I’ve recently completed a couple of very interesting puzzle games that, at first glance appear to be typical side-scrolling platformers.

First one I encountered was Braid, that has puzzles based on manipulation of time. The basic tool at your arsenal is the ability to rewind time. To move the clock backwards. Undo your mistakes, undo your deaths. This is coupled by environments where more complex time manipulation is available – objects that are unaffected by your meddling. Objects that are affected by the echo of your actions. Objects that are tied by your spatial location to their temporal position. And all coupled by the tale of you trying to find The Princess. Who is still in another castle. It’s a beautiful game, with perfect music and perfect graphics. Touching to the bone.

The second game is Eversion, which is a very classic platformer, where the objective is to find The Princess, and the way to do that is to collect all the gems in the worlds and complete all the worlds. And to be able to do that, you need to traverse sideways, altering your perception of things, entering darker and darker dimensions, where at first the clouds become solid, then time stops … then something seems to be after you.. it’s a sugar-coated game that starts with a H.P. Lovecraft quote. Should tell you enough.

So, because the previous entry actually provoked some sort of a reaction (even if it was just “I want to hear more about…” on IRC it was still more than I’d heard in ages) from my ever-vigilant co-writer Spikey, here’s the complete (except for the secret things that I cannot say) rules for the “between games” advancement in the Century game.

First things first – Century uses a variant of White Wolf’s WoD system – scale of things is 1-5. In stats, 1 means poor, 2 means average, 3 is good, 4 is great, 5 is as good as it gets. In skills, 1 is amateur, 2 is professional, 3 is great, 4 is an expert, 5 is one of the top names in the world. Instead of the typical WoD attributes, the ones in Century are a bit more ambiguous. Things like “control” and “sanity” and “coldness” And skills are more open, and decided by the players themselves. Some example skills include “spy”, “gentleman”, “British” and “poet”

Between games, time passes. A lot of time, in fact. Years. One of the big points of the campaign is that time passes and things happen. It’s spanning over a century, what do you expect?

So, in a typical game, you are playing your soldier type and go from one game session to the other and buying new shooting skills because that’s what soldier types do and it pays off to concentrate your skills to get bigger skills to shoot bigger things. But in Century, it’s a bit different.

First of all, the game sessions decide the direction your character is heading towards. Using the soldier example above. You start your character in 1943 game as a nice 20 year old British soldier, the game session theme being war and all that, and the GM saying that you need to have a character that can be in the battlefield. So you create your soldier type dude with skills like “killing and maiming” and “playing poker”

The next session you participate is the 1950 one that happens to be a social game where the characters are there to broker a deal with some industrial mogul. In a typical game this is the point where the guy who is playing the soldier type starts complaining that he will not have anything to do in the game because it’s a social session and he’s playing the shoot-em-up character.

But, in Century, he’s actually playing exactly the character that is useful for the game, since his character has changed enough over the 7 years to be the perfect fit. This means that you, as a player, will have to steer the character to become a diplomatic industrialist type during the 7 years that happen in between. Not complain about how your character doesn’t fit the theme.

Sounds strange and I admit that grasping the concept can be difficult, but in Century life, as it usually is in reality, is unpredictable. Looking back 7 years in my own life I couldn’t have pinpointed where I was, I most certainly am not where I was planning to be. This holds true for shorter periods of time as well, like last year. If someone had asked where I was going to be this summer, I would have never guessed that I was back working at that one company that I quit 3 years ago.

So “I used to be a sniper 7 years ago, but now I’m a successful businessman” isn’t really that huge a deal, once you think from the perspective of “I’ve heard stranger stories”. Life just sometimes gives you a different path than the one you were planning on taking.

The other part of life being unpredictable is the fact that for each year in between games, your character gains an experience, in form of drawing a Tarot card from the deck. This represents how that paritcular year has been for the character. So, you draw a card that represents wealth, you have had monetary luck (or something). Draw “Worry” and that has been the theme of your year.

Now, the system allows leeway in how you read these things. It’s more or less up to the player to interpret the card, but from what I’ve seen so-far, the people who “let go” of their character during this phase are the ones who have enjoyed it more than those who have clear “my character will be doing this” attitude.

