often had been drawn into design through it.

There were several factors at work here: the accessibility of the game, with very wide distribution and a low starting price (particularly compared to buying a computer!), a pathway to move from player to Dungeon Master (DM) using established modules and rules, to designer creating your own dungeons and rules, and plenty of pathways from there on toother RPG’s including so many computer-based variants.

The scans of early attempts at designing via pen and paper are a nice touch; the article is chock full of interesting little tidbits. It doesn’t seem terribly surprising that game designers would display a propensity for game design as youngsters — unlike, say, practicing medicine, making up games is a pretty normal part of childhood, even if the designers in Falstein’s piece took it a lot further than average playground hijinks.

Design Language: Designer Derivations [Gamasutra]

The most galling aspect of the game, from a pen-and-paper player’s perspective, has nothing to do with its mechanics at all. The mere existence of the app raises the question: Why is WotC’s online team taking time to code a Facebook game, when the promised
DM and player tools for 4th Edition remain in a state of limbo?

Frustration aside, I also found the time to do a mini-review of the game, which you can read at the link below.

Play day: D&D Tiny Adventures [Playwrite]

Ouch? You better believe it.

No one likes being sidelined, underpowered or having their class poorly understood by their peers, but these are the issues hybrids have had to endure since the dawn of massively multiplayer games. Is there a solution to the hybrid problem, or should players of classes like the Druid, Paladin and Shaman face the fact that they will never be balanced?Why World of Warcraft?
Observant folk will notice that the Druid, Shaman and Paladin are all classes from World of Warcraft. They also happen to be the top three attempts I’ve seen at experimenting with the concept – the jack of all trades, the offensive hybrid and the defensive hybrid, respectively. If you were going to design a hybrid class, these are the prototypes you’d experiment with.

I’m using World of Warcraft as my foundation for two reasons: 1) I have extensive experience playing the game (and I also use quite a few links to the WoW forums to illustrate my points) and 2) it shows how a designer’s original concept ultimately did not work in the framework of a game aimed at demographic that always wants to excel i.e. hardcore gamers. It’s important how “excelling” is measured, but we’ll get to that later.

For now, let’s discuss what “hybrid” means.

What’s a hybrid?
From dictionary.com: anything derived from heterogeneous sources, or composed of elements of different or incongruous kinds.

Okay, that looks confusing. Heck, I had to look up “heterogeneous” to remind myself what it means (from a foreign source, if you were wondering). Essentially, a hybrid is an entity made up of various, different elements.

But that’s, like, everything in the world! We need to tighten our definition and make it relevant to the classes in an MMO. So, let’s start with the “foreign sources”. Almost all fantasy MMOs revolve around the tank/damage/healer design, or “holy trinity” as it’s called in the business. These roles form the base classes, with the tank absorbing hits, the damage dealing it out, and the healer keeping the former two at their peak.

The history of the holy trinity can be traced back to pen and paper role-playing games, particularly Dungeons & Dragons. We’ll revisit this later, but for now, we have our sources.

So a hybrid can be a tank/healer (Paladin), a damage/healer (Shaman), a tank/damage (the soon to be released Death Knight) or all three (Druid). How do you go about balancing these hybrids against their one-dimensional counterparts?

1 + 1 = Learn to play
Balance, at its core, is mathematics – after all, the strength of your character is but a collection of numbers in a database. A common method to come up with initial values for statistics, damage, healing, etc. is to throw all the potential variables into a spreadsheet and graph the results of various scenarios. For example, you want a boss to take five minutes to kill using a party made up of the trinity – healer, damage and tank – and drain 50 percent of their resources. By tweaking the boss’ health, rate of damage, resistance to effects, etc., you come up with an opponent that this party can kill within the established time frame. With this prototype battle established, you can playtest to account for those annoying random occurrences or situations you didn’t factor into the original balance model.

Let’s pretend, mathematically speaking, a party needs to equal “3″ in order to be considered “average”. It cannot contain more than one of each class type. Pure tank, healer and damage classes all equal one, so adding one of each gives us our three.

How is a hybrid represented mathematically? Let’s say we have our damage/healer hybrid. It’s half a healer, so that’s 0.5. It’s also half a damage dealer, so that’s another 0.5. Added together, we get one. There’s no problem, right?

