A Game of Ice and Fire, Part 2: Character Creation

Alright, already a week behind on my weekly blog posts, but that's ok, we shall forge ahead.  Following House creation, our group went to make their characters.

Character Creation

In any roleplaying game, it is important for everyone to be on the same page character-wise.  Roles the obvious coordination groups focus on, someone to deal damage, someone to take damage, and someone to heal the damage  That's easy to figure out and largely depends on the mechanics of the game being played.  What I have been focusing on more recently are the backgrounds and histories of the characters.

Recently in my games I have started trying to implement character relationships more.  Having a general idea the characters' motivations and attitudes will help avoid possible awkward, party-splitting confrontations.  It also helps you tailor scenarios and adventures in such a way that the players should rarely say, "Why would my character care about this?", have their character walk off, and possibly a session you spent days planing out.  When making characters, I like to ask the players, "How do you know at least one of the characters and why would you be traveling/adventuring with them."  Playing in A Song of Ice and Fire, these area two really important questions, but they are also easy to answer.  The characters are members of the Noble House and can fill the important member slots of the House.  With our group, a lot of these relationships were created easily.  Let's look at the generic character concepts;

Elan: archer and scout
Lucius Hill: a bastard born assassin
Zoren "The Fort" Fortunus: a towering knight
Terrance Trevayne XVI: heir to the house

Based off these ideas, we easily got everyone a solid role in the House.  Elan would be leader of the Shadowkin archers that patrol the lands. Lucius is only about 14, the bastard of Lord Trevayne and being trained by the house assassin.  Zoren actually started as a sellsword, but we thought it would be fitting for Lord Trevayne to have bought his services and then have him knighted for his person guard.  Terrance is sort of the lynchpin for the other characters relationships, a la Paul Atreides in the Dune Novels.  He had his trainers and council members and mimicing that with the characters was easy to do.

So we have Elan, a master archer and scout who will travel with Terrance in a damage role and Zoren, a knight in full armor traveling as Terrance's protector and essentially a tank.  Those are the main combat characters.  Lucius doesn't really fit a combat role, since if he gets seen, he's probably dead.  Also, he's 14.  He will be useful in other scenarios, such as facilitating the removal of some of Trevayne's enemies while they are "safely" asleep.  Terrance himself is a talker, not a fighter, so that is another non-combat role.  However, just as Elan and Zoren are both combat oriented, Lucius and Terrance will be working together, mostly to further Terrance's positions in bargaining and power struggles.  All in all a fairly solid group concept-wise.


Next week, we get into a rather important point in the game, the first session.

iOS Smackdown: Hearthstone vs. Yomi

Last week, two games that I have been looking forward to for a while came out on iPad. They aren't exactly alike, but they have a number of similar qualities (e.g. physical card games with asymmetrical factions played on a mobile device against randomly matched human opponents) and I have been playing a lot of both since there release.

Hearthstone is a card game themed to the setting of World of Warcraft. In it, you choose one of nine classes, with a set of cards that represent abilities that a character in the video game might have, and build a deck out of those cards and whatever "neutral," or general use, cards you have unlocked by playing (or by paying, of course). You take that deck and are randomly matched against other real human beings to test your skill and luck. The game plays a lot like Magic: The Gathering, if it were been simplified to keep turns entirely asynchronous, and the changes make it accessible to pretty much anyone. I don't know that it's based on Magic, but it would be hard to convince me that there was no influence at all...

I've enjoyed it a lot in the first week. There are a lot of choices to make in the creation of a deck, and since the game has been in beta for several months, there are experts out there who are giving really great advice in that realm. I've seen some discussion of the game as basically an "over-simplification" of Magic, but I feel like much of what it loses in complexity, it gains in tactical variety. 