Prime examples include a “I will never marry” type of a girl, who during her card-phase picked cards like “love”, “happiness” and such and found her party-girl type married to a loving man, who passed away just before the game session she participated next. And the bittered angsty type who couldn’t find his place in the world, until he by some odd chance found his place and purpose in the First World War, suddenly becoming quite stable and clear minded.

There are of course some players who want to keep their character the way they’ve been, and while I don’t mind it, I have a fear that they’re not getting as much out of the system as those who are actually just letting life take hold of their characters during the time when they’re not playing.

The reason I brought up character stats back there is that during the Tarot phase, your characters statistics change. If you draw a minor arcana, you can move one dot from one stat to another, or from one skill to another (but not from a stat to a skill or vice versa) and if you draw a major arcana, you get one additional “dot” to your skills. So, quickly you can see that your skills will increase over time, but your stats will only change.

Oh, almost forgot the rule that you can kill your character at any point of the Tarot drawing. No-one has yet used this option, but I can see it being a valid option at some points of some character arcs, so it’s there, in the rules.

And it should be mentioned once again that there are rules that I am not allowed to talk about, either because the players haven’t researched them yet (I’ll get to that in another blog post) or because I’m not allowed to talk about them.

Until next time

The first hundred days have passed. Welcome to the next nine hundred.

The following post is incoherent, but so am I.

The Century game (the site is in Finnish, sorry about that). Oh, The Century game. I am not allowed to talk about it in full because of some meta-rules that are in effect, that for example require me to answer any and all theories (with a few exceptions) the players come up with the phrase “that’s an interesting theory.” But, what I can talk about without the rules preventing are the general things about the system and such.

Doctor Alexander Smythe

The underlying idea of the Century game is about 15 years old. Well, the first bits of the idea that eventually molded into games like Rakennus, Snake Urn and others. Might be better to say that the underlying metaphysical groundwork has been done over a dozen years ago.. As one of my old friends/enemies commented last winter “It was funny to read the game website and notice all those familiar names.”

The system used for the game is about 5 years or so old, with some fine-tuning happening over the years. Players have a spread of tarot cards in their hands that they play to deal with challenges that aren’t  with descriptive texts that they play – if the text on the card fits the situation, it’s a success. (or a dramatic failure if the player has really bad luck). If it doesn’t fit, then numbers come to play. Really simple and you have a sort of a feeling of foreboding. You know you’re going into a dangerous situation and the only cards you have in your hand are “The Fool” and “Death” … if you’re planning to survive, it’s going to be an extreme solution.

A lot of the things in the game are practical solutions to things I’ve done wrong over the years when running games. One of those things that are worth mentioning is the persistence of the game world. A big mistake (not the only one, but one of them) I remember making with my large-scale Vampire LARP campaigns was trying to keep the world persistent between the games. It drains you a lot as a GM when someone calls you on a weekend and asks if it’s okay for their character to go explore the dark mill on the hill between the games. In Century, the problem is solved with a certain level of asynchronism. To explain that, I probably need to get to the basic structure of things first.

There are currently around 15 players in the campaign. Each one of them is playing one character, until that character dies (or something Worse happens). Each character starts as a 20 year old. Each game session represents a year in the game world. So the first game session was set in 1912, the second one in 1913, and so on. In a single game session, there are 2 or 3 players present, so not every player is in every game session. This means that your character might be in the sessions of 1934 (as a 20 year old), 1940 (as a 26 year old), 1944 (as a 30 year old) and gets killed at the end of that one.  The next time you come play it might be the session of 1950, and you’ll be playing a new 20 year old character.

The players can interact directly with the world only during the game sessions they are playing on. There is no calling me on the weekend after someone has been playing in the 1944 game and telling you about it “Ooh, I heard interesting things about the game, I think my character will be doing this now.” I might be interested in hearing what you have planned, but the world won’t react to it until it’s your turn to play. This creates a certain asynchronism to the world – your characters’ actions during the years you have missed have to be retconned into reality when you come to play. And you are limited by what others have said before you (there is an interesting example of this with a married couple of characters with kids, who decide what happens to their marriage depending who happens to get to the game session first).

So basically, the game session begins with the character (and player) catching up the “lost years”, year by year. This is another neat use of the tarot system, basically drawing a tarot card, and interpreting the year through the card. It becomes impossible to plan what’s happening beforehand, which again eliminates the need to try and preplan.