Wrong. That hybrid has to fill one of our three roles completely in order to equal our average party – or “3″. If our party already has a tank and a healer, then our damage/healer hybrid must fill the role of the damage dealer. But the class is only half a damage dealer, so our party equals 2.5. In essence, the party is below average, and will have difficulty completing our five-minute boss.

This is the problem, I believe, World of Warcraft encountered early in its life cycle. People aren’t looking for a class that can’t excel at anything. Sure, players of hybrids will say they’re fine being a lesser substitute, but when push comes to shove, no one wants to be left behind because a pure class does better.

What can we conclude from all this? Mathematically speaking, the “half and half” hybrid is flawed.

But games are more than maths, of course.

The practical hybrid
You can’t have a hybrid that’s as good as the classes it is based on. Why then, would you play anything else? There has to be compromise.

Let’s go back to D&D. Now I said that the holy trinity has its origins in this pen and paper RPG. This is somewhat true. D&D had its fair share of hybrid classes. The Cleric is the best example – a fighter that can heal. D&D has been around for over two decades, and the cleric has been a part of the game since 1st Edition. So how did the designers go about balancing the Cleric?

They didn’t. Wizards of the Coasts believes it’s done a decent job of putting the Cleric in its place in 4th Edition, but even in 3.5 the designers believed the class was “good at too many things”. While the class lacked the finesse of a fighter, it possessed its core strengths – armour, hit die (health) and weapon proficiencies. Add reliable healing and multi-purpose spells on top of this, and you have a class that, on paper, is unbalanced.

I’m going to tell you a little secret: this is intentional. Something you have to understand is, if you play a hybrid, you’re naturally asking for more responsibility. This is the compromise. You have to master two or more roles instead of one. As a result, the reward should be greater. For a hybrid to work practically, it has to be a little overpowered. But only if played well. Take out the min-maxing, add in your average player, and classes like the Cleric balance out because casuals and chronic re-rollers tend to focus on one role.

But we can’t take out min-maxing, because it’s the players at the hardcore-end of the things that are going to complain. As long as it’s fun and easy, casual players don’t really care where their class falls on the power scale.

Healing factor
Healing also factors into this intentional overpowering – grab 100 players of any MMO, and more of them will say “dealing damage is more fun than healing“. Hardly scientific, but look at it this way: sure, you might like healing your mates all the time, but you’re not healing those instance bosses to death. And when you grind, those 100s of mobs don’t die under the blinding light of your healing spells. No, when you boil it down, players like dealing damage over everything else.

So to “excel”, a class must be able to deal appreciable damage in Player versus Environment content, or be able to defeat another player before they can make proper use of their abilities. It is by this metric that players determine whether a class needs to be buffed or nerfed. Of course, this is only important in a game where damage is vital to winning.

WoW has no true hybrids
The designers of World of Warcraft decided not to take the D&D way of balancing hybrid classes. Once they clicked on to the fact that “half and half” hybrids don’t work, all classes that fit into the category were fundamentally changed. Now, with the correct spending of talent points, WoW hybrids can fill the roles of the primary classes they’re based on, as long as they’re willing to not be a hybrid.

Yes, some flexibility remains, but not enough to really be called a hybrid. No, the WoW hybrid is now a class that can change its role with talent points rather than a re-roll. It’s definitely a way of solving the problem, but put simply, WoW no longer has true hybrids.

A solution?
So, what have we learned? Pure “half and half” hybrids don’t work, because they cannot excel at any role; “half and half” hybrids must be overpowered to be worth playing; players like to hurt enemies more than heal friends; and damage is the metric by which most classes should be balanced, at least in the minds of players (who are your paying customers, after all).

I don’t think it’s possible to remove damage as a metric – it’s burned too deeply into our brains that hitting a bad guy with a sword or fireball is path of least resistance to victory, loot, fame, etc. We need to forget about roles and replace them with themes, centred on damage as an equaliser.

As such, next week I’m going to put forward a replacement for the holy trinity, and a way to have true hybrids, of a sort. No tank. No healer. Everyone has their time in the spotlight.

Update: I’ve seen a few readers post about talent respecs and how this makes the three World of Warcraft classes mentioned in the article true hybrids. Sadly, this is not the case.