As a quick example, in Magic, there are several distinct and more or less sacrosanct phases to a player's turn. You get one, and only one, chance to declare attacks, and you generally don't get to choose the targets of the attacks. In Hearthstone, each creature you have can attack once per turn, but they can attack at any time, and you choose their targets. This creates a sort of puzzle each turn as you try to determine how you can regain control of the board. Or maybe you should just ignore the creatures and attack your opponent? What about cards that have to be attacked first, or really powerful assault creatures with low defense? It makes the game much more about control and tempo-exchange that it might otherwise be.

Other simplifications include a lack of turn interrupting abilities, an entirely automatic resource building mechanism, and automatic calculations and maintenance. The latter is an obviously great benefit to anyone who has tried to track bonuses, enchant targets, token creatures, and recurring effects in Magic. Hearthstone, being a computer program, keeps everything straight in a clear fashion, and even signals to you what cards you have left to play, what creatures you have left to use, and has a clear indication when you are out of options on a turn. 

But let's get back to interrupts and resources - these are two of my favorite "simplifications." First, there is only one way to interrupt someone's actions and react, and that is to have a specific kind of card called a secret, and to play it before the situation occurs, sitting and waiting for your opponent to take the activating action. It creates the kind of "Two untapped blue mana" dynamic you find playing against a Counterspell deck in Magic, where you never really know what you'll be able to do (when your opponent has a secret card sitting there), but it makes it simpler and doesn't rely on me remembering that you were planning on countering X, but not Y. As for resources, you gain one crystal each turn, and each crystal provides you with one mana each turn. There is no chance for mana drought, you don't have to concern yourself with your land-to-spell ratio when deck building, and your resources are consistent, which makes choosing and playing cards more straightforward.

As you play, you gain experience which unlocks a certain number of basic cards, and then you have to start winning matches to gain gold, the in-game currency that you can use to buy randomized packs of cards that you can add to your deck. Yet again, it takes a lot from Magic; these packs assure that you will get at least one rare card, and you can spend real cash to buy them (instead of just playing to win and gathering enough fake cash to do it). This can theoretically get expensive quickly, but the game is free to download and play, and you can easily never pay a cent to Blizzard.

Whereas Hearthstone is only available in a digital format (Mac, PC, or tablet), Yomi was a physical card game for years. There has been a web-based client for playing the game online against other players for a while, but it has taken until now to get the mobile version out. In Yomi, you choose a pre-built deck representing one of twenty characters in a fighting game, and you try to use your knowledge of your cards and your opponent's cards to out-guess and out-play whoever you are matched up against.

Yomi is dramatically different from any other game I have played, and that's coming from someone who has played a lot of games. Instead of a deck full of creatures, spells, equipment, and whatever else you find in a competitive, asymmetrical game like Hearthstone (or Magic), the cards here are basically a mix of attacks, throws, blocks and dodges. Each round, the players choose and play one of these cards face-down, and then simultaneously reveal what they played. Each kind of card interacts differently with the others: attacks beat throws and slower attacks, dodges avoid attacks and provide openings for counter-attacks, throws break through defensive moves and have a tendency to knock your opponent down, and blocks stop most of an attack's power while building your options for later through card draws.

As I mentioned, each character has a different mix of these types of moves, different amounts of damage with each, three (or more) different special attacks, and a handful of cards that can be played as "special moves" instead of during the normal double-blind showdown explained above. Yet, there is no deck-building or design involved; the creator and play-testers of the game have spent years getting the mix of cards and the specifics of the special abilities balanced. Some people might feel put off by this, especially since so many other asymmetrical card games provide some method of customizability. But it does make me question the importance of such a thing. There is a lot to be said for spending time examining the depth of one particular faction/deck and how it can deal with the others, as opposed to losing a match, swapping around cards, and genuinely hoping to build a deck that has 90% uneven match-ups in your favor (the other 10%, of course, wrecking your deck in unexpected ways). With Yomi, the "meta," a term used to refer to the majority attitude of the community playing the game, is not focused on how to get the most imbalanced build, but rather, how to effectively use the well-balanced builds that already exist.