And from preplanning, I think I need to get back to the “only 2 or 3 players are present on a game session” thing.

Meeting on a riverboat on the Nile

This part of the game design is a sort of a reaction to the utterly disastrous Changeling campaign I ran. Timetables were impossible to manage as everyone was busy with everything. The solution? Large enough player base with limited amount of people per game session and a fair system so people who haven’t been playing a lot/lately have priority over those who have been playing more. Each game session is a story, with a beginning, middle and an end, so there are no cliffhangers that continue from one session to another. You come when you have time, you play for a session and then you don’t have to worry until you feel like coming back. Also, the styles of the games vary a lot. From horror, to spies, to temporal paradoxes, to P.G. Wodehouse, to urban fantasy. So I won’t get bored running the same kind of thing for three years.

Which brings me to another thing worth mentioning (that I kind of touched on already). In Century, the game forces things on your character. You are not in total control of who you’re playing. If a game session you’re attending says that the characters are assassins sent to kill Rasputin, the Mad Monk, it means that your character has been chosen for the mission because he or she is the perfect match for it. By attending the game you’re basically saying “yes, I’d like my character to live such a life that in the year 1917 she would be perfect to send to Russia to kill Rasputin”, even if in 1913, the last game she was a pacifist noblewoman. Add to that the fact that the “themes” of the years in between games are decided by drawing cards from a tarot deck, and you’ll find out that life gets nice and unpredictable.

A lot of things still need to be explained, but…

90 games to go. 896 days, 11 hours and then some. I have plenty of time to explain more to you later.

(pictures used in post (c) 2010 Sebastian Pensasto, used with permission)

Oh boy, here I am again shooting far and wide for the sake of perhaps hitting something unexpected out there.

Once again, in an episode of particularly excellent tabletop roleplaying session, I was reminded of two things.

First, characters. Don’t ever resort to mundane characters, be they NPC’s or primary ones. Always incorporate stuff made for legends told later. Always aim for potential towards legends.

Second, as much as you want to design excellent gameplay, don’t let the gameplay break the game flow. Don’t force players to play the game mechanics when there’s a gameplay moment to remember either about to occur, or has already began rolling forward. It’s stretching the concept, but imagine gamemaster snagging character sheets (or availability of inventory menus etc) away from players when something sudden occurs. Things should flow from reflexes at such point. Drop everything and go into instinctive mode.

Sudden occurrence is a funny beast, as it makes us forget stuff we haven’t got programmed down into our spine and forces us to react with what we have at hand, with whatever we can come up with in a few seconds timeframe. If you go “Err……” and bell goes bong, your character very clearly froze because he doesn’t know his strengths yet and is about to get a deserved kicking before he is able to join in the fun accordingly. It’s also a light slap on players cheek – or dare I say learning experience? In situations calling for experience and mastery of character skills, that’s where you measure your character. That’s obvious, and has always been. I’m just advocating it should not happen solely in some damn sheet or a menu we stop to oggle at RIGHT WHEN SHIT SHOULD BE FLYING. Excuse my french. Just take the player further into the game, away from reading numbers and ponderous thoughts when he should be in a hurry and playing by feel. Yes, yes, game mechanics everywhere incorporate initiatives and such derived from your character stats, but what did I just say? What?

No, if you don’t remember a particular trait of your character that would be handy in situation, then your character just isn’t kickass enough to react with it. If your character knows that going for a nightly jog in those black woods full of bloodshot eyes is a good reason to keep a gun in hand, then all the better. He at least has the gun when suddenness jumps up and grabs his face when his player doesn’t expect it. Of course, if he is new to such circumstances, chances are he’ll pull the trigger and shoot in completely wrong direction. End result might as well be a companion character in same party who now carries a character trait called limp, because of a certain instance of a epileptic squirrel accidentally falling on some new guys face. It’s something to laugh about afterwards.

During the time spent with a character, you start remembering stuff he or she is made of. That’s obvious. When the player knows his characters individual traits, weapons, magical items and whatever by second nature, is it wrong if I claim that’s when – and only when – you could call your character experienced. Why not extend that backwards into game mechanics? Measure experience through survived moments of legend. WW2 fighter pilots marked their experience on their planes, didn’t they? They damn well remembered every moment behind each kill mark. Turn your character sheet from an excel sheet into a character memoir worthy of saving. You’re playing story, so you’re part of it and with every influence you force upon game world, you’re also writing it.