I won’t argue that a Paladin can’t devote itself into the Protection tree and become a great tank, or throw everything into the Holy tree and not heal like a pro – because it can. Blizzard has done an excellent job of giving hybrids a new lease on life by allowing them to specialise as one of the holy trinity. But that’s not what the article is about.

Tell me this: if a Paladin is Protection-specced, you’re not going to ask it to main heal. True, it can technically do it – the skills are there. But is it optimal or even noteworthy? Not at all. It doesn’t matter that a Paladin, with the correct gear, can serve in both roles with a simple respec. The point is that it can’t be both at the same time, and remain competitive against classes/specs that are dedicated. The case I’m making is that a true hybrid is, balance-wise, not possible in any MMO.

I’d also urge everyone not to get the game and the theory confused. This isn’t about a particular class in a particular MMO being over or underpowered. If it helps, replace WoW and Shaman/Paladin/Druid with another MMO and its offensive hybrid/defensive hybrid/jack-of-all-trades.

Editor’s note: Kotaku Australia previously posted several articles detailing the real life experiences of a powerleveller. You can begin reading the three-part series here.

Full size version is at the link.

TF2 – D&D Alignment Chart [Halolz]

Being inspired by concepts is not just a good idea. When your skill reaches a high enough level, it becomes a state of mind. Start by analysing games in similar genres for good ideas. Dissect those ideas and learn from them. Then jump to similar games in different genres. Pen and paper role playing games and board games are a great next step.

A true epic-level master of concept-yoinking like Shigeru Miyamoto can take gameplay features from abstract activities like gardening. Pay attention to everything you see, from movies to conversations with friends to patterns in the ceiling tiles. Where do designers get the inspiration for new games? It’s all thievery.

OK, I’m not sure it’s fair to say it’s all thievery (it sounds so bad!), but certainly there’s a healthy dose of borrowing and reinterpretation. Anyways, even if you’re not a tabletop nerd, it’s worth a read through – there are some interesting ideas contained within.

The Adventurer’s Guide to Thievery [Gamasutra]

In addition to the Insider promotion, Wizards of the Coast is sponsoring a Worldwide Dungeons & Dragons Game Day tomorrow, Saturday June 7th, during which locations around the world will be hosting special events to help ease players into the new ruleset. Hit the jump for to find out more about this worldwide celebration!

Okay, maybe not that last one. But for the others, Gen Con is the place to be if you love the scent of sweaty dice and hot graphite. Sadly, the expo has been a purely overseas shindig, leaving Australians with little recourse but to cough up a few thousand for return air fare.

This year, things are different. Gen Con has made its way to our shores and, from June 3-6, the Brisbane Convention Centre will be geek central. Damn shame it’s not in Sydney, but what can you do?

If you register online, a full expo ticket will set you back $55, $66 if you buy on the day. Alternatively, you can get a single day pass for $16.50, or $22 at the door. There’s more pricing details on the site.

Even if you’re not interested in tossing around magic missiles, there’s much on offer for the excitable video gamer – a 200-person LAN tournament; previews of Star Wars: The Force Unleashed; recruiting by THQ and an appearance by Krome’s Steve Stamatiadis.

Big, fat action-filled press release after the jump.

PRESS RELEASE – FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Thursday 22nd May 2008

Over 500 Games and Tournaments at Gen Con™ Australia, Brisbane!

With over 500 games and tournaments, Gen Con™ Australia is the biggest ever interactive game-playing convention to be held in the country!

There’s something for everyone at Gen Con™ Australia, the best four days in gaming!

Australia’s first ever Gen Con™ gaming convention will kick off in Brisbane from the 3-6th July 2008 at the Brisbane Convention and Exhibition Centre. Gen Con™ is recognised internationally as the biggest and best games event in the world and with over 500 events and tournaments already scheduled, Brisbane’s convention won’t let visitors down!

Gen Con™ will be the venue for computer games tournaments, miniature war games tournaments, board games tournaments, card games tournaments, role playing tournaments, costume play competitions and parades, movie premieres, and lectures and seminars on games development.

Tickets are $16.50 online, in the preregistration period which closes in mid June, or $22 at the door. Once registered you can lock in your place in the competitions you plan to play in.