One of the things that makes Yomi so very different from other card games that I enjoy is the way that strategy is implemented during play. In Magic, Hearthstone, Race for the Galaxy, Summoner Wars, and countless other games, each card plays a part in building your board up, eventually with the hopeful culmination in a tableau that will defeat your opponent (or at least, has led to their defeat during the building). In Yomi, you essentially play one card per turn, and even if a few others are added to make a combo, activate a special effect, or take advantage of an opponent playing poorly, the board is wiped clean and you start the next round with a blank slate in front of you. But truthfully, the slate is not blank at all... it's just invisible. You have to consider what your opponent has previously played, what their goal for this round might be, what cards they have left in their deck vs. their discard, what special abilities remain that might interfere with your plans, and how you can best play or manipulate your cards to get the effects that you need... all while sitting there with no protective collection of cards laid out on the (virtual) tabletop.

For some people, this results in an empty feeling to the game. If every round is taken by itself, the game can look like a fancy alternative to paper-rock-scissors. But that neglects the depth of reasoning behind what card each player wants to play, why they want to play it, what they think their opponent will be playing and why, and whether some sort of second-guessing is worth while... while you can sometimes gauge how the momentum in going in a game of Hearthstone by a single turn and a glance at the board, to do so in Yomi requires looking at a dozen turns, possibly more. And, lest it be unclear, I think this makes for a really great game with a huge amount of play-space to explore. It's just that it might not be as immediately obvious a play-space as you get with Hearthstone.

The audience for Hearthstone is almost certainly larger, and the familiarity and ease of getting into the game is the biggest reason for that. If you know Magic, World of Warcraft, like humorous fantasy, or just want to try something quick and free, Hearthstone was designed for you, there is no question in my mind. It's beautiful, the interface is obvious and easy, and there are a lot of incremental rewards to keep people playing. I massively prefer it to Magic, for many of the reasons I explained above, and I love that I am able to compete against strong players with a bunch of rare cards with my free deck of basic cards.

Yomi is obviously more niche, and I think that is intentional. First, and foremost, the app is $10 upfront even to try. This immediately roots out a lot of casual customers who don't know what they are getting into. (In the long run, I feel like more people will spend far more than $10 on Hearthstone, just for the chance of getting some really great cards. I don't object, as much as I am against microtransactions in general - this is a collectible card game, and people like collecting.) The depth of the Yomi is a lot less obvious, too. It's not about getting a lucky booster pack with a super-cool creature and building a deck around that, it's about subtly tweaking how you use your deck's strengths, and learning (and then preying on) the weaknesses of the other decks. And that subtle tweaking and learning is not nearly as straightforward as swapping a few cards around is in Hearthstone.

If you were hoping to come to the end of this article and have me tell you which one to get, I'm afraid you are going to be disappointed. These games which have so many surface similarities and differences are actually both really well designed and really well maintained, and I hold both in really high regard. I'm not going to just be wishy-washy and equivocate, though. If you are looking for breadth, play Hearthstone. It has a huge number of cards, factions, decks, and already there is at least one expansion coming soon. There are so many different directions to go, and so many different things to try, that I can't recommend it highly enough for someone who loves combing through new stuff. On the other hand, if you are looking for depth, play Yomi. There is a lot of breadth to be sure; for $10 more, you can unlock another ten characters, bringing the total to 20 playable decks, each of which is exhaustively balanced against the others. But that is basically where the game will leave you for "trying new things." The real "newness" you experience with Yomi is by digging deep into one character, learning the ins and outs of their attack-throw-dodge-block ratios and special powers, finding workable or even ideal strategies against the other 19 characters, and mastering those. Of course, Hearthstone has depth, too, and you can take a single deck and work it over and over against every class, but the ever shifting "meta" and the ever expanding set of cards is going to force you to explore breadth even more.

I went with both. That's another option.

The French Deck

I love card games. Six of my top ten board games are actually card games. I love the variety, the versatility, and the potential of a deck of cards. I have since I was a kid playing War and Go Fish, through my high school years of Spades and President, to today where Haggis and Mystery Rummy are two of my most played games despite the more than 100 I own.