When the experience begins to grow measurable, it’s also when you connect with your character and it becomes dear and memorable to you, having gone through quite a bit of legends through mishaps, mistakes, victories and awesome saving throws. Like feminists in sixties called for women to burn their bras, gamers should burn their inventory and action menus or character sheets when they become just a part of game mechanic instead of game itself.  Obviously, all this is as much wrong as it is true, as different people enjoy different games. I firmly believe the wanted mood and atmosphere might have their say on game mechanics as well. If I, lone shepherd helping a stray puppy in woods come across a pack of undead Spetsnatz in the woods, first thing you would see me doing has damn well nothing to do with dices or inventories. I would very much prefer to incorporate such raw instances of reaction in games, seeing what happens after the initial smoke settles and brain is back in gear, even if it results in registering shit in pants and a dead puppy in hand for being handled as a club against improbable enemy.

In the game we played, characters left legends behind and game mechanics never rose to break the flow, even though they carefully churned their cogs and wheels underneath.

A day not too long ago I was playing Fallout 3, and while enjoying the game itself, I started to feel some distance between the iconic Fallout and myself. Or was it between the iconic world and Fallout 3 itself? Get off my lawn, you say. How could that be? It is set in that world!

After the obligatory self-study of “am I a bad person now?” sort, it began to dawn on me.

It is the viewpoint of our protagonist. Not the story with its flaws – that’s just a good overall scapegoat for elusive “wtf was wrong there? -observations one can’t easily put a finger on. Just the viewpoint.

Fallout 3 thrusted us into first person perspective, dropping us face first into the groundlevel with rabid dogs, madmen and fallen society at fingertips. All very close range, often running to our face to maybe shoot it off or perhaps to just eat it, and not in the partychick kind of way.
On paper, close personal sweaty action in Fallout world sounds good, but there seems to be a trap. It actually gets too personal. Player does not get a chance to distance himself from the world on personal level, whereas in previous Fallouts the distanced isometric view gave the player a wide look at desolate expanses, with close human factors essentially removed. It is easier to feel hopeless and alone there, death of ground itself overburdening your senses. First person perspective keeps you too aware and too busy and too there and now to see the forest from trees.
That contrast between how I experienced those games screams essence of Fallout world to me – it is a world of bigger perceived pictures, because individuals and tangible details have been burned off the face of the earth. To experience the broken world, you must look further into distance, lest you notice the remnants of humanity mixed in the sand under your boots. Every now and then a part of that world in pain comes around the corner and violence is exchanged or traded, but all that is part of the land, too.

Again, story itself is almost irrelevant to this basic feel of the world. I’m guessing it has to do with the amount of visual information versus some curious aspect of the game world. Wanted mood and feel of it, I think – you could make a Fallout game in first person, but it should feel and sound more dreamlike and rid of distractions we could keep ourselves busy with. Remove the chance to behave and react with things like in normal world, and we get the needed detachment and alienation. Feed the world with noises of inhuman world and clear absence of sounds from human life, remove visual cues of the same human life as we know it, force us to make choices that sidestep our learned behaviour and you’ll catch us with our pants in knots around our ankles. I urge you to play Defcon and compare your findings. Causes and effects ending in no resolutions.

Also, remember how Another World felt like when you played it for the first time? That game crept up your neck like a f*cking spider.

After nuclear fire, whole humanity is cleansed into an abstraction, a pieced-together non-person memory we can try to understand and let ourself feel something about. Actual individuals we come across are deteriorated into huddled masses in desert – not humans to relate with, not with our minigun ever-obediently waiting for our choice. They pose either a threat or means of survival.
In that sort of a world stories don’t carry weight, because story is always a human journey. A survived journey in a world that glows in the dark is series of events you didn’t die of, and that’s quite enough – they form a memorable half-story by themselves, regardless of the order you survive them. Play the world and become part of it.

Since everyone keeps asking me if I got laid off… There are still two editors writing for the-cow.net. So no, I didn’t. Spikey did.

It’s been a while, and I feel like a worthless punk for not writing since ages. Luckily, now that I got laid off, I have free time and a distinct lack of work stress and
I feel like some proper bloggery and ranting is in order.