Hot tournaments to talk about are everywhere at the show. But you must sign up at www.genconoz.com as soon as you can, because places in the exciting events are filling fast. Major competitive tournaments include:
• Flames of War Asia Pacific Championships
• The last ever Games Workshop Grand Tournament for Warhammer 40k; Warhammer Fantasy; and Lord of the Rings
• Australian Championships for Mechwarrior and Heroclix: The winner of national MechWarrior competition will win a trip to Gen Con Indy 2008 to compete in the World Titles
• First time ever in Australia: Warmachine HardCore Championship
• Australian Championship of Rummikub, the winner of which will qualify to compete the world’s elite Rummikub champions in Europe for the world titles.
• QLD Championships for Settlers of Catan and Carcassonne
• Play board games all weekend long with the GenCon Oz Board Game Bonanza. Games include: Monopoly; Ra; Ticket to Ride; Settler; Kill Doctor Lucky; Robo-Rally; Blokus; Puerto Rico; Talisman; Memoir 44.
• Card games of every kind throughout the convention, including: Legend of the Five Rings; Magic the Gathering; Yu-Gi-Oh!; Pokémon; World of Warcraft

A line-up of events and participation-based tournaments has never been seen like this before in Australia. There will be something for everyone at Gen Con™ Australia!

Gen Con™ Australia Event Highlights include:
• The 4th edition Dungeons & Dragons will be showcased for the first time in Australia!
• Never before seen previews of Star Wars: Force Unleashed will be unveiled to the public!
• In-house movie theatres will be playing anime films from Madman Entertainment
• The Australian Movie Premiere of Dragonlance the Movie sponsored by Paramount Pictures
• Costume Play Competitions will be run every day on stage
• Daily Costume Play Parades will be held both morning and afternoon!
•
• See the largest gathering of collectable card games tournaments in Australia including: Pokémon, Yu-gi-oh!, World of Warcraft, Magic: the Gathering
• Roleplaying Gamers Association National Tournaments will be held including Dungeons and Dragons 4th Edition scenarios!
• See the largest collection of miniature war games tournaments in Australia including: Warhammer, Lord of the Rings, Mechwarrior, War Machine, Heroclix
• Play in our 200 player computer game tournament featuring: Counterstrike Source; Call of Duty 4; Starcraft; Warcraft 3
• Lectures and Seminars will be held throughout the convention on games development from key members of the Game Developers Association of Australia
• THQ will give demonstrations of their latest developments: Mercenaries 2: World in Flames and Lord of the Rings Conquest will be on display by Pandemic
• Experience the spectacular world of Vikings and Gods in Viking: Battle for Asgard by Creative Assembly
• Learn about the games development industry and see the latest games from companies such as: THQ, The Creative Assembly, Pandemic, Fuzzy Eyes, Halfbrick.
• THQ, QANTM, and Griffith University will all be actively recruiting at Gen Con™ Australia.
• Leading Comic Stores will be there, exhibiting rare and exciting products
• Live Podcasts will be featuring first-rate Australian guests and games

A host of special guests will be attending the convention. Attendees will not only be able to play every game imaginable, they will also be able to:

• Delve in the mythical mind of International New York Times Bestselling Author, Tracy Hickman author of Dragonlance trilogy.
• Listen to licensed Author Sean Williams, present on the novelisation of Star Wars: Force Unleashed, his latest exciting project
• Meet Steve Stamatiadis, co-founder of Krome Studios, and lead developer of exciting electronic games such as: Ty the Tasmanian Tiger; Star Wars Force Unleashed and many more.
• Go post-apocalyptic with Graham O’Neill, the author of several Warhammer 40k novels.
• Get animated with well known voice actors Chris Sabat (Dragonball Z), and Jason Marsden (Dragonlance).
• Meet other authors and celebrities including: David Nykl (Stargate); Marianne dePierres (Author); Kylie Chan (Author); and Mungo McKay (Undead)

The event will be launched with Friday Night’s Ruckus by the River on July 4 – a party to kick off the games! The event is open to all convention attendees and will gather gamers, geeks and pop-culture fans to the fore for some interactive fun!