A few weeks back I was participating in a discussion on BoardgameGeek about card games (if I had to guess, I think it was related to Tichu) when someone mentioned Pippoglyph playing cards. Specifically, they mentioned how Tichu is basically just a regular deck of cards, with four special cards that could easily be replaced with Jokers, or in the case of Pippoglyph decks, the X cards that come included. Needless to say, because of my abiding love for Tichu, I had to learn more. I have bought many Tichu decks in my decade of playing the game, but the idea that there was a set of cards that I could use for that as well as a number of other games I enjoy intrigued me.

All of this lead to me getting a pair of the best playing cards that I have ever owned. The two Pippoglyph decks are printed on fantastic stock with a linen finish (those air pockets that make the cards slide nicely in a shuffle), the artwork and design is great, and the box is sturdier than a standard Bicycle deck. Having them makes me want to play, which I always count as a big positive point. Acquiring them has thus set off a flurry of game play, and lose or win, I am enjoying every minute of it. Cribbage, Lamarckian Poker, Rummy, even "specialty" games like Haggis, Court of the Medici, and Kobayakawa... I just want to play them all.

That pocket-sized stack of cards contains within it dozens of games that I would sit down and play right now, and sometimes, as someone who maintains a fairly large collection of games, I forget how much I enjoy them. It is frankly amazing to me that something as simple as four suits of thirteen cards has that much variety in the experiences you can have - bluffing games, trick-taking games, climbing games, fishing games... and many of them are extremely deep, maintaining a replayability that can't be matched by many big box, "epic" board games.

Plus, there is a sense of history, a rustic universality, to the so-called "French deck." Everyone everywhere is familiar with it, everyone knows what it is, and many people are willing to play "cards" where they would be put off by a game about dragons or farming. That deck fits just as well into the image of wealthy businessmen dressed in tuxedos playing a public game of Baccarat as it does with a bunch of poor kids on a stoop slapping down a perfectly executed hand of Gin. You can find them being shuffled around by little old American ladies playing Bridge as easily little old Chinese men playing Big Two or beefy Russians playing Durak. A pack of 52 cards and two jokers crosses boundaries of class, race, and age and culture like little else.

My cards make me a part of that in some way. So do yours. And it's kind of rad.

A Game of Ice and Fire, Part 1: House Creation

Hey all, Will here with the first in what I hope will be many consistent updates on the new game our weekly group is playing; A Song of Ice and Fire by Green Ronin Publishing.  With these posts, I hope to showcase the fun our group has while playing an RPG and maybe some of the confusing mess that is my GMing ability.  This will not be a review of the game, that will come in a later episode once we have a couple sessions under us, so I won't be going too heavily into the mechanics.  Let's get started!

House Creation

In SIFRP, players get to make characters but also a noble house that they are from or serve.  Not the main seven from the books, but minor houses, the banner men that serve the Lannisters and Starks, etc.  This is an example of why I enjoy roleplaying games in a setting, it lets you carve out your own little piece of the world and have fun with it.  Prior to getting everyone together, I had them all decide on one of the seven to serve under.  Lannister came up pretty quickly and that seemed to be the consensus.  Seems they wanted to play, not necessarily the "bad guys," but at least some scheming underhanded folks.

At the start, certain Holdings, or stats are rolled for to determine things like how much land, wealth, population, etc. the house has.  Each region has bonuses and penalties to these scores as befits the region.  Those that are familiar with the books will know that the West is full of mountains with precious metals and that translates to a large Wealth bonus.  It also happened to be the highest number the grouped rolled on, making them pretty rich in terms of a house.  Then they rolled for their Founding which servers 2 purposes; 1) To determine in what era they came to be and 2) A number of random events that further modify the Holdings and provide ideas for their history.  The group rolled and it was decided that their house was founded during Aegon's Conquest, about 300 years ago with only one event; Madness.  After a while of discussion, the founding of House Trevayne was decided and is as follows:

House Trevayne

The future Lord of House Trevayne began as a knight and second cousin to Loren I.  When Aegon brought his army to bear on the Westerlands and the Reach, Terrance Trevayne was there on the Fields of Fire when the 3 dragons set them aflame.  He survived by some miracle, but was horribly disfigured.  With most of Loren's nobles burned, he gave Terrance control over his own land in the mountains north of the area currently known as Silverhill.  The area was quite small, barely a league, but it had access to 3 prosperous mine shafts and a moderately sized hall built into the mountain, which he renamed Trevayne Hall.  Terrance was a vain man, and with his looks ruined, he squandered a fair amount of his House's money on Maesters and healers, trying to repair his good looks.  Bandits ran free in his lands for a time as well until Terrance finally died and his heirs worked for years to repair the small amount of damage he had done to the House.

House Trevayne is now one of the richest houses in the West.  Their mines run deep and their close location to the Gold Road and river to the south puts them in a good location to sell their metals.  The current Lord is Terrance XV.  He is an unambitious man who spends all day in his keep, though he does keep the mines running.  Pale of skin, thinning brown hair and full of self doubt.  He has one son and one daughter.  His wife died in childbirth to their daughter, causing him to turn to a serving maid once.  She gave birth to his bastard, who he has not acknowledged, furthering his doubt.  His older brother died in the first few days of the Ninepenny King War trying to make a name for himself.  His younger sister is the only success of their now deceased father, having married Lord Serrett of Silverhill.

Their sigil is a black mountain with a golden pick axe.  Their words: "From flames, fortune."


So there it is, the history of House Trevayne.  Next week the group sits down and creates their characters which I am sure will build off the history of this house nicely.

A New Era for The Die is Podcast!

We at The Die is Podcast love games, and we want you to find games that you are interested in. We don't exactly have a mission statement, but if we did, it would be "Show people games that they haven't tried, and convince them to give the games a shot." We talk about video games, board games, and tabletop RPGs, and while there are a huge number of people who have at least dipped their toe into one or more of those genres, one of the things that I like to think we do is show the connections across the different "media" that games come in, and help people find games to play across categories.

I harbor a love for making recommendations. I have for a long time prided myself on my ability to get to know someone, and based on their preferences, make a recommendation about a movie, a restaurant,  a book series, or, more relevantly, a game that I think they will like. Little makes me as happy as when someone says "Hey, I tried out that [insert category here] you recommended, and it was great!" Similarly, I am rarely as disappointed as when I tell someone "I think you'll like this" and they don't.

The biweekly podcast is one way for the three of us to play lots of games and tell people about them. We're thoughtful people (most of the time), and that translates into thoughtful game play, and thoughtful discussions about games. But there is so much more that we could be doing!

To that end, we've begun to expand. Recently we did an interview with Liz Theis from Lone Wolf Development. Soon, we'll have more interviews with more people. These provide a way for us to get better information about certain games and companies, which theoretically translates into showing you guys good stuff and convincing you to try it out. I like talking to people about games, and what better people to talk to than the very people involved with their creation and distribution? I'm really excited about this!

A quick side note about interviews: Like our game reviews, they are not paid advertising. We give our honest thoughts on games we play, and we'll do the same thing in our interviews. "Quid pro quo" doesn't exist for this endeavor. We don't get paid for the show, we don't have advertising, and we don't want gifts! I'd like to think it wouldn't affect our responses and recommendations, but let's be honest: why shouldn't it?

In a similar vein to interviews, we're adding this blog (and possibly others), to provide some text based reviews and discussions, or just unpredictable reflections about games and the hobby of gaming. The show is great, but it's audio, it takes up attention, and sometimes our random thoughts about some card game or mobile free-to-play garbage doesn't need a 10 minute segment. Thus, bloggy stuff! It's quick to put together, we can do it individually, and it's quick to read.

All of this is going to be developing over time. Our listener base isn't huge, but it's consistent, and we think this is a way that we can bring more people in, thereby providing a benefit to a greater audience. We think we produce quality material, and we hope that our listening audience continues to grow. Let us know what you think!