Also, the original blog post about communicating game worlds to the player found itself amazingly an alternate home in printed form at Gamesauce magazine, so this kind of works as a live sequel as well. As always, you’re free to disagree, and I hereby encourage you to voice your opinions and thoughts in comments. I’m not writing down the truth, just my view of things as I feel about them right now.

I have this urge to rant about how wrong game developers are with faking humans. I mean that damned AI that’s almost a trope in itself these days. Disregarding the few very good examples out there proving that NPC characters can be done right, I’ll concentrate on the bad shit since it’s much more rewarding to fling around.

So, those rigidly moving robot-like depictions of humanity that developers try to make more human by adding more bones, more polygons, more shaders, more realistically simulated hair blowing in wind and more this and more that. Yet they still keep acting very much unlike human, while looking more and more like human. No, that gets just creepy.

More graphical fidelity you shovel on screen, higher it sets the bar for animation, facial expressions, voice acting, effects and .. well, anything. More it represents reality in our headspace, more we spot the inconsistencies and you can be sure they stand out and break that careful world construct. I’d rather see blocky graphics with fluid likeness of life infused all over than all the graphical provess with limited animation on those photoreal humans. Of course, gamers are used to the videogame looks and accept a certain level of “videogameness” as part of the media, but if you want to push the narrative limits of visual information, you need to have a broad vision to account everything it’s begging to be pushed with. Uncanny valley is most often associated with human realism, but in reality it looms over everything we’re able to associate with any close matches in our own experiences. It could be from our daily lives or from our favourite movies – object of association doesn’t matter. Just the very existence of association matters. If you try to deliver associable visual experience, it damn well should match as a complete package and not just as isolated masterworks of programming that’s easy to present as slides at GDC.

I honestly believe we could get away with less graphical fidelity, and instead the fake humans should pose at least a few common human traits, or flaws if you want to play dirty with words. Human flaw – or what makes us human from outside observers perspective – is how we react, mostly.

Yeah, I’m distilling observable “human” qualities to observed reactions, disregarding polygon counts and texture resolutions and other whizbang trickery engineer-driven development so commonly focuses on. You can have the world-class animation but keeping it alive is the hard part. We bang our toe, we break from being perfect beings (observed as rigidity!) for a split second, reacting with a sound, facial expression, and some gestural motions. We are animals, for a second. We come upon a closed door in unknown hallway and we react by glancing at the door handle, maybe trying if it opens. We are curious monkeys. We don’t just walk against it and tread the ground with futile steps against the collision. If the door doesn’t react back, we disregard the door and focus our attention elsewhere. We don’t have the patience of statues. If the leader of our group isn’t going anywhere, we start looking at some things, fiddling with others. We keep ourselves busy even when we’re idle by definition, by reacting with glances and manipulation of random stuff. We are playful children! Of course, by “we”, I mean a random bunch of AI posse following the leader, i.e. player. Remember, player observes you, the AI, and gets suspicious if you look real but act like a robot with four hinges and a three-line script for brain. Player starts to look at the videogame flaws instead of human flaws.

What’s human, anyways? Scratch that. What’s human in drama? We want to play (and make) games that brings a feeling of something larger we can lodge ourselves comfortably into. It’s a vague term in itself, but sense of drama is what we want to push into the undercurrents of gameplay – the communicable game world player “gets” without having to read it up in the manual. Rules of drama dictate the basics, and few of them could be considered here. Character has a goal, and is driven towards it with a motivation. We don’t have to go to deeper stuff with midpoint-slumps and conflicts with antagonists and so forth, because we’re not dealing with primary characters here. Primary character is the player, and that bastard breaks all our careful rulesets anyways. Player is the uncontrollable variable we hate to incorporate to our games. Anyhow. AI represents the secondary characters, and because gamestudios are so often tech- and sellingpoint/marketablefeature-oriented, AI – as a companion – is in most cases a blind, daft sidekick that stops to loop its idle animation when player stops, and will resume moving when player moves. Unless it gets stuck in obstacle, in which case you’re again playing with videogame flaws, not human flaws. ANYHOW. If you have AI companion throughout the game, or even only during parts of the journey, it should appear to have its own reasons to tag along, its own reasons to be suspicious of you, ambitions to play you for its own goals and even backstab you after calling you dear in the night. All that because that’s human. We’re mentally dirty, incomprehensible beasts with varying views of world and of each other.