Yes, I’m a huge nerd. Yes, this is a bit off-topic. As such, interested parties can keep reading after the jump, while everyone else can enjoy their social lives.With the passing of Gary Gygax recently, I went and made some improvements to the program. As a result it does all of the following:

• Tracks health, armour and initiative of multiple opponents
• Automated initiative step-through
• Can import data from PCGen PCG files
• Save fights in progress and restore them later
• Mass-add combatants
• Mass-roll Listen and Spot checks, including skill and stat bonuses

The last one is handy for rolling checks for PCs without their knowledge, or rolling checks for say, 50 orcs, without killing your arm.

It’s by know means perfect, but it managed an actual session without bugging out. Regardless, you use this program at your own risk. If you have any problems, post a comment and I’ll see what I can do. But no promises.

Note you’ll need the .NET Framework 2.0 to run it. If you’re using Windows Vista, then you’re good to go.

Download TrackWork 0.4 Beta (44KB)

1d6 of New Dungeons and Dragons Apps! [Maximum PC]

1971 – Gary Gygax and Jeff Peren create Chainmail, a fantasy miniatures game implementing rules from standard medieval gaming, adding elves, giants, halflings, and other elements borrowed from sources such as Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings.

1972 – Dave Arneson visits Gygax in order to demonstrate the game that would become Dungeons & Dragons.

1973 – Gygax and Don Kaye found Tactical Studies Rules – TSR.

1974 – TSR publishes the first edition of Dungeons & Dragons.

1976 - Willie Crowther, an early D&D player, creates a text-based game called Crowther’s Colossal Cave, which would eventually morph into Adventure, which was a direct influence on the creators of the ultimate text-based game, Zork.

1977 – Young Richard Garriott attends a sumer computer camp, where he earns the nickname Lord British and is exposed to Dungeons & Dragons for the first time. Soon he would be hosting popular D&D weekends at his parents house.

1978 – Roy Trubshaw and Richard Bartle create the first MUD – Multi-User Dungeon. It is the precursor to the modern MMO.

1980 - Richard Garriott releases one of the first computer role-playing games, Akalabeth: World of Doom. This year also sees the release of Dungeons & Dragons Computer Labyrinth Game, the first computer game using the D&D license. as well as Garriott’s Ultima I: The First Age of Darkness – a game that influences the RPG genre to this day.

1982 – The first Dungeons & Dragons console game is released for the Intellivision, simply titled Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. Dragonstomper is released for the Atari 2600, widely considered to be the first console RPG. Dragonstomper included gathering experience points and gold, random battles, and multiple ways to solve problems in the game.

1985 – TSR lets developers know that the AD&D license is up for grabs, with big names like Electronic Arts, Origin, and Sierra being beaten out by SSI (Strategic Simulations, Inc.). SSI would go on to create 30 AD&D games.

1988 – SSI releases Pool of Radiance, the first in the Gold Box series of D&D games, which allowed you to import your characters into subsequent games to continue your adventure.

1991 – The first graphical MMORPG is released via America Online – Neverwinter Nights. Based on the Dungeons & Dragons setting The Forgotten Realms, the concept of clans and PVP in online role-playing started here.

1996 – Ultima Online is released, its popularity paving the way for the enormous glut of MMORPG games we’re experiencing today.

1998 – A small company called BioWare gets put on the map when it releases the Forgotten Realms game Baldur’s Gate – incidentally the first computer game I ever reviewed on a professional basis.

2002 - BioWare releases a new version of Neverwinter Nights, featuring the ability for players to create their own modules and run them via the internet, effectively bringing the tabletop experience online.

2006 – Gary Gygax lends his voice as the Dungeon Master to Turbine for certain quests in Dungeons & Dragons Online: Stormreach, bringing the whole thing full circle.

While certainly not a complete listing, you can easily see how the creation of Dungeons & Dragons influenced the video game industry. Every time you gain hit points, or generate your numeric attributes, or choose what type of elf you want to be in the latest fantasy MMO, you’re dealing with concepts that spawned from that weekend in 1972. Even when you play a game that isn’t an RPG, there’s a good chance that someone involved in the creation of that game wouldn’t be here today if the works of Gary Gygax hadn’t inspired them to dream up their own fantastical worlds. He will be missed, but more importantly – he will forever be remembered.

Portions of this article were referenced from Brad King and John Borland’s excellent 2003 book Dungeons and Dreamers. The book explores gaming from those early days in Wisconsin up to today’s massive online communities, and is a must read for anyone interested in the roots of gaming.