Yes, it takes more care, more focus and more work to develop but in the end, wouldn’t it feel more rewarding than just witnessing next-next-generation shader tricks or ten thousand polygons more on-screen?

Which route do you take, technical or human?

It doesn’t take huge elaborate systems to bring a feeling of those things happening around the player, that sense of hidden layer beneath the more readily apparent game surface our player and world is limited to interact on. It’s that layer under game world where player can’t go, from where he should get this feeling of being subject to observation. Perhaps even a feeling of being judged, silently.

It’s in the script, in dialogue, in animation and in the AI system, with some thought to tie everything together.
We observe details consciously, but sums of details we understand subconsciously. Emotion is built from subconscious, no?

Oh boy, the awesomeness of it all. Century (Part 2) kicking off in a couple of weeks, slowly getting the hang of running Pathfinder, and restarting the 4th Edition beer-and-pretzels game.

And with awesome gaming I notice I seem to be getting more and more ideas that I want to put to paper. And of course the one that I’m thinking most of is the College of War (or the-cow, as the domain name is known). Getting new cool ideas about what I want from the system again, and what I want from the game. How it would run and what would be the essentials.

To those who don’t know, CoW is, in it’s current form, a revisioning of generic fantasy genre through the frontier mysticism of the American West. It’s still fantasy at the core, but the tone is gone quite far from the dragons and knights in shining armors of the generic fantasy setting.

CoW is about colonial rule, concepts of freedom, facing the unknown, surpassing all expectations. And Magic, Mayhem and all that stuff. It’s D&D without the dungeons and the dragons. I’m pretty much just rambling because I need to pour all this inspiration I’m getting somewhere and this seems like the perfect place to do that.

Stay tuned.

I am looking at my new wall calendar that I’ve filled up with my schedules for the upcoming year. At this point, I know for certain about 30 game sessions I’m going to run and the approximate dates for them. The first of these sessions is on the 27th March, when I start running a campaign I could consider a worthy finale to my gaming career, if I manage to run it through and if I would end my gaming career to that.

Century game. The basic idea is a  campaign that runs for a Century in the game-time. With the world moving at a fast pace between game sessions and games being individual one-shots from the lives of these people. First of the games is set in April of 1912, on a boat called Titanic, and things move on a steady pace from there on.

By the end of the year, we should be around World War II. I’m quite hyped about all this.

I’ve been running my Summer D&D campaign for a while now, using the Fourth Edition ruleset, and even if the game does feel like playing MMO: The RPG at times, there are some things it does do really well that I will be importing to future D&D style games I’ll be running (using the Pathfinder system, not 4E)

Skill Challenges

The Skill Challenge system of 4E is brilliant in the simplicity. In a way, a well-designed skill challenge plays out like a combat encounter – everyone contributing by doing what they’re good at, without the situation sliding into a series of “I’ll do X!” “me too!” “I’ll try as well.” Each skill use moves that situation forwards, telling a part of a story how a goal is eventually reached, making each new use of skill interesting. Each failure has some consequences, but they rarely end up in a dead end (pretty much like combat rarely ends in the game ending). It’s a nice way to incorporate mechanics into roleplaying situations.

You’re tracking a killer in the city – You let the GM know that your character is using Diplomacy to ask around for possible clues. You roll – if you succeed in the roll, you gain info in the course of the scene and things move forward. If you fail, something else happens. Maybe you stir the wrong crowd or interrupt a group of thieves while asking around. Something cool still happens, even if you don’t make progress in the original plan to track the killer. Some other character then might use his Athletics check to frame a scene where he physically chases the man through the streets. Followed by someone tracking him using his appropriate skills. And so on. If your party fails too many times in total before finding the killer, he might have killed again, or prepared for your arrival. Succeed well enough and the heroes catch him off-guard.

Long term goals (A Skill Challenge might take days or week of in game-time), individual smaller scenes happening from player decisions, successes and failures that actually matter. Not just pre-planned encounters where no matter what the players do, things end up the way the plot demands. Or even if they do, there are at least a couple of different variations of how things happen depending on what they PCs do. Importing this into the 3rd edition isn’t any sort of a problem.

Enemies aren’t symmetrical with the PCs

In d20 system (that is, games like Pathfinder or D&D 3rd edition), everything is made using the same model – roughly you use same rules for player characters as you do for a goblin. If the enemy fighter uses a trick in combat, that same trick should be available to an equally tough player character. If he uses a move normally reserved for some other class, like a rogue, then he must have taken a level in rogue, which means he’s not as effective a fighter as he would be if he hadn’t. And so on. In 4E, the player characters are nothing like the rest of the things they come across in their adventures. An Orc from a certain tribe might use some strange combat move that fits the style he’s been described, even if it cannot be achieved by any of the normal combat tricks the players can buy their characters.

So when you come across a drow priestess who looks gleeful when you bring one of her soldiers to a near-death condition and on her next turn, she causes the poor henchman to explode into a million spiders, you accept this power. When the agile blade-master dances around you and counterattacks your counterattacks, it isn’t something you can buy with some feats or power choices. But you accept because it fits the enemy’s style, not wonder what levels of which character class he must have taken to get there.

Looking at the situation another way – the player characters are unique when it comes to levels and things like that. There aren’t any other 3rd Level Bards in the game, sure there might be some other people with similar abilities, but the only ones developing using the level scale are the players’ characters. An NPC’s skillset would be completely different, and expecting anything else would be a grave mistake.

There are also the Minions that are there to give even low-level characters the feeling of being powerful enough to fight a lot of monsters at a time. While I do appreciate the minion mechanic, it’s just not something that I’ll be using in the Pathfinder campaign. Importing the rest into the 3rd edition will be a huge effort, but hopefully pays off when the enemies become increasingly interesting to fight against.

Dynamic combat

The curse of the 3rd edition and variants is the fact that if you stand still and hit the other guy with your sword, you’re getting optimal results. Moving around is bad for your efficiency in battle. In 4E, the thing is to keep moving, gaining advantage from position, shifting, pushing, pulling, sliding your enemies or yourself. Using the terrain to your advantage… Heck, even swinging from one bookshelf to the other using a chandelier. Movement, movement, movement.

And there are these things happening around you – walls moving, rooms filling with water, giant boulders chasing you down narrow corridors. All while there is a countdown going on for a summoning ritual to complete that you have to stop or you’ll be in big trouble. While this all has been possible in 3rd Edition, it really became clear in the Fourth, where a normal combat encounter is really boring if you just keep hitting enemies with your powers.

One of the first awesome things that I realized about this with 4E was the new dragons, who at the moment they’re dropped to 50% hitpoints, roared in fury and hurled flames at the party in retaliation, even when it was not their turn to act. Then I noticed the goblins that move around when an attack missed them, literally ducking away from the blows to another spot. And soon it was apparent that the whole combat situation had moved from “I hit you, you hit me” fest into something where things were happening all the time and everyone was constantly moving. Another great discovery was the concept of marking enemies – you make the enemy want to attack you instead of the weaker, more vulnerable, target. This means that there is a mechanical reason why every enemy doesn’t attack the wizard first.

Transporting this feeling into Pathfinder will be harder, but doable – making the surroundings such that it becomes advantageous to notice what’s available to your use there, and forcing everyone to move around are a good start. And as I’ll be redoing most of the creatures and enemies anyways, I’ll have to add some forced movement into their special actions. Some are simple, like the goblin who moves whenever an attack misses or the ogre whose blows push the characters a couple of squares away from them. Other things will need some serious thought and planning, like marking or reactive powers for some monsters.

Encounters need objectives

Sort of close to the previous two. And really not something that’s anywhere near exclusive to the 4th Edition, but something that got really highlighted by it. Just hitting things with swords is really boring. But if you have to make sure you get past the enemies before the cave collapses, that’s completely another reason to fight them. Or there is a summoning ritual going on that needs to be stopped. Or you have to convince the enemies that you’re really not their enemies before they kill you – all while not damaging them.

Encounters that can be failed even if the player characters don’t end up dead are really that much more fun. They make doing the sword dance worthwhile time after time. Even if you fail, you’ve tried, and maybe have a better motivation to do better next time. It isn’t really much of a game, if the possible results from a fight are: a) players die, game ends or b) players survive, plot continues as the GM plans.

Since this one isn’t really about the system, but the attitude towards Encounter design, it’ll be the easiest to implement into a Pathfinder game. Just takes work to make every moment count.